Thursday 29 January 2015

Farm Tax


Today I have been paying the farmer. Because, of course, farmers aren't farmers.

Some people have trade surnames: Mr Baker, Mr Butcher, Mr Farmer etc. And these people happily imagine that in some way off medieval time they had an ancestor who was a baker or a butcher or a farmer. The first two are right, but the Farmers are wrong. Because a farmer is a taxman. Or was.

The name has nothing to do with farms.

Once upon a time, there was the Medieval Latin word firma, which meant a fixed payment. (It's related in this to firm, firmament, affirm etc). From this you got the Old French fermier and the English farmer all meaning tax collector, or one who collects a fixed payment.

So Chaucer wrote (with his mind on what I'm doing today):

Him ought not be... cruel As is a farmer to do the harm he can.

This meaning of farmer actually survived all the way to the C19th, although by that time it had become rather odd.

But, feudally, rich landowners used to collect taxes on the land they owned, and they would have middle-men who were responsible for collecting the tax from a particular area. These tax farmers were responsible for a single farm from a single piece of land. They often had responsibility for making sure that it was cultivated its most profitable extent. Often they lived there as a tenant farmer.

People these days buy time-share apartments, which are often just referred to as time-shares. In the same way, the method of payment slowly came to be associated with the activity of agriculture. So the old words husbandman and churl were slowly replaced. And by the late C16th, farmer had become the standard word for somebody who simply owned a farm.

But the surname dates from the C13th. And that's why I've been paying the farmer.



7 comments:

  1. So 'terra firma' originally meant "a fixed land payment"?

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  2. So I guess those people who are so joyous after a rough plane ride, and say how great it is to be back on terra firma, are really just celebrating their ability to resume paying taxes? Suckers!

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  3. I'm afraid that, though it's etymologically related, terra firma was originally Venetian meaning all of their possessions on the mainland.

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  4. Pretty sure people 'buy' timeshares, when they should give them a bye.

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  5. I agree to what you have written because every word does have different meanings because of their origins. Words can contain other words within the same word and might not have any relations: just like the word farmer.

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  6. Mr Teller worried he couldn't have inherited his name from a medieval profession. Surely, a vowel was switched through the ages. Was his forebear then a tiller or a toller? "Same difference", smiled M. Forsyth.

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  7. A farm was also known as a fee as in eg a Knight's fee that supported him when he was fighting away in a crusade. I suppose field comes from this?

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