serf, helot, villein
(noun) (Middle Ages) a person who is bound to the land and owned by the feudal lord
Source: WordNet® 3.1
serf (plural serfs)
a partially free peasant of a low hereditary class, attached like a slave to the land owned by a feudal lord and required to perform labour, enjoying minimal legal or customary rights
a similar agricultural labourer in 18th and 19th century Europe
(strategy games) a worker unit
Synonyms: peasant, peon, villager
• ESRF, FERS, RFEs, Refs, erfs, f***ers, refs
Source: Wiktionary
Serf, n. Etym: [F., fr. L. serus servant, slave; akin to servare to protect, preserve, observe, and perhaps originally, a client, a man under one's protection. Cf. Serve, v. t.]
Definition: A servant or slave employed in husbandry, and in some countries attached to the soil and transferred with it, as formerly in Russia. In England, at least from the reign of Henry II, one only, and that the inferior species [of villeins], existed . . . But by the customs of France and Germany, persons in this abject state seem to have been called serfs, and distinguished from villeins, who were only bound to fixed payments and duties in respect of their lord, though, as it seems, without any legal redress if injured by him. Hallam.
Syn.
– Serf, Slave. A slave is the absolute property of his master, and may be sold in any way. A serf, according to the strict sense of the term, is one bound to work on a certain estate, and thus attached to the soil, and sold with it into the service of whoever purchases the land.
Source: Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary 1913 Edition
19 June 2025
(noun) the condition of belonging to a particular place or group by virtue of social or ethnic or cultural lineage; “his roots in Texas go back a long way”; “he went back to Sweden to search for his roots”; “his music has African roots”
The earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking as the modern beverage appeared in modern-day Yemen. In the middle of the 15th century in Sufi shrines where coffee seeds were first roasted and brewed for drinking. The Yemenis procured the coffee beans from the Ethiopian Highlands.
