On record as an occupational term and by-name in Yorkshire in the fourteenth century. Possibly a wood-cutter since no early examples of that word have been noted.
Not always an occupational term. In the earliest examples quoted in the OED it could be a hunter of game and even a madman or lunatic. In the sense of a workman employed to look after a wood it is noted only from 1426.
The figurative use of this term may have obscured the fact that it referred to the collecting of pieces of wool caught on hedgerows and whins or simply lying in the fields.
A word found only in Leeds, where wool, like clothes more generally, was draped over a ‘hedge’ to dry. The evidence is not conclusive but it seems likely that such a ‘hedge’ was made of rails.
In smithies of various kinds, references have been found to a wooden board or table, linked with other furniture, which provided a work surface away from the anvil or forge.
The implement's precise function is not apparent in such contexts but it may have been a section of a tree trunk over which a hide could be draped when it was being ‘wrought’, similar to the beam used when the hide was converted into a butt or the scudding-beam in more modern tanneries.
By the mid-fifteenth century the word workman had acquired the meaning of ‘skilled craftsman’, and ‘workmanlike’ meant ‘characteristic of a skilful workman’.
As a vocabulary item ‘wormstall’ is defined in the OED as ‘an outdoor shelter for cattle in warm weather’, and the inference is that ‘shelter’ refers to a building, such as a shed.
A woollen fabric made from well-twisted yarn spun of long-staple wool, combed to lay the fibres parallel. Examples from 1296 confirm the derivation from the village of Worstead in Norfolk (OED).