Baker

Assize bread laws made bakers unpopular arithmeticians, one ounce wrong and the pillory waited, yet every market needed their ovens at dawn. The surname marks guild craft from Chester to Canterbury; migration then carried smoke-stained pride into the empire's port cities.

The Worshipful Company of Bakers, founded by royal charter in 1486 (the earlier guild had operated under London ordinances from at least 1155), regulated bread-quality and weight standards across the City of London until the eighteenth century and was, by the sixteenth century, one of the wealthier of the twelve great livery companies. The Assize of Bread (the medieval ordinance that fixed the weight and price of the loaf in relation to the prevailing wheat-flour wholesale price) was the medieval baker's daily statutory burden. The pillory penalty for short weight was applied frequently across the surviving Assize records of the City of London, the boroughs of Norwich, York and Chester, and the smaller market-and-borough towns. The Baker surname records the trade across the parish-registers of every medieval market town of England.

The English-Welsh-Irish migration carried the Baker surname into a substantial colonial-trade distribution by the eighteenth century. The Cape Colony settlement of the 1820 British emigrants included a substantial Baker contingent from the Devon and Cornwall coastal parishes; the New South Wales Free Settler emigration of the 1820s and 1830s took a parallel Baker stream into the Hunter Valley and the Sydney Harbour suburbs. The American distribution is concentrated in the seventeenth-century Massachusetts and Virginia settlement zones and ran into the post-1820 Pennsylvania and Ohio populations through the standard mid-nineteenth-century industrial migrations.

The Baker name carries one of the strongest Victorian-and-modern exploration-and-acting traditions in English public life. Sir Samuel White Baker, the Norfolk-born hunter and explorer who had married the Hungarian Florence von Sass at Vidin in Bulgaria in 1859, set out from Khartoum in March 1863 on a year-and-a-half expedition that reached the previously-unidentified Lake Albert (named for the Prince Consort) on 14 March 1864 and resolved one of the two senior open questions of the geography of the Nile sources. His brother Valentine Baker (Baker Pasha) ran the Ottoman gendarmerie of the late 1870s. The mid-twentieth-century English Baker generation produced Stanley Baker the Welsh-Rhondda-actor lead of Zulu (1964), Tom Baker the fourth Doctor Who in the 1974-81 run, Janet Baker the English mezzo-soprano of the late-twentieth-century opera tradition, and Ginger Baker the Cream-and-Blind-Faith drummer of the 1960s rock-jazz fusion.