Comber

Someone who combs wool to remove the snarls, preparing it to be made into yarn.

"What had Achilles been without his Homer?

A tailor, woolen-draper, or a comber!"

Wolcott, Rowl for Oliver (1790).

Snipper

A lesser tailor. Someone capable only of stealing others' designs.

"As our Snippers go over once a year into France, to bring back the newest Mode, and to learn to cut and shape it."

John Dryden, tr. Maimbourg's Historical League Postscript (1684).

Demagogue

A leader of people. A rabble-rouser.

"But there's no doubt that those folk are all men of my kidney who delight in miracles and fictitious marvels, whether hearing or telling about them. They can never have enough of such tales when there are any wonders to relate about ghosts, spectres, phantoms, and the dead, and all the countless miracles there are of this kind. The further these are from truth, the more eagerly they are believed and the more agreeably they titillate the ear. Such things not only serve remarkably well for whiling away a tedious hour but can also be profitable, especially for preachers and demagogues."

Erasmus, Praise of Folly, (1509)

[translated by Betty Radice, notes by A. H. T. Levi (1993)].

A Mad Coachman

Someone who carries passengers in a horse-drawn carriage.

"Saw my Lady Castlemaine, who I fear is not so handsome as I have taken her for, and now she begins to decay something. This is my wife's opinion also, for which I am sorry. Thence by coach, with a mad coachman that drove like mad, and down byways through Bucklersbury home, everybody through the street cursing him, being ready to run over them."

Samuel Pepys, Diary (June 13, 1663).

Postmaster

The officer who directs postal messengers or oversees the postal system.

"St. Paul is a wonderful town. It is put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone, and has the air of intending to stay. Its post-office was established thirty-six years ago; and by and by, when the postmaster received a letter, he carried it to Washington, horseback, to inquire what was to be done with it. Such is the legend."

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Raymond Chandler on Hoods

Slang for a criminal of some kind. A crook.

“’A big shot from the Treasury Department comes here for a vacation every spring. Happened to see Mr. Money and know all about him. He spread the word. You think it’s not breaking his heart? You don’t know these hoods that have made theirs and gone respectable. He’s bleeding to death inside, friend. He’s found something he can’t buy with folding money and it’s eating him to a shell.’”

Raymond Chandler, Playback (1958).

Harvest-reeve

The person with the authority to oversee the workers harvesting the crops of a landed estate.

"From the household book of another family comparable with the Pastons we can see in exact terms what a burden was placed on the housewife. A typical entry runs: 'Victuals expended throughout the month [August 1413]. Wheat baked, 8 quarters 4 bushels; wine [blank]; barley and drage malt brewed, 18 quarters; beef, 2 carcasses, 3 quarters; pork, 5 pigs and 1 quarter; 1 young pig; 22 carcasses of mutton; 2 lambs; 1 capon; 333 pigeons; 1 heron; 460 white herrings; 18 salt fish; 6 stockfish.' The reason for such a mass of food is given when we turn to see the numbers to be catered for daily. To take the first of August as an example: on this day the lady entertained a friend, and sat down with eight of her household to all meals, and in addition the harvest-reeve and sixteen workers came to the manor hall for their midday repast. As a result the pantry had to provide some sixty loaves, and an unspecified amount of ale, while the kitchen used a quarter-side of beef, another of bacon, one joint of mutton and twelve pigeons."

Six Medieval Men & Women, "Margaret Paston," H. S. Bennett (1955).

Carter

Someone who drives a cart for carrying various heavy loads. Julius Caesar decreed that to free up traffic, they could only use the roads at night.

"The carters drive along the streets smacking a tune with their whips."

Hood, Up Rhine, (1840).

Muskrat Hunter

Someone who hunts a large aquatic rodent, called a muskrat, for its pelt, which apparently has a musky smell.

"Muske Rats skins, two shillings a dozen; the cods of them will serve for good perfumes."

Observ. Silkwormes (1620).

Fletcher

Someone who makes or deals in arrows. An arrowsmith.

