hewer

plural hewers

1. One who hews.

   The Larrakiahs at Port Darwin seem to have identified themselves with the white population, and became hewers of wood and drawers of water for the settlement.

   1887, Harriet W. Daly, Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory of South Australia, page 225

   4 more examples

   And behold, I will giue to thy seruants the hewers that cut timber, twentie thousand measures of beaten wheat, and twentie thousand measures of barley, and twentie thousand baths of wine, and twentie thousand baths of oyle.

   1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, 2 Chronicles 2:10

   By certain arrangements in the former method the miner not only gets the coal but makes all proppings and repairs, so that the face moves much more slowly than with the other method where the hewers devote all their time to getting the coal […]

   1904, Kellogg Durland, Among the Fife Miners, page 62

   But what of that vast number of the human kind who were always in the background? What of the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the swineherds, the shepherds, the carpenters, the hedgers and cobblers?

   1922, Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, The Old English Herbals, London: Longmans, Green and Co., page 13

   All three groups were paid less per shift than coal miners. In 1905, for instance, hewers in coal mines received an average 3.79 marks per shift; in zinc and lead, 3.10 marks; in iron, 2.36 marks.

   1975, Lawrence Schofer, The Formation of a Modern Labor Force, Upper Silesia, 1865-1914

1. A surname.