Peasant

A peasant (from French for "one of the countryside") is a pre-industrial farmer, generally referring to European farmers in the Middle Ages. Historically, most of them cultivated land owned by a noble of some kind (look up "feudalism" on the non-traditional-games wiki for more details), but some owned their own land, and even among those working for a noble, there was a distinction between slaves, serfs (who are bound to a plot of land which they must work), villeins (which is incidentally where the term "villain" comes from), and a whole slew of sub-classes. Thus was life before the Industrial Revolution for 80% of the population and most of your ancestors, and continues today in some Third World countries.

Most role-playing games (and other popular depictions of European history, for that matter) ignore the nuances, and lump all peasants into a single social class just above criminals but below everything else. In most peoples' minds, peasants are illiterate, unwashed, and poor. They toil all day in the mud growing crops on small plots of land, live in cramped little shacks made of sticks and horse crap, have very little money, and are generally treated like crap by their superiors and often have to worry about armies marching through and stealing all their crops and livestock and murdering them for the lulz. These connotations survive to the present day with the use of the word "peasant" as an insult.

Some role-playing games have adopted the less judgmental term of "commoner" for the class of "regular people", though they aren't any better off -- in fact, a common cat is a serious threat to a level-one commoner.

With the Industrial Revolution, one man with mechanical and chemical assistance could farm as much land as a hundred peasants, so there was no need for vast numbers of unskilled and semi-skilled laborers to support society, and the serf system (and feudalism in general) came to an end. Thank god for James Watt.