abecedarium
Elementary teaching in Antiquity and the Middle Ages consisted in learning firstly to read the letters of the alphabet. Exceptionally when a child learned to read alone from a text ...
Ælfric
(c.945–c.1015), Anglo-Saxon abbot, prose writer, and educator. His works, including sermons, saints' lives, and biblical translations, were intended to teach both monastic novices and laypeople. His ...
Ælle
(d. c.514),founder of the South Saxon kingdom, is said to have landed near Selsey Bill in 477, traditionally with three sons and three ships, driving the Britons back into Andredesweald. His next ...
aetas Vergiliana, Horatiana, and Ovidiana
Traube described the 8th and 9th centuries as aetas Vergiliana, the 10th and 11th as aetas Horatiana, and the 12th and 13th as aetas Ovidiana. While useful, the labels underrate ...
Æthelbald
(d. 757),king of Mercia (716–57). The young Æthelbald was driven into exile in the reign of his second cousin Ceolred, but succeeded Ceolred as king. Writing in 731 Bede says that all the kingdoms of ...
Æthelbert
(d. 616),king of Kent (560–616), was the king who welcomed the Christian missionaries led by St Augustine to England in 597. He exercised overlordship over all the English peoples south of the ...
Aethelfrith
Son of Aethelric, became king of Bernicia in 593 and added the neighbouring kingdom of Deira. His first wife was Bebba; the second was Acha, daughter of Aelle, king of Deira, by whom he had seven ...
Alcuin
(c. 735–804)English scholar and theologian. In 782 was employed by Emperor Charlemagne as head of his palace school at Aachen, where his pupils included many of the outstanding figures in the ...
Aldhelm
(c. 639–709)was one of the most learned men of his time. Thought to be related to West Saxon kings and educated at Malmesbury under the Irish scholar Maildubh, he also studied briefly at the ...
Alfred the Great
(849–99)King of Wessex (871–99). Alfred's military resistance saved south‐west England from Viking occupation. He negotiated the treaty giving the Danelaw to the Norsemen (886). A great reformer, he ...
Anastasius
(d. 628),Persian monk and martyr. He was tortured and put to death at Caesarea; his relics were translated to Rome in 640. His cult may have come to England through Theodore of Canterbury. His Life ...
Angles
A member of a Germanic tribe closely linked to the Jutes and Saxons, thought to have originated in Schleswig‐Holstein or Denmark. In the 5th century they settled in eastern Britain in East Anglia and ...
Anglo-Latin literature to 1847
From the 7th to the mid‐19th cents, thousands of English writers produced Latin writings in great quantity, both in prose and in verse, addressed to a Latin‐reading public in continental Europe and ...
Anglo-Saxon
A person or language of the English Saxons, distinct from the Old Saxons and the Angles, a group of Germanic peoples who invaded and settled in Britain between the 5th and 7th centuries.
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
A collection of seven manuscripts written in Anglo‐Saxon (Old English) that together provide a history of England from the beginning of the conversion to Christianity up to 1154. The major text ...
Anglo-Saxon Church
The Church in England from the end of the 6th cent. to the Norman Conquest (1066). In 597 the Roman mission of St Augustine landed in Thanet in the south and sees were quickly set up at Canterbury, ...
Angus MacFergus
(c. 690–761),king of the Picts. Under Angus Pictish power was at its height. Succeeding in 729 after a fierce internal struggle, Angus established himself as over-king and waged war ...
annals
(from Latin annus, ‘year’) The yearly records kept by the priests in Rome from the earliest times. They noted ceremonies, state enactments, and the holders of office. The high priest (Pontifex ...
astronomy
Until 1582, the need for Calendar reform was a significant spur to astronomy. Astronomers' reactions to the publication of the Copernican theory (1543) were at first rather friendly (see Rheticus ...
atomism
A philosophical doctrine at least as old as Democritus, and plausibly viewed as an attempt to combine an a priori conviction of the unchangeable and immutable nature of the world with the variety and ...
