Before they were known as butchers, people who sold cuts of meat were called flesh-mongers, a term first recorded in the eleventh century. The monger part of this word, still current in terms such as fish-monger or war-monger, derives from the Latin mango, which is what the ancient Romans called someone who traded goods for a living (this mango is not related to the fruit of the same name). Butchers ceased to call themselves flesh-mongers in the late sixteenth century when the term came to mean pimp, a person who deals in human flesh. For a briefer time, from the early fourteenth to the mid fifteenth century, butchers were also sometimes called flesh-hewers, a term so graphic that it’s hardly surprising it quickly became obsolete.