It is 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,’[320] ‘Slaymans,’ and obsolete ‘Slaywrights’[321] 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 Curriers, cordwayners, and cobelers, Gyrdelers, forborers, and webbers. Such entries as ‘Elyas le Webbe,’ or ‘Clarice le Webbere,’ or ‘John le Webestre,’ are of common occurrence in our mediæval and still earlier records. But the processes are anything but at an end. The cloth must be dyed and fulled. Of the first our ‘Listers,’ once enrolled as ‘Hugh le Litster’ or ‘Henry le Littester,’[322] speak, and ‘Dyer’ or ‘Dister,’ still harder of recognition in such a guise as ‘Geoffrey le Deghere’ or ‘Robert le Dighestere,’ forms found at the period we are writing about. It was John Littester, a dyer, who in 1381 headed the rebellion in Norwich. Here the surname was evidently taken from the occupation followed. Halliwell gives the obsolete verb ‘to lit’ or dye, and quotes an old manuscript in which the following sentence occurs: ‘We use na clathis that are littede of dyverse coloures.’ Such names as ‘Gilbert le Teinturer,’ or ‘Richard le Teynterer,’ or ‘Philip le Tentier,’ which I have come across in three separate records, represent the old French title for the same occupation, but I believe they have failed to come down to us—at least I have not met with any after instance. The old English forms of ‘tincture’ and ‘tint’ are generally found to be ‘teinture’ and ‘teint.’ The teinturer is not without relics. We still speak when harassed of ‘being on the _stretch_,’ or when in a state of suspense of ‘being upon _tenter_-hooks,’ both of which proverbial expressions must have arisen in the common converse of cloth-workers. The tenter itself was the stretcher upon which the cloth was laid while in the dyer’s hands.