Note 5 — INTRODUCTORY.

“The prefix ‘chap,’” says Professor Fraser, “originally meant ‘to cheap or cheapen,’ as in the word ‘cheapening-place,’ meaning a market-place,—hence the English Cheapside and Eastcheap.” The word “chap,” meaning “a fellow,” is a mere shortening of the name. “In addition,” writes George Mac Gregor, “it may be stated that the word ‘chapman’ is derived from the Anglo-Saxon ‘ceap-man,’ ceap meaning ‘a sale, or bargain’; and it is related to the Suio-Gothic or Swedish keop-a, whence is derived the Scottish ‘coup’ or ‘cowp,’ now confined to horse-selling, colloquially spoken of as ‘horse-cowping.’” The chapman, like his successor of to-day, had to procure a licence, and in old byelaws and proclamations he is classed among “Hawkers, Vendors, Pedlars, petty Chapmen, and unruly people.” There are occasional references in English literature to these itinerant merchants. Chaucer speaks of the commercial travellers of the age of the “Canterbury Tales” as

and in “The Winter’s Tale” there is a description of them on their literary side. The servant (act iv. scene 3) gives the following account of the wares of Autolycus:—“He hath songs for man, and woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves; he has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings.” Thus introduced, Autolycus describes his wares. He has one ballad, “to a very doleful tune, How a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden; and how she longed to eat adders’ heads and toads carbonadoed:” and another, “of a fish that appeared upon the coast, on Wednesday, the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids:” and yet another, of “two maids wooing a man.” Readers of “Tam o’ Shanter” will remember that Burns there speaks of “chapman billies.” In his Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, which was published at London in 1611, Cotgrave defines the chapman thus:—“Bissoüart, m. A paultrie Pedlar, who in a long packe or maunde (which he carries for the most part open, and hanging from his necke before him) hath Almanacks, Bookes of News, or other trifling wares to sell.” In “Troilus and Cressida,” and also in “Love’s Labour Lost,” Shakespeare refers to the chapman in the sense of a general dealer. In the former (act iv. scene 1) Paris says—

and in the latter (Act ii, scene 1), the Princess of France exclaims—