I a joly rutter?"

(Skelton, Magnyfycence, 1. 762.)

The fairly common name Rutter is a good example of the difficulty of
explaining a surname derived from a trade or calling no longer
practised. Even so careful an authority as Bardsley has gone
hopelessly astray over this name. He says, "German ritter, a rider,
i.e. a trooper," and quotes from Halliwell, "rutter, a rider, a
trooper, from the German; a name given to mercenary soldiers engaged
from Brabant, etc." Now this statement is altogether opposed to
chronology. The name occurs as le roter, rotour, ruter in the Hundred
Rolls of 1273, i.e. more than two centuries before any German name for
trooper could possibly have become familiar in England. Any stray
Mid. High Ger. Riter would have been assimilated to the cognate Eng.
Rider. It is possible that some German Reuters have become English
Rutters in comparatively modern times, but the German surname Reuter
has nothing to do with a trooper. It represents Mid. High Ger.
riutaere, a clearer of land, from the verb riuten (reuten),
corresponding to Low Ger. roden, and related to our royd, a clearing
(Chapter XII). This word is apparently not connected with our root,
though it means to root out, but ultimately belongs to a root ru which
appears in Lat. rutrum, a spade, rutabulum, a rake, etc.

There is another Ger. Reuter, a trooper, which has given the
sixteenth-century Eng. rutter, but not as a surname. The word appears
in German about 1500, i.e. rather late for the surname period, and
comes from Du. ruiter, a mercenary trooper. The German for trooper is
Reiter, really the same word as Ritter, a knight, the two forms having
been differentiated in meaning; cf. Fr. cavalier, a trooper, and
chevalier, a knight. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Ger.
Reiter was confused with, and supplanted by, this borrowed word
Reuter, which was taken to mean rider, and we find the cavalry called
Reuterei well into the eighteenth century. As a matter of fact the
two words are quite unrelated, though the origin of Du. ruiter is
disputed.

The New English Dictionary gives, from the year 1506, rutter (var.
ruter, ruiter), a cavalry soldier, especially German, from Du. ruiter,
whence Ger. Reuter, as above. It connects the Dutch word with
medieval Lat. rutarius, i.e. ruptarius, which is also Kluge's view.
[Footnote: Deutsches Etymologisches Wrterbuch.] But Franck [Footnote:
Etymologisch Woordenboek der Nederlandsch