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 archaeological 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 more. 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.