hūsbonda

Old Norse hūsbóndi combines hūs (house) with bóndi (dweller, farmer, from búa, to dwell). A hūsbóndi was a householder, the person who managed a farm. The word entered English during the Viking settlement of northern England in the ninth and tenth centuries. 'Husband' meant land manager. 'Husbandry' meant land management. Marriage was not the primary meaning — the agricultural sense came first.

The word 'husbandry' covered everything a good farm manager did: soil preparation, crop rotation, livestock breeding, resource conservation. Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry, published in 1573, was a bestselling farming manual in verse. Robert Bakewell of Dishley, Leicestershire, revolutionized animal husbandry in the 1760s by developing selective breeding techniques for sheep and cattle. The word named a professional skill, and a demanding one.

The marital meaning gradually displaced the agricultural one. By the sixteenth century, 'husband' primarily meant a married man, and 'husbandry' had split: it still meant farming (animal husbandry, crop husbandry) but also meant the thrift and care a good household manager would show. 'Good husbandry' could mean either good farming or good domestic economy. Shakespeare used it both ways.

The agricultural meaning survives mainly in technical contexts. University departments of animal husbandry still exist, though many have renamed themselves 'animal science.' The word 'husband' as a verb — to husband resources, to husband one's strength — preserves the Old Norse management sense. A man who husbands his energy is not marrying it. He is managing it carefully, the way a Norse farmer managed his farm.