"Peasant" is an incredibly expansive term, encompassing everything from beggar to a family with a solid stone house and some servants. If you'll allow for a generous definition of the high Middle Ages, the English Subsidy of 1332 (tax &c law) and records of its implementation can offer a pretty good look at the minimal standards. I'm fudging a little because 14th century is generally agreed upon as the late MA, but it's still pre-Black Death and juuuust barely pre-Hundred Years War, so.
The Subsidy of 1332 was a tax on material goods (not property) imposed in London. This is useful for considering peasants because medieval cities were population sinks; they maintained and grew via immigration, and in fact (as we will see), actively worked to recruit immigrant workers (including petty laborers/servants). A lot of the people being taxed, especially outside the established artisans, had started off life as rural.
The Subsidy allows households (presuming a married couple) a certain amount of items tax-free. They are:
Immigrants coming into London, moreover, were allowed to bring in the amount of clothing that they could fit into a backpack without paying customs on it.
This is all nice and prescriptive. Actual records of tax collection and duty collection on immigrants, however, show that about 50% of Londoners failed to meet the minimum standard for taxation.
So the urban poor, many of whom had started as the rural poor, were definitely dependent on their current outfit holding together, and on charity in the case it didn't.
And, in one of my favorite medieval history tidbits for reasons that I will explain, we know clothing could very well be charity in the Middle Ages. In addition to the healthy market in secondhand clothing (really, medieval thrift shopping!), rich people often used 'free' donations of clothing as an incentive for poor people to attend their funerals (that is, to get more prayers for their soul, in theory). The reason this is so awesome to me is the modern movie stereotype of the "colorless Middle Ages" where everything is brown, gray, brown, gray, brown. Well, when we look at actual wills with funeral provisions, there are examples of people who say, "And money to purchase solid, well-constructed garments for the poor in the funeral procession, as long as they are gray."
I've talked about the lowest (but substantial) segments of society here. The 14th century also witnesses what some scholars have called the 'rise of fashion,' that is, the purposeful transformation of clothing into new and innovative shapes and decoration for social and/or artistic purposes. This is the period that sees the earliest "sumptuary laws," that is, laws designed to regulate who can own and wear what based on their social status. Sometimes the reasons for this are related to trade and protectionism (can't have too many people buying fancy expensive imported fabric), but they are equally designed to be markers of social status. While a lot of early sumptuary laws in particular targeted different degrees of royalty/nobility, their invention and spread suggests that among the middle classes of society as well (which would include better-off peasants), wardrobes were increasing in size, variety, and social sensibility.
Women are often recorded as leaving dresses to their family and friends in their wills, in the late Middle Ages, but that is probably representative of someone's nicest dress instead of a wardrobe inventory.
...And here is me, providing a 100% textually-sourced answer to a material culture question. Well done, Sun.
To go off this, how were their clothes different from each other, did they have any personal way they wore/made their clothes?
