The Foundations--Vocabularies, Glossaries, and _Nominalia_--Their manifold utility--Colloquy of Archbishop Alfric (tenth century)--Anglo-Gallic treatise of Alexander Neckam on utensils (twelfth century)--Works of Johannes de Garlandia--His Dictionary (thirteenth century) and its pleasant treatment--The Pictorial Vocabulary--Anglo-Gallic Dictionary of Walter de Biblesworth (late thirteenth century). I. The origin and history of a class of documents which may be viewed as the basis and starting-point of our educational literature have first to be considered. I refer to the vocabularies, glossaries, and _nominalia_, which afford examples of the method of instruction pursued in this country from the Middle Ages to the invention of printing. Such of these manuals as we fortunately still possess represent the surviving residue of a much larger number; and from the perishable material on which they were written and their constant employment in tuition, it becomes a source of agreeable surprise that so many specimens remain to throw light on the mode in which elementary learning was acquired in England in the infancy of a taste for letters and knowledge. In the small volumes on _Cookery and Gardening_ by the present writer, he has, as a matter of course, called into requisition these early philological relics to illustrate both those subjects; and this fact testifies to the multiplicity of purposes for which such relics can be rendered serviceable. There is hardly, indeed, any aspect or line of mediæval life which these productions do not assist very powerfully in making more luminous and familiar. But their original design and destination were obviously educational. They were rude and imperfect vehicles, contrived by men of narrow culture and limited experience for the instruction of the young; and they were advisedly thrown, as far as possible, into an interlocutory form--the form most apt to impress circumstances and names on the memories of pupils. Some of these, which I shall presently describe a little more at large, were constructed on the interlinear principle, not, as among ourselves, for the edification of the learner, but, as Mr. Wright points out, for the preceptor's guidance in days when the latter was often a person of very mediocre attainments, and was incapable of dispensing with occasional assistance to his recollection. In other words, the majority of schoolmasters and ushers were merely the mechanical medium for conveying to the boys the lessons which they found set down in treatises prepared by persons of superior skill and erudition.