The Lexicon and Dictionary naturally followed the Primer; and our earliest productions of this kind were formed out of the Vocabularies composed and printed abroad—not in Italy, but in Germany, as a rule. But while in many instances we are made acquainted with the writers or editors of the smaller treatises, the names of those laborious men who undertook the compilation of the first type of glossographical Manual are scarcely known.
But the time soon arrived when a native school of tuition was formed in England, and its original seat seems to have been at the Free School immediately adjacent to Magdalen College, Oxford.
We find John Annaquil mentioned as the master of this seminary in the time of Henry the Seventh, and it is the most ancient record of it that has been apparently recovered. Annaquil, of whom our knowledge is extremely scanty, wrote, for the use more immediately of his own pupils, Compendium Grammatices, with an Anglo-Latin version of the Vulgaria of Terence annexed. This volume was printed at Oxford by Theodore Rood about 1484; and an edition of the work entitled Parvulorum Institutio, ascribed to the same press, was doubtless prepared by Annaquil, or under his direction, for the benefit of his school. Such fragments as have been recovered of this book exhibit variations from the later copies, into which subsequent editors purposely introduced improvements and corrections. There are some familiar allusions here, such as, had they been more numerous, might have rendered these ancient educational tracts more attractive and precious even than they are. I mean such entries as, “I go to Oxford: Eo Oxonium or Ad Oxonium.” “I shall go to London: Ibo Londinum.”
Knight explains these references in his Life of Dean Colet: “It may not be amiss to remark that many of the examples in the Latin Grammar pointed to the then juncture of public affairs; viz., the prosecution of Empson and Dudley in the beginning of Henry VIII.’s reign: as Regum est tueri leges: Refert omnium animadverti in malos. And this humour was the reason why, in the following editions of the Syntax, there were examples accommodated to the respective years of the impressions; as, Audito regem Doroberniam proficisci; Imperator [Maximilian] meruit sub rege, &c. There were likewise in that edition of Erasmus several examples referring to Dean Colet, as Vixit Romæ, studuit Oxonii, natus est Londini, discessit Londini, &c.”
Annaquil is supposed to have died about 1488, and was succeeded in his work by John Stanbridge, who is much better known as a grammarian than his predecessor. Stanbridge was a native of Northamptonshire, according to Wood, and received his education at Winchester. In 1481 he was admitted to New College, Oxford, after two years’ probation, and remained there five years, at the end of which he was appointed first usher under Annaquil of the Free School aforesaid, and after his principal’s death took his place. The exact period of his death is not determined; but he probably lived into the reign of Henry the Eighth.
II. The writings of Stanbridge are divisible into two sections—those which he published in his own lifetime, and those which appeared after his death in the form either of reimpressions or selections by his pupil Whittinton and others. The former category embraces: 1. Accidence; 2. Vocabula; 3. Vulgaria. In the latter I include: 1. Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Editione recognita limâ Roberti Whittintoni; 2. Parvulorum Institutio ex Stanbrigiana Collectione. The first of these productions, not strictly to be regarded as proceeding from the pen of Stanbridge, bears the name of Whittinton; the second I merely apprehend to have been his. But the line of distinction between the publications of Stanbridge himself and posthumous, or at any rate not personally superintended reprints, is one which ought to be drawn.
There is an edition of Stanbridge’s Accidence, printed at the end of the sixteenth century by Caxton’s successor at Westminster. The variations between it and the collections which were modelled upon it, probably by John Holt, whom I shall again mention, are thus explained and stated by the author of the Typographical Antiquities:—
“This treats of the eight parts of reason; but they differ in several respects as to the manner of treating of them; this treating largely of the degrees of comparison, which the other (Accidentia ex Stanbrigiana Collectione) does not so much as mention. That gives the moods and tenses of the 4. conjugations at large, both active and passive, whereas this gives only a few short rules to know them by. Again, this shews the concords of grammar, which the other has not.”
There are at least three issues of the Accidence from London presses, and a fourth in an abridged shape from an Antwerp one, presumably for the convenience of English residents in the Low Countries. The tide had by this time begun to a certain extent to flow in an opposite direction, as it were, and not only introductions to our own language were executed here and reproduced abroad, but Latin authors were beginning to find competent native interpreters, among whom John Annaquil was perhaps the foremost.
Next to the Accidence of Stanbridge I shall consider briefly his Vocabula, which was, on the whole, the most popular of his works, and continued for the greatest length of time in vogue, as I record editions of it as late as the period of the Civil War (1647). I have not, on the other hand, met with any anterior to 1510. Annexed is a specimen:—