Etymology of "bodge"

[Michael Quinion]

Regarding 'bodge' and 'bodger', those good British words, you may
be interested to see a note about another sense of the word, which
went out in World Wide Words this weekend:

3. Weird Words: Bodger
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An itinerant chair-leg turner.
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This term was once common around the furniture-making town of High
Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, between London and Oxford (so much so
that the local football team, Wycombe Wanderers, is nicknamed 'The
Bodgers'). 'Bodgers' were highly skilled itinerant wood-turners,
who worked in the beech woods on the chalk hills of the Chilterns.
They cut timber and converted it into chair legs by turning it on a
pole lathe, an ancient and very simple tool that uses the spring of
a bent sapling to help run it. Their equipment was so easy to move
and set up that it was easier to go to the timber and work it there
than to transport it to a workshop. The completed chair legs were
sold to furniture factories to be married with other chair parts
made in the workshop.

The word only appears at the end of the nineteenth century. There
may be a link - through the idea of a itinerant person - with a
much older sense of the word, for a travelling merchant or chapman.
The _Oxford English Dictionary_ finds examples of this meaning from
the eighteenth century, but there's a much earlier one from
_Holinshed's Chronicles_ of 1577 (a major source for Shakespeare)
in which William Harrison rails against bodgers who bought up
supplies of wheat to sell abroad, leaving nothing for local people
to make their bread with.

But that leaves us with another sense, the more common one (at
least in Britain and Australia) of an incompetent mender of things,
which Americans may prefer to see spelled 'botcher'. In both
spellings this comes from the Middle English 'bocchen', which had a
sense of repairing or patching. It could be significant that in
medieval times it was a neutral term that had no associations with
doing a job badly. It's possible that this old sense of the word
survived in dialect or local usage, and evolved into the furniture
'bodger', while its meaning in the standard language changed.