Copyright held by
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Further details of licences are available from our
Licences page. For more
information, contact the project director,
Born digital.
Hornbooks were tools for teaching young boys and girls (age four to eight) how to read. Hornbooks consisted of a leaf of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, syllables, and sometimes the Ten Commandments. In early modern London, the teacher, often a scrivener, cobbler, tailor, or fishmonger who taught part-time in hopes of making some extra money (Jewell 96), would mount the paper or parchment onto a wooden paddle (a square piece of wood with a handle) and cover it with a thin sheet of horn for protection. Alternatively, as Helen Jewell points out in her analysis of hornbooks, the alphabet could be incised directly into the wood (Jewell 98).
Most MoEML documents, or significant fragments with mol:
prefix and accessed through the web application
with their id + .xml
.
The molagas prefix points to the shape representation of a location on MoEML’s OpenLayers3-based rendering of the Agas Map.
Links to page-images in the Chadwyck-Healey
Links to page-images in the
The mdt (MoEML Document Type) prefix used on
The mdtlist (MoEML Document Type listing) prefix used in linking attributes points to a listings page constructed from a category in the central MDT taxonomy in the includes file. There are two variants, one with the plain _subcategories
, meaning all subcategories of the category.
The molgls (MoEML gloss) prefix used on
This molvariant prefix is used on
This molajax prefix is used on
The molstow prefix is used on
The molshows prefix is used on
The sb prefix is used on
Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.
Hornbooks were tools for teaching young boys and girls (age four to eight) how to read. Hornbooks consisted of a leaf of paper containing the alphabet, the Lord’s Prayer, syllables, and sometimes the Ten Commandments. In early modern London, the teacher, often a scrivener, cobbler, tailor, or fishmonger who taught part-time in hopes of making some extra money (Jewell 96), would mount the paper or parchment onto a wooden paddle (a square piece of wood with a handle) and cover it with a thin sheet of horn for protection. Alternatively, as Helen Jewell points out in her analysis of hornbooks, the alphabet could be incised directly into the wood (Jewell 98). Mermaids, birds, and other images were sometimes engraved on the back of the wood for aesthetic effect. Historian Andrew W. Tuer notes that teachers taught students how to read by a pointer, which might be a straw, pin, pen, piece of wire, quill, feather, or pointed piece of wood or bone, [which] was used to direct children
(Tuer 24).
When the Normans conquered England in A
and Amen
appeared after Z
(Orme 56). In short, the hornbook’s visual structure dictated how the alphabet was taught. By the
Although hornbooks constituted the second-largest market for early modern printers, few copies survive today; overuse and dirty fingers caused hornbooks to deteriorate quickly. The hornbook’s development in sixteenth-century England reflected a desire to instill a fixed set of ideas and facts into the pupil
that would reaffirm values of order and conformity (Houston 56). Since English society was becoming sharply stratified, schools for the poor were created in order to curb the turbulence of lower-class youth and turn them into useful members of an ordered society
(Houston 14). Consequently, a progressive educational system emerged that consisted of elementary school, grammar school, and university. However, this system of education did not grant complete social mobility. Helen Jewell points out that guild regulations in the sixteenth century required literate apprentices, but only male children of yeomanry or higher could further their education past elementary school after reaching the age of employability (Jewell 93-94). Like lower-class men, women could attend only elementary school (Jewell 17). Thus, elementary schools reserved Latin for advanced scholars in grammar school. Instead, elementary schoolmasters used hornbooks to teach the English alphabet. Children learned how to read through memorization, a convention that stressed knowledge as an ordered system. After children had learned their letters, they would progress to primers (small books of prayers) and classical texts. Hornbooks remained a popular teaching tool until the late nineteenth century, when they were replaced by ABC storybooks and textbooks.
First published as a quarto in
In