enth century, contained in a
MS. of the British Museum (Harl. 3376), the alphabetical arrangement
has been carried as far as the third letter, beyond which point it
does not appear to have advanced.

The MS. of the Corpus Glossary dates to the early part of the eighth
century; the Epinal and Erfurt--although the MS. copies that have come
down to us are not older, or not so old--must from their nature go
back as glossaries to a still earlier date, and the Leiden to an
earlier still; so that we carry back these beginnings of lexicography
in England to a time somewhere between 600 and 700 A.D., and probably
to an age not long posterior to the introduction of Christianity in
the south of England at the end of the sixth century. Many more
vocabularies were compiled between these early dates and the eleventh
century; and it is noteworthy that those ancient glossaries and
vocabularies not only became fuller and more orderly as time advanced,
but they also became more _English_. For, as I have already mentioned,
the primary purpose of the glosses was to explain difficult _Latin_
words; this was done at first, whenever possible, by easier Latin
words; apparently, only when none such were known, was the explanation
given in the vernacular, in Old English. In the Epinal Glossary the
English words are thus relatively few. In the first page they number
thirty out of 117, and in some pages they do not amount to half that
number. In the Corpus Glossary they have become proportionally more
numerous; and in the glossaries that follow, the Latin explanations
are more and more eliminated and replaced by English ones, until the
vocabularies of the tenth and eleventh centuries, whether arranged
alphabetically or under classified headings, are truly Latin-English:
every Latin word given is explained by an English one; and we see
clearly that a new aim had gradually evolved itself; the object was no
longer to explain difficult Latin words, but to give the English
equivalents of as many words as possible, and thus practically to
provide a Latin Dictionary for the use of Englishmen[3].

Learning and literature, science and art, had attained to fair
proportions in England, and in the Old English tongue, when their
progress was arrested by the Norman Conquest. The Norman Conquest
brought to England law and organization, and welded the country into a
political unity; but it overthrew Old English learning and literary
culture. In literary culture