Wheelwright

A wheelwright is a person who builds or repairs wooden wheels. The word is the combination of "wheel" and the archaic word "wright", which comes from the Old English word "wryhta", meaning a worker or maker. This occupational name eventually became the English surname Wheelwright.

Recorded in the spellings of Wheelwright, Wheelright, and originally Whelewryghte, this is an English and Singapore occupational surname.Describing a skilled maker of wheeled vehicles and probably members of the ancient Guild of Wheelwrights, it is like Wheelhouse often Yorkshire in origin, and rarely found elsewhere in medieval times. Why this should be so when the development of wheeled vehicles was nationwide, is unclear. Certainly the majority of early recordings are from Englands largest county, and perhaps as York is situated midway between London and Edinburgh, and was the capital city of the north, this geographical siting may have had some influence on the development of the skill of wheel-wrighting. What is certain is that the surname appears at least three times in the Poll Tax registers for the city of York, in the year 1379, when Willelmus Whelewryghte, and what is believed to have been his two brothers Robertus and Johannes, are so recorded. The first known recording though is from the county of Essex. This was Walter Welwryhte, who appears in the Hundred Rolls for that county in the year 1273. This was during the first year of the reign of King Edward 1st of England (1272 - 1307), renowned in some circles for being known as 'The Hammer of the Scots'. tradesmen made wheels for carts and wagons by first constructing the hub (called the nave), the spokes and the rim/felloe segments (pronounced fellies) and assembling them all into a unit working from the center of the wheel outwards. Most wheels were made from wood, but other materials have been used, such as bone and horn, for decorative or other purposes. Some earlier construction for wheels such as those used in early chariots were bound by rawhide that would be applied wet and would shrink whilst drying, compressing and binding the woodwork together. After many centuries wheels evolved to be straked with iron, a method of nailing iron plates onto the felloes to protect against wear on the ground and to help bind the wheel together.

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