A commoner, also known as the common man, commoners, the common people or the masses, was in earlier use an ordinary person in a community or nation who did not have any significant social status, especially a member of neither royalty, nobility, nor any part of the aristocracy. Depending on culture and period, other elevated persons (such members of clergy) may have had higher social status in their own right, or were regarded as commoners if lacking an aristocratic background.
This class overlaps with the legal class of people who have a property interest in common land, a longstanding feature of land law in England and Wales. Commoners who have rights for a particular common are typically neighbours, not the public in general.
In monarchist terminology, aristocracy and nobility are included in the term.
History
Various sovereign states throughout history have governed, or claimed to govern, in the name of the common people. In Europe, a distinct concept analogous to common people arose in the Classical civilization of ancient Rome around the 6th century BC, with the social division into patricians (nobles) and plebeians (commoners). The division may have been instituted by Servius Tullius, as an alternative to the previous clan-based divisions that had been responsible for internecine conflict. The ancient Greeks generally had no concept of class and their leading social divisions were simply non-Greeks, free-Greeks and slaves. The early organisation of Ancient Athens was something of an exception with certain official roles like archons, magistrates and treasurers being reserved for only the wealthiest citizens – these class-like divisions were weakened by the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes who created new horizontal social divisions in contrasting fashion to the vertical ones thought to have been created by Tullius.
Both the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire used the Latin term Senatus Populusque Romanus, (the Senate and People of Rome). This term was fixed to Roman legionary standards, and even after the Roman Emperors achieved a state of total personal autocracy, they continued to wield their power in the name of the Senate and People of Rome.
With the growth of Christianity in the 4th century AD, a new world view arose that underpinned European thinking on social division until at least early modern times. Saint Augustine postulated that social division was a result of the Fall of Man. The three leading divisions were considered to be the priesthood (clergy), the nobility, and the common people. Sometimes this was expressed as "those who prayed", "those who fought" and "those who worked". The Latin terms for the three classes – oratores, bellatores and laboratores – are often found even in modern textbooks, and have been used in sources since the 9th century. This threefold division was formalised in the estate system of social stratification, where again commoners were the bulk of the population who are neither members of the nobility nor of the clergy. They were the third of the Three Estates of the Realm in medieval Europe, consisting of peasants and artisans.
Social mobility for commoners was limited throughout the Middle Ages. Generally, the serfs were unable to enter the group of the bellatores. Commoners could sometimes secure entry for their children into the oratores class; usually they would serve as rural parish priests. In some cases they received education from the clergy and ascended to senior administrative positions; in some cases nobles welcomed such advancement as former commoners were more likely to be neutral in dynastic feuds. There were cases of serfs becoming clerics in the Holy Roman Empire, though from the Carolingian era, clergy were generally recruited from the nobility. Of the two thousand bishops serving from the 8th to the 15th century, just five came from the peasantry.