boor

Latin, burus.

The small number of boors in Domesday Book appear to belong to the same category as freedmen. Like freedmen, they were not recorded in the Danelaw counties, only in Wessex and western Mercia, and there mostly on royal or ecclesiastical manors. They belonged to the lower ranks of the peasantry but above slaves, occasionally paying rents, making customary payments, or owning oxen.

For more detail, see F.W. Maitland, Domesday Book and beyond (1897); and H.C. Darby, Domesday England (1977).