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One-roomed mud huts with leaky
thatched roofs, bare and windowless, were good enough dwellings for
these tillers of the soil. In the dark corners of the dirt-floors
lurked germs of pestilence and death. Fuel was expensive, and the
bitter winter nights must have found many a peasant shivering
supperless on his bed of straw.
True, the gloom of such conditions was relieved here and there by a
prosperous village or a well-to-do peasant. But, speaking in a general
way, the sufferings of the poorer European peasants and serfs can
hardly be exaggerated. It was they who in large part had paid for the
wars, theaters, palaces, and pleasures of the courts of Europe.

COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: Growth of Towns]
Let us now turn our eyes from the country to the city, for in the towns
are to be found the bourgeoisie, the class in which we are most
interested. The steady expansion of commerce and industry during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had been attended by a remarkable
development of town life.


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