abetical. About the middle of the century,
also, was compiled the famous _Medulla Grammatices_[5], designated,
with some propriety, 'the first Latin-English Dictionary,' the
popularity of which is shown by the many manuscript copies that still
survive; while it formed the basis of the _Ortus (i.e. Hortus)
Vocabulorum_ or first printed Latin-English Dictionary, which issued
from the press of Wynkyn de Worde in 1500, and in many subsequent
editions down to 1533, as well as in an edition by Pynson in 1509.

But all the glossaries and vocabularies as yet mentioned were
Latin-English; their primary object was not English, but the
elucidation of Latin. A momentous advance was made about 1440, when
Brother Galfridus Grammaticus--Geoffrey the Grammarian--a Dominican
friar of Lynn Episcopi in Norfolk, produced the English-Latin
vocabulary, to which he gave the name of _Promptuarium_ or
_Promptorium Parvulorum_, the Children's Store-room or Repository.

The _Promptorium_, the name of which has now become a household word
to students of the history of English, is a vocabulary containing some
10,000 words--substantives, adjectives, and verbs--with their Latin
equivalents, which, as edited by Mr. Albert Way for the Camden Society
in 1865, makes a goodly volume. Many manuscript copies of it were made
and circulated, of which six or seven are known to be still in
existence, and after the introduction of printing it passed through
many editions in the presses of Pynson, Wynkyn de Worde, and Julian
Notary.

Later in the same century, the year 1483 saw the compilation of a
similar, but quite independent work, which its author named the
_Catholicon Anglicum_, that is, the English Catholicon or Universal
treatise, after the name of the celebrated Latin dictionary of the
Middle Ages, the _Catholicon_ or _Summa_ of Johannes de Balbis, or
John of Genoa, made in 1286. The English _Catholicon_ was in itself a
work almost equally valuable with the _Promptorium_; but it appears
never to have attained to the currency of the _Promptorium_, which
appeared as a printed book in 1499, while the _Catholicon_ remained in
two MSS. till printed for the Early English Text Society in 1881.

The Renascence of Ancient Learning had now reached England, and during
the sixteenth century there were compiled and published many important
Latin-English and English-Latin vocabularies and dictionaries. Among
these special mention must be made of the Dictionary of S