Last name

Potter

English

The surname Potter is of English origin. It was an occupational name for a maker of drinking and storage vessels, derived from the Middle English 'pot', Old English 'pott', from the Late Latin 'pottus'; an altered form of 'potus', drink, draught ( reinforced by the Old French 'pot' from the same source ). In the Middle Ages the term covered workers in metal as well as earthenware and clay. The potter was sometimes also a bell-founder. The name thus comes to signify 'pot maker or seller'. To make round objects either of wood or clay a lathe or potter's wheel was necessary, and they have been in existence in one form or another from remote antiquity. "The potter whom Robin Hood failed to despoil said that the 'pottys' which he was carting to Nottingham for sale there were worth 'two nobellys" - Robin Hood and the Potter. The name dates back to eleventh century were a Seuard le potter is recorded in historical archives; by the thirteenth century it was a common entry. The name was brought to America by English immigrants. One of the first fore fathers to bring this name to America is that of a Thomas Potter, a carpenter formerly of Yorkshire, who emigrated to America aboard the Brilliant; he settled in Virginia. This name is the three-hundredth and forty-first most common surname in America.

Heraldrys Institute of Rome strongly believes in the intellectual work of human beings and for this reason, given the type of its activity uses only craftsman work.

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