yeomen

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