In medieval and early modern England, a yeoman /ˈjoʊmən/ was a member of a social class ranking between the peasantry and the landed gentry. The class was first documented in mid-14th century England, where it included people who cultivated their own land as well as the middle ranks of servants in an English royal or noble household.

The 14th century witnessed the rise of the yeoman longbowmen during the Hundred Years' War, and the yeoman outlaws celebrated in the Robin Hood ballads. Yeomen joined the English Navy during the Hundred Years' War as seamen and archers. In the early 15th century, yeoman was the rank of chivalry between page and squire. By the late 17th century, yeoman became a rank in the Royal Navy for the common seamen who were in charge of ship's stores, such as foodstuffs, gunpowder, and sails.

References to the emerging social stratum of wealthy land-owning commoners began to appear after 1429. In that year, the Parliament of England re-organized the House of Commons into counties and boroughs, with voting rights granted to all freeholders. The Electors of Knights of the Shires Act 1429 restricted voting rights to those freeholders whose land value exceeded 40 shillings. These yeomen became a social stratum of commoners below the landed gentry, but above the husbandmen. This stratum later embodied the political and economic ideas of the English Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment, and transplanted those ideas to British North America during the early modern era.

Numerous yeoman farmers in North America served as citizen soldiers in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. The 19th century saw a revival of interest in the medieval period with English Romantic literature. The yeoman outlaws of the ballads were refashioned into heroes fighting for justice under the law and the rights of freeborn Englishmen.

The etymology of yeoman is uncertain, for several reasons.

The earliest documented use occurs in Middle English. There are no known Old English words which are considered acceptable parent words for yeoman. Nor are there any readily identifiable cognates of yeoman in Anglo-Norman, Old Frisian, Old Dutch, Old Saxon, or Middle Low German. The four last-named of these languages are West Germanic languages, closely related to Old English at the time they were spoken. Taken together, these facts would indicate that yeoman (1) is a word specific to the regional dialects found in England; and (2) is nothing similar to any word used in continental Europe.

Another complicating factor for the etymology is that yeoman is a compound word made by joining two other words: yeo + man. Linguists have been perplexed about the origin of yeo since scholars such as John Mitchell Kemble and Joseph Bosworth began the modern linguistic study of Old English in the early to mid 19th century. Two possible etymologies have been proposed to explain the origin of yeo.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has proposed that yeoman is derived from yongerman, which first appeared in a manuscript called Pseudo-Cnut's Constitutiones de Foresta. Although the manuscript has been demonstrated to be a forgery (it was produced during the reign of King Henry II of England, rather than during the reign of King Cnut), it is considered authentic to the 11th and 12th-century forest laws. According to the OED, the manuscript refers to 3 social classes: (1) the thegn (noble) at the top; (2) the tunman (townman) at the bottom; and (3) the lesser thegn in the middle. Yongerman is considered a synonym for a lesser thegn. OED suggested that yongerman is related to youngman, meaning a male youth or young male adult who was in the service of a high-ranking individual or family.