Boucher

Boucher is the French butcher, and it carries an older, narrower job inside it. Old French bouchier was built on bouc, the he-goat, and it first meant the man who sold goat's meat rather than meat of any kind. The trade outgrew the animal and the word stayed put, so that the bouchier of a market street was simply the man who killed and sold what the town ate. As surnames hardened into inherited property in the later Middle Ages, the byname said what a man did, in the open street where anyone could watch him do it.

The work it names is older than the word. Butchery's duties may reach back to the domestication of livestock itself, and by the medieval period the butcher sat inside a dense network of urban trades, overlapping with food provision, textiles and clothing, that made a town's economy work. A settlement of any size needed someone at the block, and the byname attached itself to whoever stood there.

The sequence has barely changed. Stunning, to render the animal incapacitated; exsanguination, severing the arteries so the blood can be drawn off; skinning, or in the case of pork scalding and dehairing; evisceration; and splitting, dividing the carcass in half lengthwise. Then came primary butchery: choosing the carcasses, sides or quarters that would yield primal cuts with the least waste, separating those cuts, trimming them, storing them. Secondary butchery followed, the boning and trimming that turned a primal cut into something a customer would buy.

For most of the trade's life both halves of that happened under one roof, done by one pair of hands. Only vacuum packing and cheap transport pulled them apart. And the cuts themselves are not universal: British, American and French primal cuts each divide the same animal differently. Fatback is the clearest case, an important primal cut of pork in Europe and in North America little more than trimmings for sausage or lard. Where refrigeration was scarce, the butcher had to be able to do all of it, because meat that was not sold was meat that was lost.

In medieval England butchering was heavily regulated and heavily structured, and appointed officials oversaw the sale and preparation of the meat specifically. The regulations set the standards a carcass had to meet before it could be sold to the public, and they represent early efforts to maintain quality standards in public markets. Butchering guilds were formed in England as far back as 1272, and from the Middle Ages into the Renaissance the trade tied itself tightly to the guild systems of the towns.

Guilds mattered most where the market was biggest, in cities and large towns, and they governed regulation, market organisation and economic activity together. Authorities watched them closely, and one thing above all: underweighting. Short weight meant the public paid an unfair price, so it was policed hard. The result was a standing tension between the men at the block and the men with the regulations, and it sharpened whenever market conditions moved against the trade.

Regulation did not clear the air. Butchers stayed associated with contaminated air and putrid meat, and one complaint recurs in the record more than any other: the disposal of butchering waste into public spaces. Contemporaries linked those heaps directly to disease and to the stench of a town, and authorities treated the offence seriously and punished it accordingly, which did restrict the practice without ending it.

When improper disposal did happen it was sometimes tied to widespread animal disease, at exactly the moments when nobody could vouch for the quality of the meat anyway. Behind all of it lies a fact easy to forget now: this was a trade done in public, in the street, in front of the people who would eat the result. That is what the nineteenth century took away.

Industrialisation moved slaughter into designated industrial facilities away from public space. Before that shift, butchering was an ordinary sight; afterwards it was not, and the distance opened a rift between the trade and the people it fed. Visiting a butcher's shop, and watching the work in it, stopped being a normal part of the week. The new plants were regarded as more sanitary because they were more regulated, and the modern arrangement between the meat industry, the butcher and the public dates from that moment.

The trade did not vanish; it credentialed itself. Since the twentieth century many countries and local jurisdictions have offered trade certification for butchers, usually reached in English-speaking countries through an apprenticeship, and in Canada a trade-qualified butcher can go on to master butcher, the Fleishmaster. Butcher shops are still common through Europe and South America, in a country such as Argentina where meat consumption ran as high as 97 kilograms a head in 2002. In the United States and Canada they have thinned out, squeezed by supermarkets, warehouse clubs and case-ready meat cut and packed before it ever reaches the store.

The name's real weight outside France was made by one man. Pierre Boucher was a soldier, an author and a seigneur, and the founding governor of Trois-Rivières in New France. A surname that began at a market block in a French town ended up attached to a governor, a landholding and a book, which is a long way from the he-goat it started with.

What followed him mattered as much as what he did. His progeny were vast, and they made Boucher a name of Quebec rather than a name merely carried there. French law compounded the effect: until 2005 children were required to take their father's surname, the mother's only where the father was unknown, so a large family multiplied a single name down the generations without dilution. Since 2005 parents may pass on either name, or both hyphenated, and where they cannot agree the two are hyphenated in alphabetical order.

France carries an extraordinary number of family names for its population. Estimates put the total at any point since 1990 at between 800,000 and 1,200,000, and the national statistics institute counted more than 1,300,000 surnames registered in the country between 1891 and 1990, of which around 200,000 have since disappeared. The reason is spelling. Most French surnames had many orthographic and dialectal variants, more than forty in some cases, and when the family vital records booklets were issued around 1880 those variants were written down as entirely separate names.

In that landscape most names are fragile. By various estimates between 50 and 80 percent of French citizens carry a rare surname, one with fewer than fifty living bearers at the time of a census. Against that, French law made any name hard to shed. Changing a surname outright, as opposed to using another name in daily life, requires a decree in the Conseil d'État issued by the Prime Minister after the Council of State approves it, and a legitimate interest to justify it. A name like Boucher was far easier to keep than to shed.