# villein

Pronunciation: US say "VIL-uhn" /ˈvɪlən/; UK

## Noun

1. A tenant in the feudal system who held land as a serf.
   - Simple: In the past, a farm worker who was tied to a lord's land and had to work for him.
   - _Every villein on the manor owed the lord several days of labor a week in return for his strips of land._
   - _The manor court heard a complaint from two villeins whose oxen had strayed into the lord's meadow._

## Origin

From Anglo-Norman vilein, a variant of vilain, from Medieval Latin villanus (“field hand”), from Latin villa (“country home”). It is a doublet of villain.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/villein (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).