“Among other stores of a ship, there must be a needle mounted on a dart (habeat etiam acum jaculo superpositam) which will oscillate and turn until the point looks to the north, and the sailors will thus know how to direct their course when the pole star is concealed through the troubled state of the atmosphere.”[5]
Alexander Neckam was born at St. Albans in 1157, joined the Augustinian Order and taught in the University of Paris from 1180 to 1187, after which he returned to England to take charge of a College of his Order at Dunstable. He was elected Abbot of Cirencester in 1213 and died at Kemsey, near Worcester, in 1217.
The satirical poem of Guyot de Provins, written about 1208, contains the following passage:
The mariners employ an art which cannot deceive,
By the property of the lodestone,
An ugly stone and brown,
To which iron joints itself willingly
They have; they attend to where it points
After they have applied a needle to it;
And they lay the latter on a straw