the town) was divided into farms small enough to be
cultivated--vines, olives, corn, and fruit--by one family of peasants,
helped perhaps by a paid labourer. The thriftier and less scrupulous
peasants could, in good seasons, put by sufficient profit from their
share of the produce to suffice after some years, and with the addition
of what the women might make by washing, spinning, weaving, plaiting
straw hats (an accomplishment greatly insisted upon by Lorenzo dei
Medici), and so forth, to purchase some small strip of land of their
own. Hence, a class of farmers at once living on another man's land and
sharing its produce with him, and cultivating and paying taxes upon land
belonging to themselves.

Of these Tuscan peasants we get occasional glimpses in the mediaeval
Italian novelists--a well-to-do set of people, in constant communication
with the town where they sell their corn, oil, vegetables, and wine, and
easily getting confused with the lower class of artizans with whom they
doubtless largely intermarried. These peasants whom we see in tidy
kilted tunics and leathern gaiters, driving their barrel-laden bullock
carts, or riding their mules up to the red city gates in many a
Florentine and Sienese painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, were in many respects better off than the small artizans of
the city, heaped up in squalid houses, and oppressed by the greater and
smaller guilds. Agnolo Pandolfini, teaching thrift to his sons in
Alberti's charming treatise on "The Government of the Family,"
frequently groans over the insolence, the astuteness of the peasantry;
and indeed seems to consider that it is impossible to cope with them--a
conclusion which would have greatly astounded the bailiffs of the feudal
proprietors in the Two Sicilies and beyond the Alps. Indeed it is
impossible to conceive a stranger contrast than that between the
northern peasant, the starved and stunted serf, whom Holbein drew,
driving his lean horses across the hard furrow, with compassionate Death
helping along the plough, and the Tuscan farmer, as shown us by Lorenzo
dei Medici--the young fellow who, while not above minding his cows or
hoeing up his field, goes into Florence once a week, offers his
sweetheart presents of coral necklaces, silk staylaces, and paint for
her cheeks and eyelashes; who promises, to please her, to have his hair
frizzled (as only the youths of the Renaissance knew how to be frizzled
and fuzzed) by the bar