Generally speaking, it refers to a yeoman who owns simple production tools on the basis of small land ownership. However, some people call tenants who can choose their own masters free farmers. They are numerous, but they have never become the dominant class force in society.

Historical background In the slave city-state economy of ancient Greece, free peasants mainly engaged in agricultural production. But under the oppression of slave owners and the exploitation of merchant capital and usury capital, many people fell into bankruptcy and became slaves. On the ruins of the Roman slave empire, with the disintegration of the conqueror Germanic Marquez, a large number of free peasants appeared. Ma Ke is a social and economic organization form of transition from clan commune to private ownership of land. Mark's land used to be public and private. By the end of the 6th century and the beginning of the 7th century, the property was divided, and the land was gradually privately owned and freely transferable. This clan commune has gradually transformed into a free peasant commune. In medieval Europe, the process of feudalism was that free peasants gradually lost their land and personal freedom and became serfs. Because no matter in the case of serfdom or tenancy, farmers use their own tools to farm on small plots of land at their disposal, that is, they have their own economy. In this case, farmers can only provide them with surplus products if they lose their personal freedom and are attached to the feudal main class, while the lords or landlords have super-economic coercion.

In the process of disintegration of feudal society in Europe, a large number of free peasants appeared again. By the end of 14, Britain was already the majority of yeomen. With the development of productive forces, in the process of primitive accumulation of capital, they were driven out of the manor and robbed of their land, and became "free" wage laborers with nothing. The history of this kind of free peasant who is engaged in self-employment or labor on the basis of small land ownership shows the instability of small-scale peasant economy. Although they once formed the basis of agricultural production in slave economy and feudal economy, they could not become the dominant mode of production in society. It also shows that socialism, which represents the social ideal of free peasants, petty-bourgeois economics and small-scale peasant economy, is always an illusion.