Etymology: Middle English bond , a phonetic variant of band n.¹ (compare land lond , stand stond , etc.), used interchangeably with it in early senses; but bond preserved more distinctly the connection with bind , bound , and is now the leading or exclusive form in branch II.

Etymology: Early Middle English bonde < Old English bonda, bunda husbandman, householder, husband, < Old Norse bónde(-i) , contraction of bóande , búande ‘occupier and tiller of the soil, peasant, husbandman; husband’, participial noun < búa , bóa to dwell, Latin colĕre , and thus equivalent in sense and etymology to German bauer . In Iceland the bónde was a peasant proprietor ‘including all owners of land from the petty freeholder to the franklin. In the more despotic Norway and Denmark, bóndi became a word of contempt, denoting the common low people; and in modern Danish bönder means plebs . In the Icelandic Commonwealth the word has a good sense, and is often used of the foremost men..this notion of the word (a franklin) still prevails in the mind of Icelanders’ (Vigfusson). In Old English, bonda , bunda appears first in the Laws of Cnut, apparently in the same sense as in Old Norse, and nearly, if not entirely, = Old English ceorl . When, through the effects of the Norman Conquest, the ceorl sank from the position of a free-man tilling his own land to that of a tenant bound to certain services to a lord (see Freeman Norm. Conq. V. 477), bonde became equivalent to ‘villain’, and so at length to ‘serf, slave’ (sense A. 3), and was thenceforth evidently associated with bond n.¹ and bound n.¹ Hence the occasional variant bande: but bounde may represent the Old English variant bunda.

Etymology: < Dutch bond league, confederation (= German bund), < binden to bind.

Etymology: < bond n.¹