FREEMAN AND FREEDMAN. In the most general acceptation of these terms, the first implies one who has inherited the full privileges and immunities of citizenship: the second, one who has been delivered from the restraints of bondage, but who, usually, is not placed in a position of full social or even political equality with him who was born free. Though the words arc Teutonic (being composed of frei, free, and mann, a man or human being), the distinction between them depends on the constitu tion of Roman society. The equivalent for freemen Other homo), indeed, comprehended all classes of those who were not slaves; but the distinction here pointed out was pre served by the application of the term ingenuus to him who was born free (Gains i. 11), and of libertines to him who, being born in servitude, was emancipated. For the further development of this subject, as regards the classical nations of antiquity, see SLAVERY, CITIZEN. As the organization of Roman society survived the convulsions of the middle, ages to a far greater extent in the towns (see MUNICIPALITY, MUNICIPAL CORPORATION) than in the landward districts, where the institutions of feudality almost entirely superseded it, it is in the borough and other municipal corporations of this country, and of continental Europe, that we still find freemen, or persons or acquiring by adoption, purchase, or apprenticeship, the rights of citizenship. See
FREEMAN'S ROLL. But the idea of a freeman was by no means peculiar to the Roman or Romanized population of Europe; on the contrary, it belonged to the constitution of society in all the Indo-Germanic nations. Amongst those branches of them commonly known as Teutonic, it was, generally based on the possession of some portion of the soil. In Anglo-Saxon England, the freemen were divided into ceorls (q.v.) and eorls (q.v.), or thanes (q.v.). See CITIZEN.