Antiquary and Linguist

Abstract

Recorde's collection of books by British authors was one of the threelargest collections listed by Bale in his Index Scriptorum. Theirtitles, mainly of manuscripts, covered a wide range of interests,religion, medicine, alchemy, prophesy, heraldry, geography, history,arithmetic and astronomy and law. The largest group concerned astronomy,a roll call of past English authors writing on this subject. Thegreatest number were from the collection of Lewis of Caerleon, anarchive of documents of the important English astronomers of thefourteenth century still extant, Recorde having provided a safe havenduring a perilous period in their history. The only example of Recorde'swriting is as comments in Anglo-Saxon on an early medieval manuscript.This together with other examples of his scholarship in this tonguesuggests strongly that Recorde was part of a group of the earliest Tudorantiquarians. His linguistic interests did not end there. Oneconsequence of his decision to write his books in the vernacular was thepractice he eventually adopted with respect to the etymology of Englishscientific terms. Having failed to introduce terms having Old Englishroots into the geometrical vocabulary, using Latin roots he introduced awide vocabulary of terms necessary for number theory, cossike arithmeticand algebra, which are still in use today.