Cobbett, A Medieval Man

Cobbett was a yeoman; that is, a man free and farming a small estate. By Dickens’s time, yeomen seemed as antiquated as bowmen. Cobbett was mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every way the opposite of what that word means to-day. He was as egalitarian as St. Francis, and as independent as Robin Hood.

— G. K. Chesterton, The Crimes of England