Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 205

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….

Master of the Rolls

I mentioned yesterday about how Grose doesn’t normally do much with puns, but he did with ‘Master of the Mint’. And there’s another here, “master of the rolls” meaning a baker. The phrase was first recorded with this meaning in the middle of the seventeenth century and fell out of usage in the late nineteenth century.