subs. (sporting).—1. A bag-fox; a fox caught and preserved alive to be hunted another day, when it is brought in a bag and turned out before the hounds.
1875. ‘STONEHENGE,’ Manual of British Rural Sports, I. 11. iv. 5. If, therefore, wild cubs cannot be found, a BAGMAN or two must be obtained, and turned down before the hounds, and they will afterwards work with redoubled zest.
2. (trading).—A commercial traveller; an AMBASSADOR OF COMMERCE (q.v.): formerly the usual epithet, but now in depreciation.
1765. GOLDSMITH, Essays, I. The BAGMAN was telling a better story.
1808. WOLCOT (‘Peter Pindar’), One More Peep at the Royal Academy [Works (1812), v. 360]. The BAG-MEN, as they travel by.
1815. PEACOCK, Headlong Hall, 2. In later days when commercial bagsmen began to scour the country.
1840. THACKERAY, The Paris Sketch Book, 20. After a forty hours’ coach-journey, a BAGMAN appears as gay and spruce as when he started.
1865. Daily Telegraph, 13 Dec., 5. 4. A traveller—I mean a BAGSMAN, not a tourist—arriving with his samples at a provincial town.
1867. W. L. COLLINS, The Public Schools, 363. Here a certain set of boys … used to sit (c. 1793) and ‘chaff’ the passing ‘BAGSMEN’—for the commercial travellers to Rugby then rode with actual saddle-bags.
