The Foundations--Vocabularies, Glossaries, and _Nominalia_--Their
manifold utility--Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric (tenth
century)--Anglo-Gallic treatise of Alexander Neckam on utensils
(twelfth century)--Works of Johannes de Garlandia--His Dictionary
(thirteenth century) and its pleasant treatment--The Pictorial
Vocabulary--Anglo-Gallic Dictionary of Walter de Biblesworth (late
thirteenth century).
I. The origin and history of a class of documents which may be viewed as
the basis and starting-point of our educational literature have first to
be considered. I refer to the vocabularies, glossaries, and _nominalia_,
which afford examples of the method of instruction pursued in this country
from the Middle Ages to the invention of printing.
Such of these manuals as we fortunately still possess represent the
surviving residue of a much larger number; and from the perishable
material on which they were written and their constant employment in
tuition, it becomes a source of agreeable surprise that so many specimens
remain to throw light on the mode in which elementary learning was
acquired in England in the infancy of a taste for letters and knowledge.
In the small volumes on _Cookery and Gardening_ by the present writer, he
has, as a matter of course, called into requisition these early
philological relics to illustrate both those subjects; and this fact
testifies to the multiplicity of purposes for which such relics can be
rendered serviceable. There is hardly, indeed, any aspect or line of
mediæval life which these productions do not assist very powerfully in
making more luminous and familiar. But their original design and
destination were obviously educational. They were rude and imperfect
vehicles, contrived by men of narrow culture and limited experience for
the instruction of the young; and they were advisedly thrown, as far as
possible, into an interlocutory form--the form most apt to impress
circumstances and names on the memories of pupils. Some of these, which I
shall presently describe a little more at large, were constructed on the
interlinear principle, not, as among ourselves, for the edification of the
learner, but, as Mr. Wright points out, for the preceptor's guidance in
days when the latter was often a person of very mediocre attainments, and
was incapable of dispensing with occasional assistance to his
recollection. In other words, the majority of schoolmasters and ushers
were merely the mechanical medium for conveying to the boys the lessons
which they found set down in treatises prepared by persons of superior
skill and erudition.
These primitive schoolbooks are, as a rule, easily susceptible of
classification under the heads of Vocabularies, Dictionaries, Colloquies,
and Narrative or descriptive texts, of which the two latter divisions are
usually interlinear, either in part or throughout. Some of these terms,
again, were formerly understood in acceptations different from our own;
for a Vocabulary was what we should rather call a Dictionary, and a
Dictionary was what we should rather call a Phrase-Book.
II. The most ancient item in the collection before me belongs to that
century of which King Alfred just lived to witness the opening, the
Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric, in Anglo-Saxon and Latin, and known only
from an enlarged copy or transcript made by the writer's disciple and
namesake. The original is supposed to have been compiled while Alfric was
a monk at Winchester. He succeeded to the archbishopric in 995, and his
pupil and editor died about the middle of the following century. The
professed object of the undertaking was the acquisition of the Latin
language by the Anglo-Saxon youth in the intervals of leisure from other
pursuits or duties; and the process of instruction is conducted on the
plan of a dialogue in Latin between a master and boys, with an interlinear
Saxon gloss. It is significant of the harsh discipline which prevailed in
those days that one of the foremost points of inquiry is in relation to
flogging. The teacher asks if the boys choose to be flogged at their
lessons, and the answer is that they would rather be flogged and taught
than be ignorant, but that they rely on his clemency and unwillingness to
punish them, unless he is obliged. The entire work deals with the matters
which were most familiar to the student and came nearest home to their
everyday life and sympathies; and this feature constitutes for us its
special value and beauty. The Latin itself is indifferent enough, and
bespeaks the acquisition of the tongue by Alfric and his follower from the
earlier monkish authors, rather than from classical models. Many curious
points might be elicited from the present composition and others of an
allied character printed with it,--I mean such passages as those where the
shepherd speaks of the danger from wolves, and the herdsman of the
depredations of cattle-lifters. There was probably no occupation of the
period which is not brought before us, and its particular specialities
bilingually set out.
The VOCABULARY, of approximately the same date, is in reality a Latin and
Anglo-Saxon word-book. Like the _Colloquy_, it received subsequent
additions--perhaps by the same hand; but they are in the form of a
separate Appendix. Each section has its independent alphabet, and the
articles which fall under it do not observe any apparent order. The same
is to be said of all the works of this class belonging to the mediæval
era.
The Anglo-Gallic treatise of Alexander Neckam _De Utensilibus_ (twelfth
century) is differently constructed from the Alfric Vocabulary, not as
regards the text itself, which is also in Latin, but in having an
interlinear gloss in Old French, and in following a descriptive form. It
takes the various parts of a dwelling _seriatim_, the several occupations
and callings of men, the mode of laying out a garden, and of building a
castle.
