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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
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