8 Surnames That Prove Your Ancestor Had a Job Nobody Wanted

Your surname might be a job description that stopped existing five hundred years ago. Between about 1250 and 1450, English surnames froze. What had been a description of one man — where he lived, who his father was, what he did all day — hardened into something his children inherited whether or not they ever touched the trade. By 1413 it was law: the Statute of Additions required a man in a legal document to be identified by his estate, his degree, or his "mystery" — his trade. Which means a modern phone book is not a record of families. It is a snapshot of what enormous numbers of ordinary people were doing at one particular moment — and the jobs that were common enough to become surnames were almost never the jobs anyone wanted. Eight of them, counted down: the arrow-maker whose trade the gun destroyed, the chandler who boiled animal fat for a living, the miller everyone in the village suspected of theft, the three surnames that quietly record women's work, the man who spent his life at the bottom of a saw pit, the sexton who dug the graves and rang the death bell, the three regional words for one filthy job, and the trade every town in Europe wrote laws to push downstream. CHAPTERS 0:00 - Fletcher: The Job the Gun Killed 3:57 - Chandler: A Life Spent Boiling Fat 7:53 - Miller: The Most Hated Man in the Village 11:53 - Baxter: The Names That Say She Ran It 15:52 - Sawyer: The Man in the Pit 19:34 - Sexton: The Man Who Dug for the Dead 23:31 - Walker, Fuller and Tucker: One Job, Three Names 27:15 -Tanner: The Trade Every Town Pushed Downstream Which one is your name? Tell me in the comments — I'll answer as many as I can. #history #surnames #medievalhistory