Flemings began on me for to cry, ‘Master, what will you copen or buy? Fine felt hats, or spectacles to read?’ That many of these wares, however, were of home manufacture is equally undoubted, and of this we are reminded by our ‘Blockers,’ representatives of the old ‘Deodatus le Blokkere.’ The ‘block’ was the wooden mould upon which the hat was shaped and crowned. In ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ Beatrice is made to say: ‘He wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat; it ever changes with the next block.’ The ‘blocker,’ I doubt not, was but a hat-maker; we still call a stupid man a _blockhead_. Our ‘Hurrers’ (‘Alan le Hurer,’ H.R., ‘Geoffrey le Hurwere,’ H.R.), once so important as to form a special company with articles and overseers, as representative of an old general term, are not so familiar as we might have expected them. Bonnets, caps, hoods, hats, all came under their hands. Strictly speaking, however, a ‘hure’ or ‘howre,’ as Chaucer spells it, was a shaggy cap of fur, or coarse jagged cloth. In an old political song of Edward the First’s time it is said— Furst there sit an old cherle in a blake hure, Of all that there sitteth seemeth best sure. That the word itself should have dropped from our vocabulary is to me a mystery.[341] Even in our nomenclature the rarity of our ‘Hurers’ and ‘Hurrers’ is to me inexplicable, bearing as it does no possible proportion to the former importance of the occupation. But this, as I have said before, is one of the peculiarities of personal nomenclature, depending entirely as it does on the uncertainties of descent. The head, we see, was not neglected.