An old word for a whole class of people in Britain: the farmers who owned the land they worked. That last part is the point of the word. Below them were people who farmed someone else's land and paid rent; above them were the gentry and the nobles, who owned land but did not push a plough themselves. The yeomanry sat in the middle — small, independent, not rich but not poor, and famous in English writing for being solid, plain-speaking and stubbornly free. The word is a collective one: it names the group, not one man. One of them is a yeoman; all of them together are the yeomanry. It takes 'the' almost always — 'the yeomanry of England'. You meet it in history books, in Shakespeare's time and after, and in speeches praising ordinary English people; you do not meet it in ordinary conversation today, and using it about modern farmers would sound like a joke or like a costume drama. There is a second use worth knowing, because it is why the word still exists on British army badges: in the 1790s and after, volunteer cavalry units were raised from men who could bring their own horses — mostly this same landowning farming class — and these were called the yeomanry. Some British Army reserve regiments still carry 'Yeomanry' in their names today, long after the horses went.