Are men born free and equal? by Robert Buchanan 1890
"in past times, treated the farmer's man as half-labourer and half-pauper"
Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy
"Some few years ago a certain farmer was riding through this lane in the gloom of a winter evening. The farmer's friend, a dairyman, was riding beside him. A few paces in the rear rode the farmer's man"
Another reference in Shakespeare in Love refers to the farmers man or churl beating his flail on the corn.
Conclusion:
The farmer's man was the lowest rank of farm labourer who road at the rear of hs master and lived in poverty.
A churl, in its earliest Anglo-Saxon meaning, was simply "a man", but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelt ceorle, and denoting the lowest rank of freemen. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it later came to mean the opposite of the nobility and royalty, "a common person". This meaning held through the 15th century, but by then the word had taken on negative overtone, meaning "a country person" and then "a low fellow". By the 19th century, a new and pejorative meaning arose, "one inclined to uncivil or loutish behaviour".
Mike
