Biographia Britannica literaria; or, biography of literary characters of Great Britain and Ireland. Anglo-Saxon period / arranged in chronological order.
- Thomas Wright
- Date:
- 1842
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Biographia Britannica literaria; or, biography of literary characters of Great Britain and Ireland. Anglo-Saxon period / arranged in chronological order. Source: Wellcome Collection.
83/582 page 71
![Introd.] ANGLO-SAXON SCHOOLS. 71 and, secondly, that the study of medicine was considered a very important part of a scientific education, in fact, that the clergy were the chief medical practitioners. 5. With the single exception of medicine (lece-dom), we find no term in the Anglo-Saxon language for any of these branches of learning; but in the glosses, which most of these manuscripts contain, the original word is simply translated according to its component parts. We are inclined to look upon this as an additional proof that there were no scientific works written in the vernacular tongue until a late period. Thus rhetoric is translated by pel-creeft, and dialectics or logic by flit-creeft,* the latter of which will be best understood by the readers of old Scottish poetry, if we explain it as the art of flyting. Grammar is not translated in these glosses, but the Anglo- Saxon term generally used was steef-craft, or the art of letters. Arithmetic is rim-creeft, or the art of numbers; geometry is translated by eorp-gemet, or earth-measure- ment; music by son-creft, or the art of sound; astro- nomy by tungel-z’, or the law of the constellations ; astro- logy by tungel-gescead, or the reason of the constellations ; and mechanics by orpane-scipe, or ingenuity. 6. The schools of the Anglo-Saxons appear in system and form of teaching to have been the prototypes of our old grammar-schools. Before the time of Alfred, English was not taught in them. The elementary treatises on Grammar, the first subject in their course of studies, were written in Latin, and it is probable that the teacher, or magister, in the first instance, explained and translated them orally, whilst the chief task of his scholars was to commit them to memory, and to repeat the teacher’s comments. At the same time they were continually exer-](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b33096740_0083.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
