ABSTRACT
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘broker’ derives from the Old Northern French brokeor, literally a ‘tapster’ or a person who serves or sells wine from the tap. 1 During the Middle Ages, it became synonymous with second-hand dealers, peddlers, or middlemen who facilitated commercial transactions, as well as pawnbrokers and furniture dealers. William Langland's Piers Plowman includes several uses of ‘broker’. The figure of Envy, for example, presents itself as ‘a broker of backbiting and blaming men's wares / Among merchants all the time especially in London’. 2 The definition of the broker as a facilitator of commercial exchange also associated it with the functions of a messenger or emissary. William Caxton mentions ‘an alien that was called Arnold of Spain that was a brocour [sic] of London’, sent as a secret emissary to France. 3 Peter Levens, in his English-Latin dictionary Manipulus Vocabulorum (1570), associated ‘broker’ with the Latin word proxeneta, or ‘intermediary’. 4
