A Husbandman in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 in the medieval and early modern period was a free tenant farmer

Farmer

A farmer is a person engaged in agriculture, who raises living organisms for food or raw materials, generally including livestock husbandry and growing crops, such as produce and grain...

. The social status of a husbandman was below that of a yeoman

Yeoman

Yeoman refers chiefly to a free man owning his own farm, especially from the Elizabethan era to the 17th century. Work requiring a great deal of effort or labor, such as would be done by a yeoman farmer, came to be described as "yeoman's work"...

.

The earliest recorded use of the term dates from the Hebrew bible in the book of Genesis. The sense of husband in this term is that of the "master of house" rather than "married man".