Citations:litster

English citations of litster

Noun: "(archaic, UK, Scotland) a dyer"

					1891 1898	1954 1995	2002 2006 2008 2011
ME «	15th c.	16th c.	17th c.	18th c.	19th c.	20th c.	21st c.

• 1891 – Alexander Maxwell, Old Dundee, Ecclesiastical, Burghal, and Social, Prior to the Reformation, David Douglas/William Kidd (1891), page 364:

  Another has illegally acquired a piece of cloth which a litster had got to die.

• 1898 – Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days, The Berkshire Traveller Press (1898), page 187:

  The art of spinning was an honorable occupation for women as early as the ninth century; and it was so universal that it furnished a legal title by which an unmarried woman is known to this day. Spinster is the only one of all her various womanly titles that survives; webster, shepster, litster, brewster, and baxter are obsolete.

• 1954 – Jane Lane, The Phoenix and the Laurel, House of Stratus (2002), →ISBN, page 219:

  […] There is one Binnie, a litster, who heard two men, lodged in his house – ”

• 1995 – Richard H. Saunders, John Smibert: Colonial America's First Portrait Painter, Yale University Press (1995), →ISBN, pages 1-2:

  But it was the woolen industry that provided the elder Smibert with a livelihood, for as a litster he spent his days dyeing wool, which was then woven into cloth.

• 2002 – Margaret H. B. Sanderson, A Kindly Place?: Living in Sixteenth-Century Scotland, Tuckwell Press (2002), →ISBN, page 122:

  Other women ran businesses that required reliance on a network of suppliers, sometimes of raw materials. Isobel Provand in the Canongate was a litster.

• 2002 – Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland, Yale University Press (2002), →ISBN, page 79:

  The Edinburgh elders in 1575 summoned a messenger named Walter Thomson who had been overheard debating in the streets with a litster (dyer), John Leyton, about prayer for the dead, citing texts from Maccabees.

• 2006 – R. B. Dobson, "The Tailors of Medieval York: From Craft to Company", in The Merchant Taylors of York: A History of the Craft and Company from the Fourteenth to Twentieth Centuries, Borthwick Publications (2006), →ISBN, page 35:

  Between the 1380s and the dissolution of the guild in the 1540s at least seven drapers as well as several litsters or dyers and other craftsmen are known to have made testamentary bequests to the 'fraternitas Sancti Johannis Baptiste' in a way which makes it virtually certain that they had been members of that fraternity.

• 2008 – Shona Maclean, The Redemption of Alexander Seaton, Penguin Canada (2010), →ISBN, unnumbered page:

  The smell of the tanners' and the litsters' work still hung in the night air, although they had long since gone to their weary beds.

• 2011 – George Redmonds, Turi King, & David Hey, Surnames, DNA, & Family History, Oxford University Press (2011), →ISBN, page 144:

  Just where and when it became a surname has not yet been established but examples occur in Yorkshire from 1472, when John Pennyman, a 'litster' or dyer, was granted freeman status in the city.