It may surprise you that villain once meant nothing more than an ordinary farmer. The Latin villa meant "a country farm or estate," and the laborer bound to that land was a villanus. At first, then, villain simply meant "a peasant who works a lord's land, a country dweller." But as the urban nobility and ruling classes came to despise rural farmers as coarse and ill-mannered, the word slowly took on darker shades. "Country bumpkin" became "uncouth person," then "base, contemptible person," and at last "villain." The contempt of a rank-bound society is etched right into the word.