Yeomen
Farmers
of their own land
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Yeoman Farndales
Richard
ffarndaill (FAR00092)
was a Yeoman of Brotton and the first mentioned of Brotton. John Farndale (FAR00143), “Old
Farndale of Kilton” was a Farmer, Alum House merchant, Yeoman and Cooper. His
grandson John Farndale (FAR00217) was a
Yeoman farmer and writer.
Medieval Yeomen
The word appears
in Middle English as yemen, or yoman, and is perhaps a contraction of yeng man or yong
man, meaning young man, or attendant.
In early recorded
uses, a yeoman was an attendant in a noble household.
Titles were given such as Yeoman of the Chamber, Yeoman of the Crown,
Yeoman Usher, King's Yeoman, Yeomen Warders, Yeomen of the Guard.
The Canon's
Yeoman, The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales shed some
light on the yeoman's social standing in the late fourteenth century. The
yeoman in The Canon's Yeoman's Tale is a servant
to a cleric, once finely dressed but now impoverished. In The General Prologue, the Knight is accompanied
("served") by a yeoman who knew the forest just as he knew his
home...this was a hunter indeed. This yeoman has a bow, arrows and a coat
and hood of forest green, as does the yeoman in The Friar's Tale,
who is a bailiff of the forest. The Ellesmere
Manuscript contains an illustration of the Canon's
Yeoman. William Caxton's printing also contains a
woodcut engraving of a yeoman.
In some tales
of Robin Hood, such as A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin Hood is a
yeoman, although later retellings make him a knight. According to Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe,
Robin Hood's Band of Merry Men is composed largely of yeomen.
Yeoman Farmers in the
fifteenth to eighteenth centuries
From the
fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, a yeoman was a commoner who
cultivates his own land. Yeomen farmers owned
land (freehold, leasehold or copyhold).
Their wealth and the size of their landholding varied.
Victorian Yeoman Farmers
Yeomen farmers owned
land (freehold, leasehold or copyhold).
Their wealth and the size of their landholding varied. The Collins Dictionary defines a Yeoman as
simply a man who farmed his own land. The Concise
Oxford Dictionary defined a yeoman as a person
qualified by possessing free land of 40/- (shillings) annual [feudal] value,
and who can serve on juries and vote for a Knight of the Shire. He is sometimes described
as a small landowner, a farmer of the middle classes.
Sir Anthony
Richard Wagner, Garter Principal King of Arms,
wrote that a Yeoman would not normally have less than 100 acres (40
hectares) and in social status is one step down from the Landed gentry,
but above, say, a husbandman. Often it was hard to distinguish minor
landed gentry from the wealthier yeomen, and wealthier husbandmen from
the poorer yeomen.
Yeomen were
often constables of
their parish,
and sometimes chief constables of the district, shire or hundred. Many yeomen held the positions
of bailiffs for
the High Sheriff or for the shire or hundred. Other civic
duties would include churchwarden,
bridge warden, and other warden duties. It was also common for
a yeoman to be an overseer for his parish. Yeomen, whether working for
a lord, king, shire, knight, district or parish, served in localised or
municipal police forces raised by or led by the landed gentry.
Some of these roles, in particular those of constable and bailiff,
were carried down through families. Yeomen often filled ranging, roaming,
surveying, and policing roles. In districts remoter from landed gentry and burgesses,
yeomen held more official power: this is attested in statutes of the reign
of Henry VIII indicating yeomen along with
knights and squires as leaders for certain purposes.