Just as we have left behind the Thanksgiving festivities and a Christmas dinner is not far away, we might think of table manners. Most know which fork is used for salad, which for dessert, what glass to use for champagne and what for hot mulled wine, and our children have been instructed what is done at the table and what is not… But it is interesting to see how much in common we have with the mediaeval children who were taught how to behave at the table, or rather how not to misbehave, because learning good manners was considered “better than playing the fiddle, thought that’s no harm”.
Before meals:
Wash your face and hands
Be dressed properly
Make a low curtsy or bow to your parents and wish the food may do them good
Let your betters sit before you
Say Grace before the meal, then wait a while before eating
See others served first
Take salt with your knife
Cut your bread, keep your knife sharp
At the table:
Keep your fingers and nails clean
Wipe your mouth before drinking
Behave properly
Sit upright
Remember: silence hurts no one, and is fitted for a child at table
Don’t:
Pick your teeth, or spit
Don’t fill your spoon too full
Don’t smack your lips, or gnaw the bones
Don’t scratch yourself at the table
Don’t clean your mouth or nose with the tablecloth
Don’t put your elbows on the table
Don’t belch as if you had a bean in your throat
Don’t jabber or stuff yourself
Don’t speak with your mouth full
Don’t laugh too much
After the meal don’t leave your seat before others
Adapted from:
The Lytylle Childrenes Lytil Boke, or Edyllys Be; from The Schoole of Vertue, and Booke of Good Nourture for Children by F. Seager; from The Young Children’s Book, printed from the Ashmolean MS 61 (Bodleian Library) about 1500 AD, and from The Boke of Curtasye, from Sloane MS (The British Museum), about 1460 AD.
Image from Richard Pynson’s 1526 edition of The Canterbury Tales.
exams. Of course, Special Collections is always ready to help. This week, we’re sharing a 280-year-old secret from the 
The words in brackets are the mnemonic devices, with the code at the end that represents the year in letters. If a student were called upon in an exam to produce an entire chronology of world events (as students often were in the eighteenth century), he could simply remember what Grey calls the “Memorial Line”: Diocleseko Mahomaudd Yezsid. Grey points out that the system is also adaptable to geography, astronomy, weights and measures, and the study of ancient coins.
readers, his work was hugely popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Memoria Technica remained in print for over 130 years, and was in fact the only pre-1800 book on memory to remain in use for so long.
In honor of Halloween, we're posting an excerpt from one of the horror stories in the rare book collection, 
This pamphlet purports to be "a romance, on which is founded the popular drama now performing with unbounded applause at Astley's Amphitheatre." Several plays were produced under this title in the early nineteenth century, featuring Fergus Campbell, his unfortunate aunt, and the rest of the characters in the romance. Indeed, the first of these plays was performed at Astley's Amphitheatre and ran in September and October 1820. The playbill for this production said "The Idea from which the Subject is arranged [is] taken from the Interesting Legend of St. Swithin's Chair, in Walter Scott's Popular Novel of Waverly."
As far as we know, this cuneiform tablet dates to around 2500 B.C.E., making it the oldest item held in Special Collections (it predates the next oldest item, an Egyptian scarab seal, by about 500 years).
If you guessed that the scroll represents the oldest book form in Special Collections, you were right! The scroll predated the codex (the form we usually associate with a book nowadays) by thousands of years.
This manuscript copy of De Constructione by Priscianus dates to around 1150 A.D. Although Special Collections holds manuscript fragments that are older, this is the oldest complete book in the collection. It is a work on grammar, written in Latin with passages in Greek.
Dating from approximately 1500-1100 B.C.E., this fragment from the Egyptian Book of the Dead isn’t the oldest item in Special Collections – but it is the oldest piece of writing on papyrus in Special Collections.
