Thank you, Emanuela. You've just made the connection for me to villain. From Webster's Unabridged:

[ME vilein, vilain, fr. MF, fr. ML villanus, fr. L villa country house, country estate, village + anus* -an ...]

So, villain has a heritage similar to civility, civilized, barbaric, and uncouth, in that it imposes attributes depending upon where the person is from.


* and we do not need to tie this in with the direction the other fork of this thread has taken...