Peasantry

The tax bore hard on the peasantry.

Source: tatoeba (45889)

The peasantry revolted wielding pitchforks and clubs.

Source: tatoeba (727109)

In every hedge we passed were medlars, plumbs, cherries, and maples with vines trained to them. This abundance of fruit gives an air of great plenty, and likewise much improves the beauty of the country. The French fruit of almost every kind exceeds the English. An exception must be made with respect to apples, which are better in England than in any country in the world. But the grapes, the plumbs, the pears, the peaches, the nectarines, and the cherries of France, have not their equal all the world over. They are of course cheap in proportion to their abundance. The health of the peasantry may perhaps in good part be imputed to this vegetable abundance.

Source: tatoeba (12215979)

They distressed her. They were so stolid. She had always maintained that there is no American peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks. But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians, Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.

Source: wiktionary