rider, or riding man

Latin, radman, or radchenistre

There appears to be no essential difference between a rider and a riding man (radchenistre). With four exceptions, all riders and riding men are found in the five counties of circuit 5, along the Welsh border. Their riding duties as escorts or messengers were analogous to those performed by freemen in Cambridgeshire and it seems probable that radmen were a class of freemen as, indeed, they were described in one entry in Gloucestershire (GLS 19,2). Their resources in land and teams were comparable. There was also a marked resemblance between their duties and the customary services due from the drengs in circuit 6 and from a class of free men in Wessex described in a late Anglo-Saxon estate survey.

For more detail, see L.H. Nelson, The Normans in south Wales, 1071-1171 (1966); and P.D.A. Harvey, 'Rectitudines singularum personarum and gerefa', English Historical Review, vol. 108 (1993), pages 1-22.