A villain is a bad guy (or gal – it is the 21st century after all). But, it didn’t always mean that. In one of the English language’s greatest plot twists, back in the day it simply referred to a farmworker.
So how did a villain evolve from a humble peasant to the ultimate baddie?
Our story starts, as it so often does, with a Latin word. In this case, that’s villanus. This came from villa, which meant a country estate, farm or, well, villa. From there we got the noun villanus, which was simply someone who worked on a country estate i.e. a farmhand or peasant.
As Latin evolved into Old French in the Middle Ages, the word became vilein or vilain and was used to describe a feudal serf, both male and female. These vileins were bound to the land and their lordly masters. The word still didn’t have any connotations of evilness or moustache-twirling though – it was just a legal and social status.
We actually have the Brits to thank for the semantic shift from farming to foul play, which says a lot about our medieval class attitudes. When the Normans conquered us in 1066, they brought Old French with them, including the word ‘vilein’. And because all the wealthy, aristocratic poshos looked down on everyone else, over time, they started using ‘vilein’, which had now become the more familiar ‘villain’, to describe someone with ‘the characteristics of a peasant’. To them that meant churlish, crude, untrustworthy and generally vulgar (think Baldrick in Blackadder).
By the 1300s and 1400s, the word had moved away from farming and describing a person’s social status to casting aspersions on their moral character. By the time Shakespeare was writing in the late 1500s and early 1600s, it was firmly established as a malicious antagonist. Take this, from Much Ado About Nothing:
‘In this, though I cannot be said to be
a flattering honest man, it must not be denied but I
am a plain-dealing villain.’
There you have it. Villains didn’t start with a thirst for world domination, but with a pitchfork and low social standing. This word’s evolution is a stark reminder that for a long time, the English language was shaped by the classist attitudes of the rich and powerful elite.