CHAPTER IV. SURNAMES OF OCCUPATION (COUNTRY). I now come to the consideration of occupations generally, and to this I think it will be advisable to devote two chapters. One reason for so doing, the main one in fact, is that they seem naturally to divide themselves into two classes—those of a rural character, very numerous at that time on account of agricultural pursuits being so general, and those of a more diverse and I may say civilized kind, bearing upon the community’s life—literature and art, dress, with all its varied paraphernalia, the boudoir and the kitchen. In considering the former, the character of our surnames will give us, I imagine, by no means a bad or ineffective picture of the simplicity of our early rural life, its retirement, and even calm. In shadowing forth the latter, we shall be enabled to see what were the available means of that age, and by the very absence of certain names to realise how numberless have been the resources that discovery has added at a more recent period. It will be well, too, to give two entire chapters to these surnames, as being worthy of somewhat further particularity than the others. They betray much more of our English life that has become obsolete. Local names, as I have said already, while they must ever denote much of change, denote the changes more especially of Nature herself, which are slow in general, and require more than the test of four or five centuries to make their transitions apparent. Personal or Christian names vary almost less than these. The Western European system is set upon the same foundation, and whatever has been peculiar to separate countries has long since, by the intermingling of nations, whether peaceful or revolutionary, been added to the one common stock. Some indeed have fallen into disuse through crises of various kinds. A certain number, too, of a fanciful kind, as we have already seen, have been added within the last two centuries, but these latter have not of course affected our surnames. Nicknames, which form so large a proportion of our nomenclature, remain much the same; for a nation’s tongue, while receiving a constant deposit and throwing off ever a redundant phraseology, still, as a rule, does not touch these; they are taken from the deeper channel of a people’s speech. But the fashion and custom of living is ever changing. New wants spring up, and old requirements become unneeded; fresh resources come to hand, and the more antique are at once despised and thrown aside. In a word, invention and discovery cast their shafts at the very heart of usage. Thus it is that we shall have such a large number of obsolete occupations to recount—occupations which but for our rolls even the oldest and most reliable of our less formal writings would have failed to preserve to us.