Definition
Redmans were a class of feudal tenure-holders whose obligation to the lord of the manor was defined by riding service — that is, by the custom or terms of their land tenure, they were required to ride with or on behalf of the lord to conduct his business. The term appears in Domesday Book and reflects an early medieval arrangement in which personal mounted service, rather than a fixed cash rent or agricultural labor, constituted the primary render owed by a tenant in exchange for land.
Common Confusion
Redmans should not be confused with knights holding by knight service, whose riding obligation was military and formally calibrated to the feudal host. Redmans performed administrative or personal riding service for the lord — escorts, errands, dispatch of the lord's business — not necessarily armed military service. Nor should the term be conflated with general villeins or serfs, whose customary obligations were primarily agricultural. The redman's defining characteristic was the mounted personal service owed to the specific lord of the manor by virtue of his land's custom or tenure condition.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "redmans" in medieval English records or in legal-historical sources should treat it as a tenure classification, not a personal name or status descriptor. The term appears in Domesday Book (1086), which is the primary evidentiary source, and its use thereafter is largely antiquarian — carried into the legal dictionaries as a record of the Domesday vocabulary rather than as a term with ongoing doctrinal life.
Several research traps apply. First, the term drops out of active legal usage after the Norman consolidation of English tenure law; finding it in post-Domesday sources would be unusual and warrants scrutiny about whether the source is quoting Domesday or reflecting a live local custom. Second, the obligation of riding service is part of a broader spectrum of personal service tenures that medieval English law gradually commuted to money payments; researchers tracing the history of copyhold tenure, serjeanty, or socage may encounter redmans-type arrangements described in different vocabulary across different periods and localities. Third, Black's Law Dictionary's treatment — essentially verbatim across both editions consulted — signals this as a terminal entry: the historical dictionaries preserve the definition but offer no doctrinal development, because there is none to offer.
For corpus researchers working in Law Mind materials on feudal tenure, manorial custom, or Domesday-era land law, redmans is most useful as an index term connecting to the broader category of personal service tenures and to the Domesday Book as a primary source document.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both Black's Law Dictionary entries are functionally identical, with the second edition adding the field notation "In feudal law" as a classifying prefix. Neither entry develops the term beyond its Domesday source. The consistent citation to Domesday across both editions confirms that the term's entire legal authority rests on that single source, and neither Black's nor any supplemental entry attempts to connect redmans to subsequent case law, statutory treatment, or comparative feudal doctrine. This is notable: the legal dictionaries are preserving a historical record, not describing a living legal concept. Researchers should treat both entries as glosses on Domesday rather than as independent legal authority.
Jurisdictional Note
Redmans is a term of English feudal law with no counterpart in other common law jurisdictions. Its relevance is confined to the historical law of England, specifically to the period and geography covered by Domesday Book (1086) and the manorial tenure structures it recorded.