Yeoman

The term "Yeomen" is notable for its uncertainty. It is believed that in word the word has been circulated since the early Middle Ages, and in the texts there are references from the twelfth century. The first mention of the "yeomen" is found in the Anglo-Germanic-Scandinavian epic Beowulf , whose creation dates back to the 7th - 8th centuries.

According to a common version, "yomen" was transformed from the word " young man " ( Eng. Young man - a young man). Perhaps the word refers to free-born servants, who were a cross between Esquire and Page.

Early Middle Ages

Starting from the period of the Norman conquest of England in the XI century , and even earlier, the social status of the individual is very tightly tied to the quantity and degree of land ownership. And the very concept of "yeomen" since the dark ages denotes a person who owns his allotment by the right of freehold , copyhold or lease.

The core of the Yeomen was made up of free peasant free-holders ( English free-holders - "free holders") of the medieval manor (see Freehold ). However, not all Yeomen possessed land, which did not prevent them from belonging to their class. They were the "servers" in the castles of the feudal lords , but not of the level of a simple servant, but rather of the level of the "majordoms", the "quartermasters" who govern. Although in general the class of Yeomen, according to the early Anglo-Saxon legislation, is defined as the "aristocratic" peasantry .
The layer of yeomen, while remaining very blurred, according to the Doomsday Book , the first serious documentary source, was formed into a peculiar middle class of early feudal England. The upper layers of the yomenstvo rose to the level of the petty nobility, the lower layers remained simply peasants. At the same time, although in a different form, all the yomen were in manorial (local) service under the king or large feudal lord.
But, and this is fundamentally important, the whole class of Yeomen was a class of personally free people.

During the crusades, Yeomen began to be called young armed servants, henchmen, often themselves riders, surrounded by a knight. This more accurately reflected their status and distinguished them, for example, from pages.

Summing up, we can say that by the end of the period of the early Middle Ages the "yomentry" took shape in the estate, the three inalienable attributes of which were: personal freedom - lack of freedom - as opposed to cottaria , villans , curls ; armament ; the land is usually privately owned.

Middle Ages and the New Age

Yeomen as foot archers (see the article English Longbow ) were recruited to serve in the royal army. They especially proved themselves during the Hundred Years War .

During the time of Henry VII , in 1485, a guard corps was formed from them. Then there was a war of the Scarlet and White Rose . A detachment of Yeomen, decades later turned into the aforementioned corps, fought desperately in the battle of Bosworth and earned the honor of becoming the Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard .
The yeomen of this corps came to our times in the form of the legendary "meat-eaters" ( beefeaters - gatekeepers and rangers of the Tower of the Tower .

By the 15th century , all peasants who were independent in the economy began to be called Yeomen, regardless of the legal status of their holder ^[1] . In the conditions of further development of commodity-money relations, the yomentri layer began to erode, polarizing to the prosperous elite and the rural poor. Nevertheless, up to the middle of the 17th century, the Yeomen constituted the bulk of the English peasantry.

Of the yeomen came William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton .

During the English Civil War, the Yeomen became the social base of the parliamentary army ^[2] . The century following the revolution and the further development of capitalist relations led to the almost complete disappearance of the Yeomen from the historical arena. However, the term itself was preserved in the name of the irregular military units of volunteers (for example, Imperial Yomenry )

Karl Marx in Capital describes the disappearance of the Yeomen class as one of the conditions for the initial accumulation of capital in the hands of large landowners:

As early as the last decades of the 17th century, the Yeomen, an independent peasantry, were more numerous than the class of tenants. It was Cromwell's main strength, and, as Macaulay himself acknowledged, represented a favorable contrast to the noblemen and their servants. Around 1750, the Yeomen disappear, and in the last decades of the 18th century, all traces of the communal property of landowners are smoothed out ^[3] .

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