The Earliest Arithmetics in English

ȝ, ſ (yogh, long s) ɳ, łł (n with curl, crossed l: see below) φ (Greek phi, sometimes used in printed text for 0)
If any of these characters do not display properly, or if the apostrophes and quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, you may have an incompatible browser or unavailable fonts. First, make sure that the browser’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change your browser’s default font.
In The Crafte of Nombrynge , final n was sometimes written with an extra curl as
. It has been rendered as ɳ for visual effect; the character is not intended to convey phonetic information. In the same selection, the numeral “0” was sometimes printed as Greek φ (phi); this has been retained for the e-text. Double l with a line
is shown as łł . The first few occurrences of d (for “pence”) were printed with a curl as
. The letter is shown with the same d’ used in the remainder of the text.
The diagrams in “Accomptynge by Counters” may not line up perfectly in all browsers, but the contents should still be intelligible.

The number of English arithmetics before the sixteenth century is very small. This is hardly to be wondered at, as no one requiring to use even the simplest operations of the art up to the middle of the fifteenth century was likely to be ignorant of Latin, in which language there were several treatises in a considerable number of manuscripts, as shown by the quantity of them still in existence. Until modern commerce was fairly well established, few persons required more arithmetic than addition and subtraction, and even in the thirteenth century, scientific treatises addressed to advanced students contemplated the likelihood of their not being able to do simple division. On the other hand, the study of astronomy necessitated, from its earliest days as a science, considerable skill and accuracy in computation, not only in the calculation of astronomical tables but in their use, a knowledge of which latter was fairly common from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.