A Volume of Vocabularies, Illustrating the Condition and Manners of Our Forefathers, as Well as the History of the Forms of Elementary Education and of the Languages Spoken in This Island, From the Tenth Century to the Fifteenth
Edited, from MSS. in Public and Private Collections, by ESQ., etc. Privately printed. [London.] 1857. 8vo. pp. 291.
MR. WRIGHT, in editing this handsome volume, has done another service to the lovers and students of English glossology. Their thanks are also due to Mr. Joseph Mayer, who generously bore the expense of printing the book.
A great deal that is interesting to the student of general history lies imbedded in language, and Mr. Wright, in a very agreeable Introduction, has summarized the chief matters of value in the collection before us, which comprises the printed copies of sixteen ancient MSS. of various dates. As far as we have had time to examine it, the book seems to have been edited with care and discretion, and Mr. Wright has added much to its value by timely and judicious notes.
Most of the vocabularies here printed (many of them for the first time) were intended for the use of schoolmasters, and throw great light on the means and methods of teaching during the periods at which they were compiled. Mr. Wright tells us that there exist very few MSS. of educational treatises of the fourteenth century, (during which teaching would accordingly seem to have been neglected,) in comparison with the thirteenth and fifteenth, when such works were abundant. To all who would trace the history of education in England and follow up our common-school system to its source, the editor’s Introduction will afford valuable hints.
The following extracts from Mr. Wright’s Introduction will give some notion of the archæological and philological value of the volume.
“It is this circumstance of grouping the words under different heads which gives these vocabularies their value as illustrations of the conditions and manners of society. It is evident that the compiler gave, in each case, the names of all such things as habitually presented themselves to his view, or, in other words, that he presents us with an exact list and description of all the objects which were in use at the time he wrote, and no move. We have, therefore, in each a sort of measure of the fashions and comforts and utilities of contemporary life, as well as, in some cases, of its sentiments. Thus, to begin with a man's habitation, his house,—the words which describe the parts of the Anglo-Saxon house are few in number, a heal or hall, a bur or bedroom, and in some cases a cicen or kitchen, and the materials are chiefly beams of wood, laths, and plaster. But when we come to the vocabularies of the Anglo-Norman period, we soon find traces of that ostentation in domestic buildings which William of Malmsbury assures us that the Normans introduced into this island; the house becomes more massive, and the rooms more numerous, and more diversified in their purposes. When we look at the furniture of the house, the difference is still more apparent. The description given by Alexander Neckam of the hall, the chambers, the kitchen, and the other departments of the ordinary domestic establishment, in the twelfth century, and the furniture of each, almost brings them before our eyes, and nothing could be more curious than the account which the same writer gives us of the process of building and storing a castle.”
p. xv.
“The philologist will appreciate the tracts printed in the following pages as a continuous series of very valuable monuments of the languages spoken in our island during the Middle Ages. It is these vocabularies alone which have preserved from oblivion a very considerable and interesting portion of the Anglo-Saxon tongue, and without their assistance our Anglo-Saxon dictionaries would be far more imperfect than they are. I have endeavored to collect together in the present volume all the Anglo-Saxon vocabularies that are known to exist, not only on account of their diversity, but because I believe that their individual utility will be increased by thus presenting them in a collective form. They represent the Anglo-Saxon language as it existed in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and, as written no doubt in different places, they may possibly present some traces of the local dialects of that period. The curious semi-Saxon vocabulary is chiefly interesting as representing the Anglo-Saxon in its period of transition, when it was in a state of rapid decadence. The interlinear gloss to Alexander Neckam, and the commentary on John de Garlande, are most important monuments of the language which for a while usurped among our forefathers the place of the AngloSaxon, and which we know by the name of the Anglo-Norman. In the partial vocabulary of the names of plants, which follows them, we have the two languages in juxtaposition, the Anglo-Saxon having then emerged from that state which has been termed semi-Saxon, and become early English. We are again introduced to the English language more generally by Walter de Biblesworth, the interlinear gloss to whose treatise represents, no doubt, the English of the beginning of the fourteenth century. All the subsequent vocabularies given here belong, as far as the language is concerned, to the fifteenth century. As written in different parts of the country, they bear evident marks of dialect; one of them—the vocabulary in Latin verse— is a very curious relic of the dialect of the West of England at a period of which such remains are extremely rare.”—p. xix.