Dutch peasantries stayed autonomous and individualistic amid market agriculture

Evidence

Dutch rural society, especially in the northern Netherlands, had been based on a peasantry composed of freeholders owning in toto more land than the nobility, church, or urban bourgeoisie, with property ownership, transfer rights, and relatively little open-field common land. Here, where the nobility was weak, the peasantry was individualistic and autonomous, owning and leasing land, lending money to other peasants, and engaging in urban market trade. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 280