Commoner

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.

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.

[4] This threefold division was formalized 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.

This encouraged the formation of princely and kingly states, which needed to tax the common people much more heavily to pay for the expensive weapons and armies required to provide security in the new age.

A similar trend occurred regarding the clergy, where many priests began to abuse the great power they had due to the sacrament of contrition.

The Reformation was a movement that aimed to correct this, but even afterwards the common people's trust in the clergy continued to decline – priests were often seen as greedy and lacking in true faith.

An early major social upheaval driven in part by the common people's mistrust of both the nobility and clergy occurred in Great Britain with the English Revolution of 1642.

When the general council of Cromwell's army met to decide on a new order at the Putney Debates of 1647, one of the commanders, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, requested that political power be given to the common people.

According to historian Roger Osbourne, the Colonel's speech was the first time a prominent person spoke in favor of universal male suffrage, but it was not to be granted until 1918.

After much debate it was decided that only those with considerable property would be allowed to vote, and so after the revolution political power in England remained largely controlled by the nobles, with at first only a few of the most wealthy or well-connected common people sitting in Parliament.

For example, Pitt the Elder was often called The Great Commoner in England, and this appellation was later used for the 20th-century American anti-elitist campaigner William Jennings Bryan.

For Polanyi this related to the economic doctrine prevalent at the time which held that only the spur of hunger could make workers flexible enough for the proper functioning of the free market.

"[13] Comparative historian Oswald Spengler found the social separation into nobility, priests and commoners to occur again and again in the various civilizations that he surveyed (although the division may not exist for pre-civilized society).