BAKER, a person whose occupation or business it is to bake bread. There is considerable doubt as to the time when baking first became a particular profession, and bakers were introduced. It is, however, generally agreed that they had their rise in the East, and passed from Greece to Italy about the year B.C. 173. Till that time every housewife was her own baker; for the word pistor, which we find in Roman authors before this period, signified, as Varro justly observes, a person who ground or pounded the grain in a mill or mortar to prepare it for baking. According to Athenæus, the Cappadocians were the most approved bakers; after them the Lydians; and then the Phœnicians. To the foreign bakers brought into Rome were added a number of freedmen, who were incorporated into a body, or, as they termed it, a college; from which neither they nor their children were ever allowed to withdraw. They held their effects in common, and could not dispose of any part of them. Every bakehouse had a patronus intrusted with the superintendence of it; and these patroni again elected one of their number every year, who had superintendence over all the rest, and the care of the college. Out of the body of the bakers one was every now and then admitted among the senators; and, to preserve honour and honesty in the college, they were expressly prohibited all alliance with comedians and gladiators. Every one had his own shop or bakehouse, and they were distributed into fourteen regions or wards of the city. They were excused from guardianships and other offices which might divert them from their employment. By British statutes bakers are declared not to be handicraftsmen. No man for using the mysteries or sciences of baking, brewing, surgery, or writing, shall be interpreted a handicraftsman. The bakers were a brotherhood in England before the year 1155, in the reign of King Henry II., although the white bakers were not incorporated till 1407, and the brown bakers not till 1621. The French had anciently a great baker, grand panetier de France, who had the superintendence of all the bakers of Paris.