Husbondmen

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Archaic plural term for men who worked and cultivated the land as tenant farmers or agricultural laborers
2. Old-fashioned word for men who tilled the soil and tended crops and livestock on farms
3. Earlier English name for the people who farmed the land, the men who worked fields and raised animals

Etymology: "Husbondmen" is the plural of "husbandman," and the word's surprise lies in its first element. "Husband" once meant "master of a house" or "householder," with no connection to the marriage partner it means now. It comes from Old Norse "húsbóndi," literally "house-dweller" or "householder," from "hús" (house) and "bóndi" (occupier, householder). Old English borrowed the sense and the form as "husbonda," and the word meant a man who ran a household and its land. A "husbandman" was therefore a man who tilled and managed land, a farmer who worked his own holding or tended someone else's. Because "husband" was used for the head of a household, the compound kept that older sense of a man in charge of an estate. English dropped "husbandman" in favour of "farmer" over the centuries, and "husbondmen" with its medieval spelling survives mostly in older texts and the Bible, where the older forms of the word appear.

Synonyms: husbandmen, farmers, tillers