Surname Origins, Their Source and Significations (1875)

merchant, and has therefore absorbed the more general meaning the word ought to have conveyed.

The first stage towards manufacture would be the process of carding the raw and tangled material, and numberless are the 'Carders,' 'Combers,' and' Kempsters,'1 or'Kemsters,' who remind us of this. In these latter sobriquets we have but varied forms of the same root ' cemb,' to comb. We still talk poetically of 'unkempt locks,' and we are told of Emelie in the Knight's Tale' that

Her bright hair kembed was, untressed all.

The Norman corresponding name is found in 'Robert le Peinnur' or 'William le Puigneur,' but unless in our ' Pinners ' (a supposition not unnatural) it has left no descendants. But even these are not all. It is with them we must associate our 'Towzers' and 'Tozers,' from the old 'touse' allied to 'tease' — they who cleared the fibre from all entanglements. Spenser talks of curs 'touring' the poor bear at the baiting, and I need not remind the reader that in our some-what limited canine nomenclature, 'Towzer; as a name for a dog of more pugnacious propensities, occupies a by no means mean place. As applicable to the trade in question, Gower uses the word when he says, in his 'Confessio Amantis':

What schepe that is full of wulle

Upon his backe they tose and pulle.2

1 A prayer to the Commons, in 1464, respecting the importation of foreign goods and merchandise, mentions 'the makers of wollen cloth within this Reame, as Wevers, Fullers, Dyers, Kempsters, Carders, and Spynners.' (Rot. Parl. Ed. IV.)

2 A recipe from an old Harleian MS. thus begins: 'Recipe brawne of capons or of hennys, and dry them wele, and towne them small.'

SURNAMES OF OCCUPATION (TOWN).

Itis here, therefore, we must place our one or two solitary relics of the rough machinery then in use. In ' Cardmaker' we have the manufacturer of the' comb' or 'card' thus usefully employed; in 'Spindler' the maker of the pin round which the thread was wound; while our 'Slaymakers, 1 'Slaymans,' and obsolete ' Slaywrights' 2 preserve the once so familiar 'slay' — that moveable part of the loom which the webbe with his fingers plied nimbly and deftly along the threads. A petition to Parliament in 1467 from the worsted manufacturers complains that in the county of Norfolk there are 'divers persones that make untrue ware of all manner of worstedes, not being of the assises in length nor brede, nor of good, true stuffe and makyng, and the slayes and yern thereto belonging untruly made and wrought, etc.' (Rot. Parl. Ed. IV.) I believe the word is not yet obsolete as a term of the craft.

I have mentioned 'Webbe.'

My wife was a webbe

And woolen cloth made,

says Piers in his 'Vision.' This appears, judging at least from our directories, to have been the more general term, and after it its longer forms, the masculine 'Webber' and the originally feminine 'Webster! A poem written in the beginning of the sixteenth century refers to

1 In the south walk, Westminster Abbey, Ere gravestones recording the deaths of 'George Slemaker,' 1802, and 'Susannah Slemaker,' his widow, r818. (Yid Neale's Westminster Abbey. )

2 Richard Slawright was prior of the Hermit Friars of St. Augustine Warrington, in 1516. (Warrington in 1465. Ch. Soc., p. xliv.) Y