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. 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, and in the early 17th cent. Thomas Wilson included in a similar list yeomen, and ‘yeomen of meaner ability which are called freeholders, copyholders and cottagers’. Another contemporary distinguished in 1674 between yeomen (farmer-owners), farmers (tenant farmers), and labourers, while a law dictionary of 1720 referred to yeomen as ‘chiefly freeholders, and farmers; but the word comprehends all under the rank of gentlemen, and is a good addition to a name &c’. 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. The tables of landowners prepared by John Bateman in the 1870s on the basis of the so-called New Domesday of 1873–4 used the term of two categories: greater yeomen, those owners with between 300 and 1,000 acres, and averaging around 500 acres; and lesser yeomen with between 100 and 300 acres, averaging about 170 acres. However, he recognized that this was but a makeshift title.

The imprecision of the term yeoman has raised acute difficulties for historians concerned with the small landowner-cum-farmer. Mantoux, early in the 20th cent., used the term more or less without reserve. He was followed by Clapham—although he admitted to being aware of the ‘varying uses of the word yeoman, both by contemporaries and by historians’— but 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. Phrases such as ‘small owner-occupier’, ‘farmer-owner’, and ‘owner-cultivator’ are thought to be more precise, even if they lack any contemporary justification.

John Beckett

yeo·man / ˈyōmən/ • n. (pl. -men) 1. hist. a man holding and cultivating a small landed estate; a freeholder. ∎  a person qualified for certain duties and rights, such as to serve on juries and vote for the knight of the shire. 2. hist. a servant in a royal or noble household. 3. a petty officer in the U.S. Navy or Coast Guard performing clerical duties on board ship.DERIVATIVES: yeo·man·ly adj.

yeomanry. A force of volunteer cavalrymen, formed on a county basis, and first embodied in 1794 to meet the challenge of the French Revolution. They were not under any obligation to serve outside the kingdom and during the Boer war a special force of Imperial Yeomanry was raised. Despite regular training, discipline was not always good. The Irish Yeomanry, raised in 1796, was almost exclusively protestant and put down the 1798 rising with great severity. The Lancashire and Cheshire Yeomanry got into difficulties in 1819 trying to disperse the crowd at Peterloo. The yeomanry was merged with the volunteers in 1907 to form the Territorial Army.

J. A. Cannon

yeoman a man holding and cultivating a small landed estate; a freeholder; a person qualified for certain duties and rights, such as to serve on juries and vote for the knight of the shire, by virtue of possessing free land of an annual value of 40 shillings. The term is recorded from Middle English, and probably comes from young + man.
Yeoman of the Guard a member of the British sovereign's bodyguard, first established by Henry VII, now having only ceremonial duties and wearing Tudor dress as uniform. Also called Beefeater.
Yeoman Usher in the UK, the deputy of Black Rod.
Yeoman Warder a warder at the Tower of London.

yeoman In medieval England, a man of intermediate social rank. Originally, yeomen were servants or retainers of great lords. Later the term was applied to a freeholder or small farmer, below the rank of the gentry. It was also applied to certain military groups, such as the Yeomen of the Guard ("Beefeaters") at the Tower of London.