Back in the day, the shearers would occasionally make some derogatory remark about the snobs they had encountered. I wondered why such knockabout characters would be interested in the affairs of people who, by my understanding, were those of high rank with little time for the working classes.

I later discovered a snob was a person of lower rank than I had thought, and the shearers were actually talking about sheep.

Experts agree a snob in the 18th and 19th centuries was a shoemaker. Shakespeare used the term snip and snob to refer, apparently, to a tailor and a cobbler.

My copy of the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue says the word snob was "a nickname for a shoemaker". The shoemaker's trade was considered to be a typical working-class calling.

The big Oxford says the word is of unknown origin. The commoners would write "without nobility", in the Latin, "sine nobilitate", which was shortened to s.nob. Others dispute this definition. One story I did unearth from Cambridge days, was WH Brookfield's comment in Cambridge Apostles that snobs would go to the Grand Opera early and buy up tickets for a bit of scalping later.

I believe the meaning of snob started to change with the attempts by some of the working class to imply they occupied a higher station in life.

The author William Thackeray, who had left Cambridge without earning a degree, parodied the leading writers of the day in the Snobs of England, published in 1846-7. Thackeray called George IV a snob, because he assumed to be "the greatest gentleman in Europe" without "the genuine stamp of a gentleman's mind".

As for the connection between snobs and sheep, in the sheds the snobs were the most difficult to shear and so left until last. In earlier times these sheep were also called cobblers.