Later in the same century, the year 1483 saw the compilation of a similar, but quite independent work, which its author named the Catholicon Anglicum, that is, the English Catholicon or Universal treatise, after the name of the celebrated Latin dictionary of the Middle Ages, the Catholicon or Summa of Johannes de Balbis, or John of Genoa, made in 1286. The English Catholicon was in itself a work almost equally valuable with the Promptorium; but it appears never to have attained to the currency of the Promptorium, which appeared as a printed book in 1499, while the Catholicon remained in two MSS. till printed for the Early English Text Society in 1881.
The Renascence of Ancient Learning had now reached England, and during the sixteenth century there were compiled and published many important Latin-English and English-Latin vocabularies and dictionaries. Among these special mention must be made of the Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot, Knight, the first work, so far as I know, which took to itself in English what was destined to be the famous name
of DICTIONARY, in mediaeval Latin, Dictionarius liber, or Dictionarium, literally a repertory of dictiones, a word originally meaning ‘sayings,’ but already by the later Latin grammarians used in the sense of verba or vocabula ‘words.’ The early vocabularies and dictionaries had many names, often quaint and striking; thus one of c1420 is entitled the Nominale, or Name-book; mention has already been made of the Medulla Grammatices, or Marrow of Grammar, the Ortus Vocabulorum, or Garden of Words, the Promptorium Parvulorum, and the Catholicon Anglicum; later we find the Manipulus Vocabulorum, or Handful of Vocables, the Alvearie or Beehive, the Abecedarium, the Bibliotheca, or Library, the Thesaurus, or Treasury of Words—what Old English times would have called the Word-hord, the World of Words, the Table Alphabetical, the English Expositor, the Ductor in Linguas, or Guide to the Tongues, the Glossographia, the New World of Words, the Etymologicum, the Gazophylacium; and it would have been impossible to predict in the year 1538, when Sir Thomas Elyot published his ‘Dictionary,’ that this name would supplant all the others, and even take the place of the older and better-descended word Vocabulary; much less that Dictionary should become so much a name to conjure with, as to be applied to works which are not word-books at all, but reference-books on all manner of subjects, as Chronology, Geography, Music, Commerce, Manufactures, Chemistry, or National Biography, arranged in Alphabetical or ‘Dictionary order.’ The very phrase, ‘Dictionary order,’ would in the
first half of the sixteenth century have been unmeaning, for all dictionaries were not yet alphabetical. There is indeed no other connexion between a dictionary and alphabetical order, than that of a balance of convenience. Experience has shown that though an alphabetical order makes the matter of a dictionary very disjointed, scattering the terminology of a particular art, science, or subject, all over the book, and even when related words come together, often putting the unimportant derivative in front of the important primitive word, it is yet that by which a word or heading can be found, with least trouble and exercise of thought. But this experience has been only gradually acquired; even now the native dictionaries of some Oriental languages are often not in alphabetical order; in such a language as Chinese, indeed, there is no alphabetical order in which to place the words, and they follow each other in the dictionary in a purely arbitrary and conventional fashion. In English, as we have seen, many of the vocabularies from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, were arranged under class-headings according to subject; and, although Sir Thomas Elyot's Dictionary was actually in alphabetical order, that of J. Withals, published in 1554, under the title ‘A short dictionarie for young beginners,’ and with the colophon ‘Thus endeth this Dictionary very useful for Children, compiled by J. Withals,’ reverts to the older arrangement of subject-classes, as Names of things in the Æther or skie, the xii Signes, the vii Planets, Tymes, Seasons, Other times in the yere, the daies of the weeke, the Ayre, the viii windes, the
iiii partes of the worlde, Byrdes, Bees, Flies, and other, the Water, the Sea, Fishes, a Shippe with other Water vessels, the earth, Mettales, Serpents, woorms and creepinge beastes, Foure-footed beastes, &c.[6]
It is unnecessary in this lecture to recount even the names of the Latin-English and English-Latin dictionaries of the sixteenth century. It need only be mentioned that there were six successive and successively enlarged editions of Sir Thomas Elyot; that the last three of these were edited by Thomas Cooper, ‘Schole-Maister of Maudlens in Oxford’ (the son of an Oxford tradesman, and educated as a chorister in Magdalen College School, who rose to be Dean of Christ Church and Vice-Chancellor of the University, and to hold successively the episcopal sees of Lincoln and Winchester), and that Cooper, in 1565, published his great Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ et Britannicæ, ‘opera et industria Thomæ Cooperi Magdalenensis,’ founded upon the great French work of Robert Stephens (Estienne), the learned French scholar and printer. Of this work Martin Marprelate says in his Epistle (Arber, p. 42), ‘His Lordship of Winchester is a great Clarke, for he hath translated his Dictionarie, called Cooper's Dictionarie, verbatim out of Robert Stephanus his Thesaurus, and ill-favoured too, they say!’ This was, however, the criticism of an adversary; Cooper had added to Stephens's work many accessions from his editions of Sir Thomas Elyot, and other sources; his Thesaurus was the basis of later Latin-
English dictionaries, and traces of it may still be discovered in the Latin-English dictionaries of to-day.
Of printed English-Latin works, after the Promptorium, one of the earliest was the Vulgaria of William Herman, Headmaster and Provost of Eton, printed by Pynson in 1519. This is a Dictionarium or liber dictionarius in the older sense, for it consists of short dictiones or sayings, maxims, and remarks, arranged under subject-headings, such as De Pietate, De Impietate, De corporis dotibus, De Valetudinis cura, De Hortensibus, De Bellicis, and finally a heading Promiscua. It may therefore be conceived that it is not easy to find any particular dictio. Horman was originally a Cambridge man; but, according to Wood, he was elected a Fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1477, the very year in which Caxton printed his first book in England, and in this connexion it is interesting to find among the illustrative sentences in the Vulgaria, this reference to the new art (sign. Oij): ‘The prynters haue founde a crafte to make bokes by brasen letters sette in ordre by a frame,’ which is thus latinized: ‘Chalcographi artem excogitauerunt imprimendi libros qua literæ formis æreis excudunt.’ Of later English-Latin dictionaries two deserve passing mention: the Abecedarium of Richard Huloet or Howlet, a native of Wisbech, which appeared in the reign of Edward VI, in 1552, and the Alvearie of John Baret, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, published under Elizabeth in 1573. The Abecedarium, although it gives the Latin equivalents, may be looked upon to some extent as an English dictionary, for many of the words have
an English explanation, as well as a Latin rendering; thus Almesse, or gift of dryncke, meate, or money, distributed to the poore, sporta, sportula; Amyable, pleasante, or hauing a good grace, amabilis; Anabaptistes, a sorte of heretyques of late tyme in Germanye about the yere of our Lorde God 1524.... Anabaptistæ.
Baret's Alvearie of 1573 has been justly styled ‘one of the most quaint and charming of all the early Dictionaries.’ In his ‘Prefatory Address to the Reader’ the author tells, in fine Elizabethan prose, both how his book came into existence, and why he gave it its curious name:—