Definition of "bondmen" [bondmen]

• Plural form of bondman. (noun)

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• "There is no authority for the contention that colonization promoted emancipation when the records show that the majority of slaveholders who supported it had in mind the expatriation of the free Negroes who among the bondmen were a living testimony against slavery."
• "In later days they made use of a class of men known as bondmen or villeins."
• "They are clothed in velvet and camlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with poor cloth: they have their wines, spices and good bread, and we have the drawing out of the chaff [2] and drink water; they dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and travail, rain and wind in the fields; and by that that cometh of our labours they keep and maintain their estates: we be called their bondmen, and without we do readily them service, we be beaten; and we have no sovereign to whom we may complain, nor that will hear us nor do us right."