A small cottage or a cottager of low status; a term of mild contempt for a poor peasant farmer.
From cotter (cottage dweller) + -el (diminutive suffix). The suffix -el made the word smaller and more dismissive, reflecting class attitudes in medieval and early modern England.
Medieval class hierarchy was literally built into language—'cotterel' wasn't just a small cottage, it was a way to mark someone as 'less than,' showing how English preserved social ranking in its diminutive forms!
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