es in Frensche.... Gentilmen children beeth taught to speke
Frensche from the tyme that they bith rokked in hir cradell; and
uplondissche men will likne himself to gentylmen, and fondeth with greet
besynesse for to speke Frensche."

The question is often asked, why did not these new numerals attract more
immediate attention? Why did they have to wait until the sixteenth century
to be generally used in business and in the schools? In reply it may be
said that in their elementary work the schools always wait upon the demands
of trade. That work which pretends to touch the life of the people must
come reasonably near doing so. Now the computations of business until about
1500 did not demand the new figures, for two reasons: First, cheap paper
was not known. Paper-making of any kind was not introduced into Europe
until {137} the twelfth century, and cheap paper is a product of the
nineteenth. Pencils, too, of the modern type, date only from the sixteenth
century. In the second place, modern methods of operating, particularly of
multiplying and dividing (operations of relatively greater importance when
all measures were in compound numbers requiring reductions at every step),
were not yet invented. The old plan required the erasing of figures after
they had served their purpose, an operation very simple with counters,
since they could be removed. The new plan did not as easily permit this.
Hence we find the new numerals very tardily admitted to the counting-house,
and not welcomed with any enthusiasm by teachers.[555]

Aside from their use in the early treatises on the new art of reckoning,
the numerals appeared from time to time in the dating of manuscripts and
upon monuments. The oldest definitely dated European document known {138}
to contain the numerals is a Latin manuscript,[556] the Codex Vigilanus,
written in the Albelda Cloister not far from Logrono in Spain, in 976 A.D.
The nine characters (of [.g]ob[=a]r type), without the zero, are given as
an addition to the first chapters of the third book of the _Origines_ by
Isidorus of Seville, in which the Roman numerals are under discussion.
Another Spanish copy of the same work, of 992 A.D., contains the numerals
in the corresponding section. The writer ascribes an Indian origin to them
in the following words: "Item de figuris arithmetic[e,]. Scire debemus in
Indos subtilissimum ingenium habere et ceteras gentes eis in arithmetica et
geometria et ceteris liberalibus discip