Perhaps the book by Neckam and the Dictionary of Johannes de Garlandia
constitute together the most comprehensive and remarkable body of
information in our literature respecting the life and habits of the
Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Normans.
Johannes de Garlandia, whose work is common in MS. and who is also known
as the author of other productions of a philological cast, commences his
Dictionary by defining what a dictionary is. "Dictionarius," says he,
"dicitur libellus iste a dictionibus magis necessariis, quas tenetur
quilibet scolaris, non tantum in scrinio de linguis facto, sed in cordis
armariolo firmiter retinere, ut ad faciliorem oracionis constructionem
perveniat. Primo igitur sciat vulgaria nominare. Placet igitur a membris
humani corporis incoare...."
This phrase or word book, which was probably composed about 1220, enters
into the most minute particulars under all the heads which it comprises,
and is unquestionably of the highest value and interest as taking us back
so far into the life of the past, and making us in a manner the
contemporary of an Englishman who flourished six or seven centuries ago,
and domiciled himself in France, chiefly at Paris, where he gives us an
account of his house and garden, with all their appointments and
incidence.
There is a very curious passage in one of the glosses, where Johannes
explains the derivation of _Pes_, which he traces from the Greek _pos_
[_sic_], adding that thence the dwellers of the other world or hemisphere,
_if it be true that there are any_, are termed Antipodes. As this was
written nearly 300 years before Columbus, it might have supplied a note
and a point to Mr. Beamish in his volume on the _Discovery of America by
the Northmen in the Tenth Century_, 1841.
The old dictionary-maker brings us so near to him by his pleasant
colloquial method and familiar way of putting everything, and expects us
to become acquainted into the bargain with his friends and neighbours, who
resided at Paris under Philip Augustus, as if one might go there and find
some of them still living. In other words, there was belonging to this man
a natural simplicity of style and a communicativeness which together have
rendered his treatise a work of art and a cyclopædia of information. He
even leaves his house to go into the market with you and shew what his
neighbour William has on sale there! How unspeakably more luminous and
understandable the gone ages might have been if we had had more such!
III. Passing from him, his pleasant book, and its pleasant associations
with cordial regret, I just notice the other and latter-day word-books,
which are really, in the main, of the same type as those of which a
description has gone before. One only differs markedly from the rest in
possessing graphic embellishments of a rude and quaint character; among
the rest the portrait of a woe-begone gallant, and by his side an
arrow-pierced heart. Some of the representations are, of course, happier
than others; assuredly those of animals are pre-Landseerian. They are many
degrees below the stamp of such artistic essays as one finds in the books
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, _as a rule_, both in England
and abroad. Criticism lays down its arms.
But I must dwell rather longer on one of the tracts in this series--the
Anglo-Gallic Dictionary or _Phraseologia_ of Walter de Biblesworth. It is
the most ancient monument of its particular kind of which I am aware, and
is ascribed to the close of the thirteenth century, in other words, to the
period embraced by the later years of the reign of Edward I. The
orthography, which naturally strikes a modern French student as strange
and uncouth, may be accepted as a key to the ancient pronunciation of the
language, at all events in England, if not even among the French
themselves; but the language, apart from the spelling, is remarkable for
its plentiful use of expressions which have fallen into desuetude, and
some of which, as _io_ for _je_, bespeak a Pyrenæan origin.
This production is intituled "Le treytyz ke moun sire Gauter de
Bibelesworthe fist à ma dame Dyonisie de Mounchensy, pur aprise de
langwage, ço est à saver, du primer temps ke homme nestra, ouweke trestut
le langwage pur saver nurture en sa juvente, &c." The text is in short
rhyming couplets, and takes the child from its birth through all the
duties, occupations, and incidents of life. To select a passage which will
give a fair idea of the whole is not altogether easy; but here is an
extract which is capable of puzzling an average French scholar of our
day:--
"Homme et femme unt la peel,
De morte beste quyr jo apel.
Le clerk soune le dreyne apel,
Le prestre fat a Roume apel.
Ore avet ço ke pent à cors,
Dedens ausy et deors.
Vestet vos dras, me chers enfauns,
Chaucez vos bras, soulers, e gauns;
Mettet le chaperoun, coverz le chef,
Tachet vos botouns, e pus derechef
De une coreye vus ceynet."
This didactic treatise is additionally interesting to the English student
from its relationship, in the way of likely literary ancestry, to the
subsequent compilations of a cognate sort by Lydgate and others. The
diction is obscure enough, and has the air of having been the work of a
man of imperfect culture, from the presence of such forms as _dreyne_ for
_derreniere_ or _derniere_ and the abundance of false syntax, which ought
not to have been so conspicuous, even at this remote date, in a
composition professedly educational. Yet, after all deductions, the work
is of singular curiosity and fascination, not only for its own sake, but
as the best philological standard which we seem to have to put side by
side with its successors in the same important direction.