Yeomen belonged to the Middle Ages and Tudor times. They lived in the country. They were farmers who owned land. Because they owned land and property, they did not have to pay rent and so could keep profits from their farm. As a result, many of the yeomen were quite well off and could employ servants and farm labourers.

Yeomen were some of the people who profited most during Elizabethan times, when they had the money to rebuild their houses. Many of the houses dating from Tudor times that survive to the present were once owned by yeomen. Poorer quality houses have long since been pulled down. Tudor-style houses that they built or rebuilt continued in the same style for half a century after the end of Tudor times, especially out in the country.

A yeoman thought of himself as a farmer who liked to work on his farm. But because he had money and others to work for him, he could become educated, and take time off to go hunting like the gentry.

The difference was that the landed gentry and the aristocracy did not farm their land themselves, but let it to tenant farmers.

It was very respectable to be a yeoman, rather like it is to be middle class today.

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If you always thought that it was Victorian times when class mattered and everyone knew his or her place, then you have never studied Medieval times. In Medieval times everyone had a place, and a title to go with it.

At the top were the barons, lower down the squires and at the bottom the serfs – peasants who were close to slaves. The word yeoman was not handed down from earlier times. It sprang up in England for the purpose of giving someone in the middle of society a rank.

Yeomen fitted in below squires. They developed the name in the 14th century when it was thought necessary to have a title for middle ranking servants of an important household.

But the number of yeomen grew, and by Tudor times, yeomen were respected members of a parish. Their role had also changed over the centuries.

It all began as medieval England settled down after the Norman conquest.

You had to be a freeman, not a serf, but you were still a commoner (meaning you were not a person with a title). Your main duty in early Medieval times would have been as a guard for the household, and in times of conflict you would have been part of the army that your lord raised.

So, for example, you might be a yeoman archer. This is why some people think it might have come from 'youth-man', as guards had to be fit and reasonably young to do their job.

Because you were an important servant, by the 15th century yeomen had a place below squire but above normal servants called pages even if they were not guards in the original sense. For example, as the Royal Navy was formed, yeoman was made an official rank for the person in charge of the stores on a ship, that is guarding the food, gunpowder and other stores.

But it wasn't a rank that stayed the same. In the 15th century some yeoman became wealthy enough to own their own houses and small areas of land, or they were given small areas of land for service rendered. Yeoman were even part of the life of the British colonies, and yeomen farmers, for example, became citizen soldiers during the American Revolution.

Because they were free, yet did not have a title, they were seen more as representing the common man – the start of the 'middle classes'. Hence 'yeoman' began to have a meaning of reliable, and the bedrock of society.

In the early Middle Ages, when the yeoman was first invented, the day to day activities of large household belonging to important nobles or royals were overseen by a Steward. This was separate from the money, which was looked after by a Treasurer.

Then there was the Chamberlain who looked after personal service to king. There were even very specialised roles such as The Keeper of the Privy Seal who was responsible for the King's small personal seal, which was stamped on letters issued by the King – so this person had to be especially trustworthy to prevent fraud.

All of these chief officers had to be nobles.

The commoner servants below them were organised into in ranks according to responsibility. The highest rank was the Sergeant. The lowest rank of the Household Office was the Groom. Groom meant boy. Yeoman was the household rank between Sergeant and Groom. His rank entitled him to dine in the Great Hall. He would have worn a uniform of the household, called a livery.

But this is how things changed. If a yeoman had given special service, he might be given the rank of squire by the king and could also have been given land. Or he might have married into a wealthier family.

Yeoman were at first part of large noble households, but over time, and especially in places away from noble houses, they came to be important dignitaries in parishes, the equivalent of the modern 'clerk' to the parish.

Things also changed as England became richer due to the wool trade and other exports. Some yeomen overlapped into the newly-emerging wealthy merchants (called gentry) through marriage; others merged with the merchants and professions of the towns through education; some became local officials in the counties; while all the time others remained as farmers.

Yeomen were often constables of their parish. Many yeomen were bailiffs or churchwardens. Some of these roles, in particular those of constable and bailiff, were carried down through families.

Many yeomen were wealthy enough to have houses rebuilt during the Elizabethan Tudor Age of prosperity – the Great Rebuilding. These sturdy homes, built with massive oak timbers, are the ones you are most likely to find surviving today as Grade II listed buildings, as there were far more yeomen than squires and nobles. Small farms that accompanied these yeoman's houses were often the first to be built in among their fields after the medieval three field system collapsed and land became enclosed by hedges.

Yeoman's houses survive in large numbers in areas that were wealthy in Medieval times (East Anglia, The Cotswolds, The Marches) due to the wool trade, but which played little part in the Industrial Revolution. That is because these once wealthy areas were bypassed by industry and so there was much less wealth, and so little inclination to knock down and rebuild. Yeoman's houses – sometimes called 'black and white' – are a major tourist attraction today.