[churl] 
| 1. | a rude, boorish, or surly person. |
| 2. | a peasant; rustic. |
| 3. | a niggard; miser: He was a churl in his affections. |
| 4. | English History. a freeman of the lowest rank. |
| churl (chûrl) n.
[Middle English, from Old English ceorl, peasant.] Word History: The word churl comes almost unchanged in meaning and pronunciation, though not in spelling, from Old English ceorl, "freeman of the lowest class." An Anglo-Saxon ceorl had a social position above a slave but below a thegn, "thane." Ceorl comes from Germanic *karilaz, whose basic meaning is "old man." In Finnish, which is not a Germanic language, the Germanic word was borrowed and survives almost unchanged as karilas, "old man." The Old Norse descendant of the Germanic word, karl, means "old man, servant," and the Old High German equivalent, karal, meaning "man, lover, husband," has become the name Karl. Middle High German karl, "freeman," was adopted into northern French as Charles, from which we have the name Charles. The Medieval Latin form Carolus is based on the Old High German karal. The fame of Carolus Magnus, "Charles the Great," or Charlemagne, added luster to the name Carolus and explains why the Slavic languages borrowed the name as their general word for "king," korol' in Russian. |
Churl
in Isa. 32:5 (R.V. marg., "crafty"), means a deceiver. In 1 Sam. 25:3, the word churlish denotes a man that is coarse and ill-natured, or, as the word literally means, "hard." The same Greek word as used by the LXX. here is found in Matt. 25:24, and there is rendered "hard."
churl
the free peasant who formed the basis of society in Anglo-Saxon England. His free status was marked by his right to bear arms, his attendance at local courts, and his payment of dues directly to the king. His wergild, the sum that his family could accept in place of vengeance if he were killed, was valued at 200 shillings. Nineteenth-century scholars often represented the ceorl as the typical peasant labourer in a kind of Anglo-Saxon democracy. Actually, he was a member of a peasant elite that was gradually extinguished between the 7th and 12th centuries. A few ceorls prospered and attained the rank of thane (a free retainer, or lord, corresponding, after the Norman Conquest, to the position of baron or knight), but most were driven, first by economic pressure and later by the Norman Conquest, into the class of unfree villeins. The word ceorl came to denote a depressed and subject peasant and, by the 14th century, was used as a pejorative.
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