"He dips his curses in the gall of irony and fletches them with a profane Classical parody."

Warburton, The doctrine of grace (1763).

Zoologist

A scientist who studies animals.

"Nor have I seen any thing that interested me as a zoologist, except an otter."

Samuel Johnson, Letter to Mrs. Thrale (1773).

Salt-weigher

Officials whose duty it was to make sure people were not shortchanged when buying salt.

“Even the infractions of solemn forms tended to become forms themselves. It seems that it was more or less a custom for the funeral of a king of France to be interrupted by a quarrel, of which the object was the possession of the utensils of the ceremony. In 1422 the corporation of the ‘henouars,’ or salt-weighers, of Paris, whose privilege it was to carry the king’s corpse to Saint-Denis, came to blows with the monks of the abbey, as both parties claimed the pall covering the bier of Charles VI.”

J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).

Fortune-hunter

Someone intent to acquire a fortune by marriage. Someone who angles to marry a wealthy heir or heiress.

“‘A woman like Mrs. West almost always ends up marrying a series of pseudo-elegant fortune hunters, tango dancers with handsome sideburns, skiing instructors with beautiful blond muscles, faded French and Italian aristocrats, shoddy princelings from the Middle East, each worse than the one before. She might even in her extremity marry a man like Mitchell. If she married me, she would marry an old bore, but at least she would marry a gentleman.’”

Raymond Chandler, Playback (1958).

Cellarer

The person responsible for laying in and keeping track of food and other provisions for a monastery. The person charged with providing a convent's supplies of liquors.

"Now he had a kinsman, Frederick by name, a canon of the same church, who held the office of cellarer; this man was wont oftimes to rebuke his uncle for his indiscreet liberality, and the uncle in turn blamed him for his too great niggardliness; for they kept house in common, and therefore Frederick was much grieved that the Dean was wont to give secretly to the poor whatsoever he could seize. It came to pass that this Frederick, having many and great swine in virtue of his office, slew them and made them into flitches which he hung in the kitchen to be kept until the time appointed; these the Dean would oftentimes consider, and, grudging sore that they should hang there, knowing at the same time that he could not or dared not beg any part thereof from his nephew, he contrived a holy fraud, a pious fraud, a fraud worthy of all memory! So often as he knew that no man was in the kitchen, he would steal secretly thither, and sometimes seize the occasion to send the servants forth. Then would he mount the ladder and cut from the flitches on the side next to the wall until all were wasted away almost to the midst; but the forepart he left untouched, that none might mark how the rest had been taken. This he did for many days, distributing the flesh thus cut away to widows, and poor folk, and orphans. In brief, the theft of this household property was at last discovered, the thief was sought and found without delay. The cellarer raged, the Dean held his peace; and when the other complained that he had lost the sustenance of the brethren and the stock of a whole year, the holy man sought to soothe him with such words as he could, saying: 'Good kinsman, it is better that thou shouldst suffer some little want than that the poor should die of hunger. The Lord will indeed reward thee.'"

Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus Miraculorum (13th century).

The Wayward and the Hayward

The worker or official of a manor who maintains the fences and enclosures, making sure livestock does not stray from its fenced-in area nor poachers from theirs.

"On the morning itself, the tenants (or suitors as they were called) appeared at the manor court, and stood around on the rush-strewn floor of the court room. The various manorial officials--the hayward, the ale-tasters, the bailiffs and the tithing-men--also took their places, and with the cry of 'Silence!' echoing through the hall, the cellarer entered, and sat at the table on the dais, his clerk at his side."

Six Medieval Men & Women, "Richard Bradwater," H. S. Bennett (1955).

Bouncer

Someone paid by the owner of a watering hole to reason with the unreasonable.

“Stiffy, though one of those girls who enjoy in equal quantities the gall of an army mule and the calm insouciance of a fish on a slab of ice, had unquestionably gone up in the air a bit when I had seemed about to explain to Stinker my motives for being in the room. I recalled the feverish way in which she had hustled him out, like a small bouncer at a pub ejecting a large customer.”

