the fourteenth century, it is sufficiently strange, though perhaps not quite unaccountable, that such a mode of reckoning should not sooner have been more general. The perplexity and tediousness of working Roman capitals to a person of an unretentive memory will appear on an examination of several of the sums printed from Custumale Roffense, in which there are long strings of shillings and pence in the same column, that not many could cast up exactly without the assistance of pen and paper; or, as the clown in the play acknowledged, without counters[1]. And, though there was an improvement in the statements of accounts by ranging the pounds, millings, and pence, in different columns[2], yet still in long and intricate sums it was admitted by a master of arithmetic in the middle of the sixteenth century, that the "feat with the counters would not only serve for them that cannot write and read, but also for them that can do both, but have not at some time their pen or tables ready with them[3]."
I am not aware that any reason has been assigned for the very slow progress in the practice with Arabian numerals, for upwards of a hundred years after they were certainly known in this country. May it not, however, be attributed, partly to the general state of knowledge and literature in the fifteenth century, partly to a pertinacious adherence to old habits and forms, which is not uncommon even in more enlightened times; and perhaps, a little to pecuniary motives? Frequently has it been observed, and with truth,
- ↑ The Winter's Tale, Act IV. Scene III. "Clown. Let me see, every eleven weather tods, every tod yieldspounds and odd shillings, fifteen hundred shorn, what comes the wool to? I cannot do it without compters."
- ↑ It however often happened that shillings, amounting to pounds, were placed in the shilling column.
- ↑ Record's Arithmetick, 12°, 1658, p. 179.
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