The Cambridge Old English Reader

One of the works which Ælfric probably composed in the first instance to meet his own needs as a teacher in the monastic school at Cerne Abbas (see p. 40) is the Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice (‘Extracts on Grammar in English’). It is a schoolboys’ Latin grammar-book, written at a fairly elementary level and intended, as Ælfric explains in the preface (given below), to make Latin accessible to boys at an early stage in their monastic careers. These boys, known as ‘oblates’ or ‘novices’ (who in many cases, like Ælfric himself, would have been placed in a monastery at the age of about seven), had to learn not only to read and write but also to speak Latin. From the start, they had to participate in the Divine Office, the series of services performed daily in Latin in the monastic church according to a strict timetable set out in the Rule of St Benedict (see 1/headnote). They were expected to learn by heart the psalter (with its one hundred and fifty psalms) and hymnal (dozens of hymns and chants regularly used in the liturgy), and in the classroom they would have to progress eventually to the texts which constituted the standard medieval curriculum, covering subjects such as rhetoric and dialectic, and grammar itself.

Well-known grammars such as the Ars minor of Donatus had long been adapted for the use of English-speaking learners, but they were still written in Latin. Ælfric's Excerptiones – based primarily on an abridgement of the work of another sixth-century Latin grammarian, Priscian – was the first to be written in English (or indeed in any other European vernacular). The widespread and continuing use of the work is confirmed by the preservation of copies of it in thirteen manuscripts, the last made as late as the thirteenth century. Appended to seven copies is a Glossary, a list of Latin words with OE equivalents which we assume was also compiled by Ælfric; it contains several hundred words, arranged not alphabetically but according to topic.

For his Excerptiones, Ælfric needed a set of English grammatical terms to represent the latinate ones. Most were created (by Ælfric himself or predecessors) by literal translation. Thus, infinitiuus (Latin for the ‘infinitive’ form of the verb) became ungeendigendlic (‘unending’) and accusatiuus (the accusative or object case) was wregendlic (from wregan ‘to accuse’ or ‘impeach’).