P. G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters (1938).

Meals of the Duke

A ruler of a small state or duchy. A provincial military ruler.

“The meals of the duke were ceremonies of a dignity that was almost liturgic. The descriptions by the master of ceremonies, Olivier de la Marche, are well worth reading. His treatise, L’Etat de la Mason du duc Charles de Bourgogne, composed at the request of the king of England, Edward IV, to serve him for a model, expounds the complicated service of breadmasters, carvers, cup-bearers, cooks, and the ordered course of the banquet, which was crowned by all the noblemen filing past the duke, who was still seated at table, ‘pour lui donner gloire.’ The kitchen regulations are truly Pantagruelistic. We may picture them in operation in the kitchen of heroic dimensions, with its seven gigantic chimneys, which can still be seen in the ducal palace of Dijon. The chief cook is seated on a raised chair, overlooking the whole apartment; ‘and he must hold in his hand a big wooden ladle which serves him for a double purpose: on the one hand to taste soup and broth, on the other to chase the scullions from the kitchen to their work, and to strike them, if need be.’”

J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).

Authors and Mental Inertia

Someone who brings something into existence. Someone who composes or writes a book or treatise. In this case, a historian.

“This failing to see the social importance of the common people, which is proper to nearly all authors of the fifteenth century, may be regarded as a kind of mental inertia, which is a phenomenon of frequent occurrence and vital importance in history. The idea which people had of the third estate had not yet been corrected and remodeled in accordance with altered realities. This idea was simple and summary, like those miniatures of breviaries, or those bas-reliefs of cathedrals, representing the tasks of the year in the shape of the toiling labourer, the industrious artisan, or the busy merchant. Among archaic types like these there is neither place for the figure of the wealthy patrician encroaching upon the power of the nobleman, nor for that of the militant representative of a revolutionary craft-guild. Nobody perceived that the nobility only maintained itself, thanks to the blood and the riches of the commoners.”

J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).

Academic

Someone who teaches in an academy (i.e., a university or college).

“I don’t know if I ended up siding with the academics just because I happened to end up in graduate school, or if I ended up in graduate school because I already secretly sided with the academics. In any case, I stopped believing that ‘theory’ had the power to ruin literature for anyone, or that it was possible to compromise something you loved by studying it. Was love really such a tenuous thing? Wasn’t the point of love that it made you want to learn more, immerse yourself, to become possessed?”

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010).

Grenadier

Originally a soldier who threw grenades.

"Now were brought into service a new sort of soldiers call'd Granadiers, who were dextrous in flinging hand granados."

Evelyn, Diary (1678).

A (Sick) Master

Someone who owns (things, land, people). Someone who has mastered an art.

"Let the man who has acquired Enough not ask for MORE./ A house and acreage, a pile of bronze and gold coins,/ Have never been able to lower the sick master's fever/ Or drive out his worries."

Horace, Epistles, To Lollius Maximus (22 B.C.)

Magistrates for Sale

A civil servant who administers laws. A justice of the peace.

"But they think anything beseems them which brings in cash, that is, which increases the hunger of the poor and nourishes the luxury of the nobles (or rather the bandits). And there are even some who make a tidy pile out of the deeds of criminals, using the law as their fishing-net. Now what magistrate's post or governorship is there, which is not for sale in several quarters? And finally, since all these many expedients cannot fill a leaky barrel (i.e., the prince's royal treasury), someone thinks up a reason for going to war, the generals get their heads together, the unhappy population has the very marrow sucked out of its bones, just as if kingship were nothing but a vast profit-making concern."

Erasmus, Adages ("A mortuo tributum exigere") (1515).

[translated by Margaret Mann Phillips (1967)].

Tory

In the 17th century, dispossessed Irish who turned to robbing and murdering English settlers. Also known as bog-trotters.

“The bogs in Ireland afforded a refuge to Popish outlaws, much resembling those who were afterwards known as Whiteboys. These men were then called Tories.”

Thomas Macaulay, The History of England (1849).