English Surnames: Their Sources and SignificationsBardsley, Charles Wareing Endell
History
English Surnames: Their Sources and Significations
Bardsley, Charles Wareing Endell
Names, English; Names, Personal -- English
Cloth that cometh fro the wevyng
Is nought comely to wear
Til it be fulled _under foot_,
Or in fullying stokkes,
Washen wel with water,
And with taseles cracched
Y-touked, and y-teynted,
And under taillours hande.
We are here not merely furnished with the entire process itself, but the
terms themselves employed harmonize well with the names I have
mentioned. ‘Walker’ and ‘Tucker’ or ‘Towkare’ or ‘Toker,’ as it was
variously spelt, together with ‘Tuckerman,’ have, however, disappeared
as terms of this trade; and it is in our directories alone we can find
them declaring these forgotten mysteries of a more uncouth manufacture.
The ‘taseles’ mentioned in the poem quoted above were the common
‘teasel’ or ‘tassel,’ a rough prickly plant allied to the thistle, which
when dried was used for scratching the cloth, and thus raising a nap
thereupon. Thus in Willsford’s ‘Nature’s Secrets’ it is said, ‘Tezils,
or Fuller’s Thistle, being gathered or hanged up in the house, where the
air may come freely to it, upon the alteration of cold and windy weather
will grow smoother, and against rain will close up his prickles.’
(Brand’s ‘Pop. Ant.,’ vol. iii. p. 133.) In an inventory of the property
of Edward Kyrkelands, of Kendall, dated 1578, we find the following
articles mentioned:—iiii syckles, a pair wyes and iii stafs, tazills,
5_s._ 8_d._—more in tazills, 2_s._—iiii tentors, 40_s._ (‘Richmondshire
Wills,’ p. 274.) The occupation itself is referred to in an old statute
of Edward IV.—‘Item, that every fuller, from the said feast of St.
Peter, in his craft and occupation of fuller, rower, or _tayseler_ of
cloth, shall exercise and use _taysels_ and no cards, deceitfully
impairing the same cloth’—‘en sa arte et occupacion de fuller et
scalpier ou tezeiler de drap, exercise et use teizels, &c.’ (4 Ed. IV.
c. 1.) It is probable that our ‘Taylors’ have engrossed this name. We
find it lingering in Westmoreland, about Kendal, till the middle of the
sixteenth century, in a form which required but little further change to
make it the same. In the will of Walter Strykland, dated 1568, there is
mentioned among other legatees a certain ‘Edward Taylzer,’ a manifest
corruption of ‘Teazeler.’ (‘Richmondshire Wills,’ p. 224.) A century
earlier than this, however, such names as ‘Gilbert le Tasseler’ or
‘Matilda le Tasselere’ were entered in our more formal registers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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