yeomen

Legally a yeoman was a freeholder who could meet the qualification for voting in parliamentary elections, but the term came to be employed more widely than this, to encompass freeholders, copyholders, and sometimes even tenant farmers. In 18th-cent. Cumbria, freeholders, customary tenants, and tenant farmers were all encompassed by the term yeoman, while in other parts of the country it was virtually unknown. In 1566 Sir Thomas Smith defined his fellow-Englishmen as gentlemen, yeomen, and rascals. By the early 19th cent. a slightly narrower definition seems to have been gaining ground. For the agricultural writer Arthur Young, yeomen were only freeholders who were not gentry, and the same definition was used by witnesses before the 1833 Select Committee on Agriculture. Since the 1960s historians have increasingly eschewed the word because of its romantic and sentimental overtones, as the sturdy inhabitants of a long-departed rural idyll.