Timawa

Pronounced ti-MA-wa. The middle of the three broad ranks of sixteenth-century Philippine society: freemen who owed the datu military service and went out on his raids and expeditions.

They are the rank most often skipped in school summaries, which tend to jump straight from chiefs to bondsmen, and skipping them loses the shape of the thing. A society with a warrior freeman class between the chief and the dependents is not a simple two-tier arrangement of rulers and ruled. It is a structure with its own internal obligations running in more than one direction.

In modern Philippine languages the word has drifted, in some usages toward “commoner” and in others toward “destitute,” which is a small lesson in how far a term can travel from what it once named.

Source: William Henry Scott, Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994, free to borrow at https://archive.org/details/barangaysixteent0000scot . Scott’s three-rank account is built only from Spanish descriptions written at contact.

First used in: 1.1 · Before anyone called it the Philippines