Yeomen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some Farndales are referred to as Yeoman

 

 

 

  

Home Page

The Farndale Directory

Farndale Themes

Farndale History

Particular branches of the family tree

Other Information

General Sir Martin Farndale KCB

Links

 

 

Yeoman Farndales

 

Richard ffarndaill (FAR00092) was a Yeoman of Brotton and the first mentioned of Brotton. John Farndale (FAR00143), “Old Farndale of Kilton” was a Farmer, Alum House merchant, Yeoman and Cooper. His grandson John Farndale (FAR00217) was a Yeoman farmer and writer.

 

Medieval Yeomen

 

The word appears in Middle English as yemen, or yoman, and is perhaps a contraction of yeng man or yong man, meaning young man, or attendant.

 

In early recorded uses, a yeoman was an attendant in a noble household. Titles were given such as "Yeoman of the Chamber", "Yeoman of the Crown", "Yeoman Usher", "King's Yeoman", “Yeomen Warders”, “Yeomen of the Guard”.

 

A painting of a child riding a horse

Description automatically generated

The Canon's Yeoman, The Canterbury Tales

 

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales shed some light on the yeoman's social standing in the late fourteenth century. The yeoman in The Canon's Yeoman's Tale is a "servant" to a cleric, once finely dressed but now impoverished. In The General Prologue, the Knight is accompanied ("served") by a yeoman who "knew the forest just as he knew his home...this was a hunter indeed." This yeoman has a bow, arrows and a coat and hood of "forest green", as does the yeoman in "The Friar's Tale", who is a bailiff of the forest.  The Ellesmere Manuscript contains an illustration of the Canon's Yeoman. William Caxton's printing also contains a woodcut engraving of a yeoman.

 

In some tales of Robin Hood, such as A Gest of Robyn Hode, Robin Hood is a yeoman, although later retellings make him a knight. According to Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Robin Hood's Band of Merry Men is composed largely of yeomen.

 

Yeoman Farmers in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries

 

From the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, a yeoman was "commoner who cultivates his own land". Yeomen farmers owned land (freeholdleasehold or copyhold). Their wealth and the size of their landholding varied.

 

Victorian Yeoman Farmers

 

The Collins Dictionary defines a Yeoman as simply a man who farmed his own land. The Concise Oxford Dictionary defined a yeoman as "a person qualified by possessing free land of 40/- (shillings) annual [feudal] value, and who can serve on juries and vote for a Knight of the Shire. He is sometimes described as a small landowner, a farmer of the middle classes". 

 

Sir Anthony Richard Wagner, Garter Principal King of Arms, wrote that "a Yeoman would not normally have less than 100 acres" (40 hectares) "and in social status is one step down from the Landed gentry, but above, say, a husbandman". Often it was hard to distinguish minor landed gentry from the wealthier yeomen, and wealthier husbandmen from the poorer yeomen.

 

Yeomen were often constables of their parish, and sometimes chief constables of the district, shire or hundred. Many yeomen held the positions of bailiffs for the High Sheriff or for the shire or hundred. Other civic duties would include churchwarden, bridge warden, and other warden duties. It was also common for a yeoman to be an overseer for his parish. Yeomen, whether working for a lord, king, shire, knight, district or parish, served in localised or municipal police forces raised by or led by the landed gentry. Some of these roles, in particular those of constable and bailiff, were carried down through families. Yeomen often filled ranging, roaming, surveying, and policing roles. In districts remoter from landed gentry and burgesses, yeomen held more official power: this is attested in statutes of the reign of Henry VIII indicating yeomen along with knights and squires as leaders for certain purposes.