"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 02/11/17 (villa, village and villain)

Thank you to Christine Robinson, who e-mailed in Sothampton, who is wondering if words like villa, village and villain all have a common origin. And Christine is spot-on. There is a common root. Let's go back to a villa first. That comes frome the Latin for a small country seat, country being an operative word there. And it reflected the fact that for the ancient Romans and Greeks, a villa wasn't just a single residence, it was a country mansion with lots and lots of building attached, so farm building and lots of houses on its estates. As you can imagine, these were occupied by people of some noble birth, some nobility and wealth. But collectively, these buildings - it's a hamlet, if you like, it was pretty much a small hamlet - constituted what they called the villaticum. And over the centuries, this passed into Italian as  villaggio - a G had crept in somehow, we're not quite sure how - and a word that travelled across various countries and tongues until, of course, it arrived in English as  village, reflecting the fact, that it was all these buildings together. Now - to that last in the trio - that's villa and village - the villain. In medieval English, a villain was simply a feudal tenant who was attached to a nobleman's villa. It was a kind of tied serfdom, if you like. In medieval times, most ordinary citizens were villeins. You'll fing that sense retained today with the E-I-N instead of A-I-N. Historians would call them villeins in that sense. They had a fairly toughlife. They had to work incredibly hard. And if you look back to the Roman times, a decree was passed that they weren't actually allowed to leave the estate at any point, apart from to go to war or to deliver a very important message. Otherwise they were not allowed to leave the land. And this was because of a fear that food production would decline if peasants were alowed to travel freely, or if these villeins were allowed to travel freely. Because country dwellers - and these villas were in the country, as I say - were often regarded as bumpkins or yokels, et cetera, they were seen as being uneducated. And not just that, sometimes they were seen as having criminal intent. And that's how our modern sense of villain crept in. The idea was they didn't have much money, and so they had to steal or do other nefarious things in order to make a living. So, villa, village and villain - Christine is absolutely right - they all share a common ancestry.