ABSTRACT
James A. H. Murray, the General Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, a century ago said that "no one appears before the end of the sixteenth century to have felt that Englishmen could want a dictionary to help them to the knowledge and correct use of their own language" (26). He added that, by 1700, the "notion that an English Dictionary ought to contain all English words had apparently as yet occurred to no one; at least no one had proposed to carry the idea into practice" (34). Yet the early Tudor period produced the first monolingual English lexicon as well as two great dictionaries, both regarded as reference books for English. The printer and dramatist John Rastell brought out Exposiciones terminorum legum anglorum .... The exposicions of ye termys of ye law of england in 1523 (ETLA), a pioneering encyclopedic lexicon of about 170 entries in parallel columns, French and English. John Pals grave, tutor to Henry VIII's sister Mary and his son the duke of Richmond, published a much larger EnglishFrench lexicon in 1530. It had English headwords and served to document English words as much as French. By 1550, rhetorician Richard Sherry said that the English did indeed have a fine dictionary of their own tongue: he commended Sir Thomas Elyot's Latin-English Dictionary of 1538, completed at Henry VIII's instance, for "searchinge oute the copye of oure language in all kynde of wordes and phrases" (TST, A3r; my italics). From the 1540s, the Crown had also legally required grammar schools to teach the Latinate Introduction to Grammar by William Lily and John Colet. Dictionaries and correct Early Modem English (EME) usage were respectable intellectual goals in the early Tudor period, partly enforced by statute. Henry VIII gave his patronage to men who documented contemporary English as a language second to none.
