The Latin word “villa” moved into Italian, and more recently into English, unchanged. In Latin it meant a farmhouse or country house, and still does, even in English. But coming from outside the city isn’t always regarded as a good thing. Just as the middle of the US is sometimes called “flyover country,” good only for looking down on from your coast-to-coast airliner, country folks have been sneered at (literally and linguistically) for a long, long time. Take, for example, another word derived from “villa”: “villain”. “Villain” entered English when the Normans arrived a thousand years ago, and it meant “a low-born base-minded rustic” — that is, somebody born in the country who’s had no education and probably lacks the wit for school anyway.
“Villain” has had a number of spellings, from “vilein,” “vilain,” and “villain” in Anglo-French and Old French to “vyleyn” in Middle English. The first written citation in the OED is from the poem Handlyng Synne, written by the monk Robert Manning of Brunne in 1303:
“Goddys treytour, and ryt vyleyn! Hast þou no mynde of Marye Maudeleyn.”
(God’s traitor, and right villain! Hast thou no mind of Mary Magdalene?)
Given the bias against country folk, the gradual change of the meaning of “villain” to “a man naturally disposed to base or criminal actions” (that’s from the OED definition), might have been inevitable, although it did take a few centuries to happen.
Shakespeare used “villain” pretty extensively, which probably cemented its place in the language, and in recent decades the word has enjoyed additional usage in the context of comic books and related movies, which feature “super villains.” It even entered police slang in the 1960s (apparently it’s still current today) among British law enforcement, where “villain” means a professional criminal. Now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder if words really do enjoy additional usage? Have to figure out how to ask them.
Although “villa” (and another derived word, “village”) have for centuries kept their original association with farms and rural life, “villain” no longer carries the slightest connotation of any of that. Today it would be more common to find a “villain” in an urban setting. Except, of course, for super villains in James Bond (and similar) movies; they tend to situate their headquarters in remote places, like under the ocean, in orbit, or in a picturesque yet sinister castle hidden somewhere in Europe. You know, like a villa.
