[172] I am indebted for these last four to a Nominale in the National Antiquities, vol. i. p. 216.
[173] The earliest example which Richardson gives of ‘seamstress’ is from Gay, of ‘songstress’, from Thomson. I find however ‘sempstress’ in the translation of Olearius’ Voyages and Travels, 1669, p. 43. It is quite certain that as late as Ben Jonson, ‘seamster’ and ‘songster’ expressed the female seamer and singer; a single passage from his Masque of Christmas is evidence to this. One of the children of Christmas there is “Wassel, like a neat sempster and songster; her page bearing a brown bowl”. Compare a passage from Holland’s Leaguer, 1632: “A tyre-woman of phantastical ornaments, a sempster for ruffes, cuffes, smocks and waistcoats”.
[174] This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof of the confusion which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare’s time, see his use of ‘spinster’ as—‘spinner’, the man spinning, Henry VIII, Act. i. Sc. 2; and I have no doubt that it is the same in Othello, Act i. Sc. 1. And a little later, in Howell’s Vocabulary, 1659, ‘spinner’ and ‘spinster’ are both referred to the male sex, and the barbarous ‘spinstress’ invented for the female.
[175] I have included ‘huckster’, as will be observed, in this list. I certainly cannot produce any passage in which it is employed as the female pedlar. We have only, however, to keep in mind the existence of the verb ‘to huck’, in the sense of to peddle (it is used by Bishop Andrews), and at the same time not to let the present spelling of ‘hawker’ mislead us, and we shall confidently recognize ‘hucker’ (the German ‘höker’ or ‘höcker’), in hawker, that is, the man who ‘hucks’, ‘hawks’, or peddles, as in ‘huckster’ the female who does the same. When therefore Howell and others employ ‘hucksteress’, they fall into the same barbarous excess of expression, whereof we are all guilty, when we use ‘seamstress’ and ‘songstress’.—The note stood thus in the third edition. Since that was published, I have met in the Nominale referred to p. 155, the following, “hæc auxiatrix, a hukster”. [Huckster, xiii. cent. huccster, it may be noted is an older word in the language than hukker (hucker) and to huck, both first appearing in the xiv. cent. N.E.D.]
[176] [Preserved in the surnames Baxter and Brewster. See C. W. Bardsley, English Surnames, 2nd ed. 364, 379.]
[177] Notes and Queries, No. 157.
[178] [‘Welkin’ is possibly a plural, but in Anglo-Saxon wolcen is a cloud, and the plural wolcnu.]
[179] When Wallis wrote, it was only beginning to be forgotten that ‘chick’ was the singular, and ‘chicken’ the plural: “Sunt qui dicunt in singulari ‘chicken’, et in plurali ‘chickens’”; and even now the words are in many country parts correctly employed. In Sussex, a correspondent writes, they would as soon think of saying ‘oxens’ as ‘chickens’. [‘Chicken’ is properly a singular, old English cicen, the -en being a diminutival, not a plural, suffix (as in ‘kitten’, ‘maiden’). Thus ‘chicken’ was originally ‘a little chuck’ (or cock), out of which ‘chick’ was afterwards developed.]
[180] See Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose, 1032, where Richesse, “an high lady of great noblesse”, is one of the persons of the allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17, Authorized Version. This has so entirely escaped the knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar as he was, that in his Grammar he cites ‘riches’ as an example of an English word wanting a singular.