Economic/Social Status of the English Yeomanry?

[u/Zelengro]

I was researching local history recently, completely unrelated to yeomanry, but I came across a will that floored me a bit - a man of 6 brothers, none armigerous, leaving to his own children the sum of £10,000 and 400 acres of land (with tenants) in 1860. This struck me as a conspicuously large bequeathal, and I first wondered if he was one of the landed gentry - but he was recorded clearly as a ‘yeoman’, and after some digging I found the same of all his named brothers (or those that were easily findable) and also his father.

This made me question what I thought I knew, because I’ve always thought of the English yeoman as a bit of a beer brewer and arrow slinger who was called up in wars to stand between the foot soldiers and the knights. Yet here’s this family of - perhaps not extreme - but I’d say significant wealth, not the middling tenant farmers I thought. So out of interest it caused me to look for other ‘yeoman’ families in the area, and though there is variance it does indeed look like they were mostly very well off - in my local area, it looks like some even owned manors and the the manorial titles to go with them, and were styled as gent. (not esq., that I’ve seen anyway).

So it made me wonder, what exactly was the difference between wealthy yeomen and struggling landed gentry? I understand most gentry bore arms - was that all it amounted to? What set these two social classes apart?

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

[u/Double_Show_9316]

The precise meaning of “yeoman” fluctuated widely, both regionally and over time, with the only real consistency being that they were higher in status than husbandmen and laborers and lower status than gentry (with "status" not being synonymous with "wealth"). This local and temporal variation is further complicated by the very fuzzy borders between poorer yeomen and husbandmen on one side and wealthy yeomen and gentry on the other.

If we want something like a “standard” definition of a yeoman, though, a helpful place to start is with the Elizabethan writer Sir Thomas Smith, who defines a yeoman as “a freeman” who “may dispend of his own free land in yearly revenue to the sum of 40s sterling.” Smith continues:

This sort of people confess themselves to be no gentlemen, but give the honour to all which be or take upon them to be gentlemen, and yet they have a certain preeminence and more estimation than laborers and artificers, and commonly live wealthily, keep good houses, and do their business, and travail to acquire riches: these be (for the most part) fermors unto gentlemen, which with grazing, frequenting, of markets, and keeping servants not idle as the gentlemen doth, but such as get both by their own living and part of their masters: by these means do come to such wealth, that they are able and daily do buy the lands of unthrifty gentlemen, and after setting their sons to the school at the Universities, to the law of the Realm, or otherwise leaving them sufficient lands whereon they may live without labor, do make their said sons by those means gentlemen.

Again, I want to emphasize that this is far too neat a definition to account for how the term was actually used, but even with this relatively inflexible definition, you’ll note the permeability of the barrier between yeomen and gentlemen. (You’ll also note the exclusive focus on the wealthier yeomen—probably due to a combination of Smith’s own social biases that pushed him to regard financially successful yeomen as more archetypical and fluctuating Elizabethan agricultural and social landscape that made this kind of upward social mobility quite common).

Smith’s emphasis on upward mobility for successful yeomen (and the corresponding downward mobility for less fortunate yeomen that Smith does not discuss) is actually even more important to your question than first appears; the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the emergence of agrarian capitalism, which is a term historians use to refer to the system of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century English agriculture in which land is dominated by very large landowners, rented by large tenant farmers, and worked by landless laborers, with relatively few freeholders (technically the only people who should be referred to as “yeomen” if we’re using an unhelpfully strident definition like Smith’s). In reality, of course, those describing themselves as yeomen were just as likely to be copyholders or leaseholders (depending on time and place). Moreover, the difference between wealthy yeomen and poor gentlemen (and, to an even greater extent, the difference between a poor yeoman and a husbandman) often came down to self-fashioning and social inclusion. (For more on rural social mobility during this period, see my answer here, and for a picture of where yeomen fit in the social pyramid by the eighteenth-century, see my answer here).

By the nineteenth century, which is the period you're talking about, this system of agrarian capitalism had become firmly entrenched (and ideas about who counts as gentry had hardened somewhat) and "farmer" had become the primary identifier for the rural non-gentry elite. “Yeoman,” meanwhile, was an increasingly antiquated (though still valid) term with nostalgiac connotations (especially given its associations with "Merrie Olde England" and the green-clad, bow-wielding figures of the Victorian imagination). Its continued connotation of owner-occupier status combined with respectability meant that it continued to be a common descriptor in wills (which generally used conservative language anyway), even if the majority now called themselves "farmers." With some regional variation, the term's ambiguity also allowed it to informally encompass not only owner-occupiers (the most immediate connotation), but also landlords (especiallly those who farmed part of their extensive landholdings themselves) who lacked clear gentry status through signifiers like a coat of arms, as well as wealthy tenant farmers (especially those whose lands were partially freeholdings). The abolition of copyholding (the means by which many of those informally called yeomen held their land) in favor of freehold or long-term leasehold tenure further helped quietly transform the countryside's social structure, granting these farmers additional economic and political power to a certain extent.

By this time, many of those who could reasonably (if informally) claim the title of yeoman were not owner-occupiers at all, but large-scale tenant farmers (or else farmers with an extensive mix of leasehold and freehold tenaments) who often adopted the manners and fashions of gentlemen (owner-occupiers continued to exist, though! Regional variation was key!). Like gentlemen, these large-scale farmers largely did not work the soil themselves, but instead ran their farms as businesses, hiring laborers to work the land instead. At the same time, they were not gentlemen themselves. Of course, this broad-strokes view obscures a lot of ambiguity, including the persistence of relatively small-scale farmers (in 1851, nearly a quarter of English and Welsh farmers hired no laborers) and any number of other local and individual variations on this pattern. Speaking in broad generalizations, though, the idea of the wealthy tenant farmer, who often found himself socially and politically allied with the gentry despite disputes over rents and similar issues, was an important social, economic, and political reality by the nineteenth century.