Churl

A churl (etymologically the same name as Charles / Carl and Old High German karal), in its earliest Old English (Anglo-Saxon) meaning, was simply "a man", and more particularly a "husband", but the word soon came to mean "a non-servile peasant", still spelled ċeorl(e), 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". Says Chadwick:

the distinction between thegn and ceorl is from the time of Aethelstan the broad line of demarcation between the classes of society.

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" (cf. the pejorative sense of the term boor, whose original meaning of "country person" or "farmer" is preserved in Dutch and Afrikaans boer and German Bauer, although the latter has its own pejorative connotations such as those prompting its use as the name for the chess piece known in English as a pawn. Also the word villain - derived from Anglo-French and Old French and originally meaning "farmhand" - had gone through a similar process to reach at its present meaning).

The ċeorles of Anglo-Saxon times lived in a largely free society, and one in which their fealty was principally to their king. Their low status is shown by their werġild ("man-price"), which over a large part of England was fixed at 200 shillings (one-sixth that of a theġn). Agriculture was largely community-based and communal in open-field systems. This freedom was eventually eroded by the increase in power of feudal lords and the manorial system. Some scholars argue however that anterior to the encroachment of the manorial system the ċeorles owed various services and rents to local lords and powers.

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