goodman

   This was used as a social title from the fourteenth century, surviving in some rural areas, and especially in Scotland, until at least the nineteenth century. It was used to yeomen farmers, who did not quite attain the rank of gentlemen, but was also used in some areas to any householder, host of an inn, or husband. It is clear that for Shakespeare it was a contemptuous title, applied to Dull in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and often prefixed to a nonce name. ‘Goodman baldpate’ is used vocatively in Measure for Measure (5:i), as is ‘goodman boy’ in Romeo and Juliet (l:v), where Capulet says to Tybalt: ‘He shall be endur’d./What, goodman boy, I say he shall. Go to;/Am I the master here or you?’

   Shakespeare also has the expressions ‘good-man rascal’, ‘goodman drivel’, ‘goodman death’, and ‘goodman bones’. The House of the Seven Cables, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, has one man saying to another: ‘I take you at your word, Goodman Maule.’ The feminine form of this term was ‘Goodwife’.