Villainage

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The land held or owned by villains or serfs in a feudal system ; the group or community of villains or serfs living in a certain area
2. Territory or estates controlled by serfs or villains under feudal law ; a body or collective of peasants bound to the land
3. The agricultural land occupied by dependent peasants ; the population of rural tenants or subordinates in medieval times

Etymology: Villainage is a close cousin of "villain," but the two took very different paths. The base word "villein" was a term for a tenant bound to a lord's estate in medieval England, and it is the same root that gave us "villain" through a shift in meaning: the lowly peasant's status came to stand for base, wicked character. Villainage is simply "villein" with the suffix "-age," used to mean the holding of such a tenant, or the community of tenants themselves. The word was borrowed from Anglo-Norman "vileinage," which in turn came from Medieval Latin "villenagium," built on the Latin "villa," a country estate or farm. The sense of the word is therefore tied to landholding before it had any moral overtones. The Latin root points to the rural estate itself, so a villein was, literally, a person attached to the villa. Over time the term "villein" was used for the unfree peasant, and villainage named the condition of that unfreedom and the land it attached to.