Scavenger

Before machines, towns relied on street cleaners to sweep up litter and filth, including horse droppings, which were valuable as fertilizer. The old English word for such a worker was scavenger, which first meant an inspector or collector of a toll called scavage.

In 1800s British and Irish cotton mills, a scavenger was a child employed to pick up loose cotton from the floor. Do not read the word in old records as someone searching through rubbish to survive, its usual modern sense.