Why this word is great
VILLEIN — [Noun] A feudal tenant, legally tied to a lord's manor, occupying a status between free peasant and serf. From Anglo-Norman vilein, from Medieval Latin villanus ("field hand, farmworker"), from Latin villa ("country estate, farm"). Unlike "serf," which implies a more universally bound and abject status, or its modern doublet "villain," which illustrates a stark semantic pejoration from class to crime, the villein was defined by specific, customary obligations. His was a life measured in boon-work days, heriot payments, and the compulsory grind of the lord's mill; it was the calloused hand on a wooden plough, the bowed back bearing a grain-sack, and the fixed horizon of a single strip of field. To be a villein was to be a human fixture of the estate—as natural, expected, and bound as a hedgerow.