Before the middle of the eighteenth century, restaurants did not exist, and inns, which provided lodgings as well as food, were not considered places that respectable people patronized. Accordingly, if you were hungry and wealthy but too tired to order your servants to prepare a meal, you ordered your servants to hire someone to prepare a meal. These culinary mercenaries, who would bring a banquet to the comfort of your own home, were not called caterers, but caters. They had derived this name at the beginning of the fifteenth century from the French word acatour, meaning a buyer of provisions, which in turn had been formed from the French verb acheter, meaning to purchase. Even further back, acheter developed from the Vulgar Latin accaptare, meaning to seize, which arose from the Latin capere, the source also of capture and catch. By the seventeenth century, the English word cater, which until then had only been used as a noun to refer to the person who provides food, started to be used as a verb to refer to the action of providing food. As a result, the need arose to stick another er onto the end of cater in order to create a job name that sounded more like a noun and less like a verb: caterer, one who caters.