scotchman

1) This was formerly the English word for a man of Scottish nationality, now usually ‘Scotsman’.

1681 John Marshall, Scotch man, Skipton. It was applied in particular to travelling drapers, hawkers, and pedlars of scotch cloth who called regularly at out-of-the-way places: they are said to have been successful partly because they used a credit system. The term occurs regularly in Yorkshire records from the early eighteenth century but will have been in use much earlier: 1705 Alexander Miller … and another Scotchman taken up with a pack on his back, Gisburn

1721 Mary Hanson had bought the musling of one Robert Maxfield a Scotchman

1731 William Rowan, scotchman pedlar, Sheffield

1738 one piece of red and white printed linen which she saith she exchanged with a Scotch Man for her son’s hair in 1736, West Riding. In 1755, a coroner’s inquest called David Anderson a travelling Scotchman. Some early depositions contain good biographic information, as when John Smith was arrested in Kirkheaton: 1682 saith that he was borne in Scotland and Dumfrees and he came into England the fooreende of May last and sells hollan and scotchcloath, cambrick, muslins, callecoe and blew linne and that he came from Almondbury to Kirkheaton and there was taken up by the watch and hath used this pedding traide for five yeares last paste in England and that he byes the comodityes, except the scotchcloath, of Mr Hardwick and Mr Hey both of Leeds. In the 1881 census the occupation of Joe Whiteley of Holmfirth was given as scotch traveller: his local surname suggests that the term had by then acquired a more generic sense.

dates 1681 1682 1705 1721 1738 1755

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