The sale of woollen cloth by our ‘clothiers’ and ‘drapers’ we have already mentioned. The tailor then, as now, made it up into the garments which the age required. Few names went through so many metamorphoses as this. ‘Mainwaring,’ it is said, can be found in over a hundred and thirty different spellings. The exact number with regard to ‘Taylor’ I cannot state, as I have not dared hitherto to encounter the task of collecting them. The forms recorded in one register alone give us such varieties as ‘le Tayllur,’ ‘le Tayllour,’ ‘le Tayller,’ ‘le Taylir,’ ‘le Taylour,’ ‘le Taylur,’ ‘le Taillur,’ and ‘le Talur.’ We have also the feminine ‘la Taylurese’ in the same roll.[342] A name obsolete now in a colloquial sense, but common enough in our directories, is ‘Parminter,’ ‘Parmenter,’ or ‘Parmitar,’ a relic of the old Norman-French ‘Parmentier,’ a term a few hundred years ago familiarly used also for the snip. Among other mediæval forms are ‘Geoffrey le Parmunter,’ ‘Saher le Parmentier,’ ‘William le Parmeter,’ and ‘Richard le Parmuter.’ The Hundred Rolls give us the same sobriquet in a Latin dress as ‘William Parmuntarius.’[343] As associated with the tailor, we may here set down our ‘Sempsters,’ that is, ‘Seamster,’ the once feminine of ‘Seamer,’ one who seamed or sewed. Mr. Lower hints that our ‘Seymours’ may in some instances be a corruption of this latter form, but I must confess I discover no traces of it. The sobriquet of ‘William le Burreller’ introduces us to a cloth of a cheap mixture, brown in colour, of well-nigh everlasting wear, and worn by all the poorer classes of society at this period. So universal was it that they came to be known by the general term of ‘borel-folk,’ a phrase familiar enough to deeper students of antiquarian lore. The Franklin premises his story by saying— But, sires, because I am a borel man, At my beginning first I you beseech Have me excused of my rude speech. Our ‘Burrells’ are still sufficiently common to preserve a remembrance of this now decayed branch of trade. They may derive their name either from the term ‘borel’ or ‘burel’ pure and simple, or from ‘Burreller,’ and thus represent the trade from which the other, as a sobriquet, owed its rise. The manufacturer is referred to by ‘Cocke Lorelle,’ in the line— Borlers, tapestry-work-makers, dyers. Special articles of costume now wholly disused, or confined or altered in sense, crop out abundantly in this class of surnames. At this period a common outdoor covering for the neck was the wimple, or folded vail, worn by women. To this day, I need not say, it is part of the conventual dress. The author I have just quoted beautifully describes Shame as— Humble of her port, and made it simple Wearing a vaile, instede of wimple, As nuns done in their abbey. Of this princess, too, whose careful dress he so particularly describes, he says—