The MS. of the Corpus Glossary dates to the early part of the eighth century; the Epinal and Erfurt—although the MS. copies that have come down to
us are not older, or not so old—must from their nature go back as glossaries to a still earlier date, and the Leiden to an earlier still; so that we carry back these beginnings of lexicography in England to a time somewhere between 600 and 700 A.D., and probably to an age not long posterior to the introduction of Christianity in the south of England at the end of the sixth century. Many more vocabularies were compiled between these early dates and the eleventh century; and it is noteworthy that those ancient glossaries and vocabularies not only became fuller and more orderly as time advanced, but they also became more English. For, as I have already mentioned, the primary purpose of the glosses was to explain difficult Latin words; this was done at first, whenever possible, by easier Latin words; apparently, only when none such were known, was the explanation given in the vernacular, in Old English. In the Epinal Glossary the English words are thus relatively few. In the first page they number thirty out of 117, and in some pages they do not amount to half that number. In the Corpus Glossary they have become proportionally more numerous; and in the glossaries that follow, the Latin explanations are more and more eliminated and replaced by English ones, until the vocabularies of the tenth and eleventh centuries, whether arranged alphabetically or under classified headings, are truly Latin-English: every Latin word given is explained by an English one; and we see clearly that a new aim had gradually evolved itself; the object was no longer to explain difficult Latin
words, but to give the English equivalents of as many words as possible, and thus practically to provide a Latin Dictionary for the use of Englishmen[3].
Learning and literature, science and art, had attained to fair proportions in England, and in the Old English tongue, when their progress was arrested by the Norman Conquest. The Norman Conquest brought to England law and organization, and welded the country into a political unity; but it overthrew Old English learning and literary culture. In literary culture the Normans were about as far behind the people whom they conquered as the Romans were when they made themselves masters of Greece; and it was not till some two generations after the Conquest, that learning and literature regained in England somewhat of the position which they had occupied two centuries earlier. And this new literary culture was naturally confined to the French dialect of the conquerors, which had become the language of court and castle, of church and law, of chivalry and the chase; while the rich and cultured tongue of Alfred and Ælfric was left for generations without literary employment, during which time it lost nearly all its poetical, philosophical, scientific, and artistic vocabulary, retaining only the words of common
life and everyday use[4]. And for more than 300 years after the Conquest English lexicography stood still. Between 1066 and 1400, Wright-Wülcker shows only two meagre vocabularies, occupying some twenty-four columns of his volume. One of these, of the twelfth century, is only an echo of the earlier literary age, a copy of a pre-Conquest glossary, which some scribe who could still read the classical tongue of the old West Saxon Court, transliterated into the corrupted forms of his own generation. The other is a short vocabulary of the Latin and vernacular names of plants, a species of class-vocabulary of which there exist several of rather early date.
But when we reach the end of the fourteenth century, English is once more in the ascendant. Robert of Gloucester, Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Dan Michel of Canterbury, and Richard Rolle of Hampole, William Langland and John Wyclif, John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, and many other authors of less known or entirely unknown name, have written in the tongue of the people; English has been sanctioned for use in the courts of law; and, as John of Trevisa tells us, has, since the ‘furste moreyn’ or Great Pestilence of 1349 (which Mrs. Markham has taught nineteenth-
century historians to call the ‘Black Death’), been introduced into the grammar schools in the translation of Latin exercises, which boys formerly rendered into French. And under these new conditions lexicographical activity at once bursts forth with vigour. Six important vocabularies of the fifteenth century are printed by Wright-Wülcker, most of them arranged, like the Old English one of Ælfric, under subject-headings; but one large one, extending to 2,500 words, entirely alphabetical. About the middle of the century, also, was compiled the famous Medulla Grammatices[5], designated, with some propriety, ‘the first Latin-English Dictionary,’ the popularity of which is shown by the many manuscript copies that still survive; while it formed the basis of the Ortus (i.e. Hortus) Vocabulorum or first printed Latin-English Dictionary, which issued from the press of Wynkyn de Worde in 1500, and in many subsequent editions down to 1533, as well as in an edition by Pynson in 1509.
But all the glossaries and vocabularies as yet mentioned were Latin-English; their primary object was not English, but the elucidation of Latin. A momentous advance was made about 1440, when Brother Galfridus Grammaticus—Geoffrey the Grammarian—a Dominican friar of Lynn Episcopi in Norfolk, produced the English-Latin vocabulary, to which he gave the name of Promptuarium or Promptorium Parvulorum, the Children's Store-room or Repository.
The Promptorium, the name of which has now
become a household word to students of the history of English, is a vocabulary containing some 10,000 words—substantives, adjectives, and verbs—with their Latin equivalents, which, as edited by Mr. Albert Way for the Camden Society in 1865, makes a goodly volume. Many manuscript copies of it were made and circulated, of which six or seven are known to be still in existence, and after the introduction of printing it passed through many editions in the presses of Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, and Julian Notary.