Neuware - INTRODUCED BY JAN MORRIS' gloriously ornate account of that epic journey is a classic' ROBERT MACFARLANE'The feeling of being lost in time and geography with months and years hazily sparkling ahead is a prospect of inconjecturable magic.' In 1933, aged eighteen, Patrick Leigh Fermor set out on his 'great trudge', a year-long journey by foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. This was during the reign King Edward 1st, known as 'The Hammer of the Scots', 1272 - 1307.Taschenbuch.

The first known recording of the hereditary surname may be that of Richard Fermor, in the Fees Rolls of the county of Devon, in 1293. This was not a hereditary surname and nor was that of William le Farmere of Cambridge in 1279. Amongst the earliest of all recordings is that of William Le Fermer, in the rolls known as the 'Feet of Fines' for the county of Essex in the year 1238. The 'farmers' in time became rich in their own right, and then reversed the process by purchasing land themselves on which in the modern sense, they then 'farmed'.

These first farmers would act as brokers for the crown or the major landowners, selecting applicants to work the tenanted lands on the basis usually of who paid most. Based upon the word 'fermier', the name describes an early financier or collector of tithes and taxes, one who specialised in 'farming ' land leases. Most people are surprised to know that originally the surname had nothing to with actually tilling the soil. This English medieval job descriptive surname, recorded in the spellings of Farmer, Farmar, Fermer and Fermor, is of Olde French pre 10th century origins.

Fermor a time of gifts