Phraseology and Culture in English

politicum. The earlier edition of 1610 had listed, in alphabetical sequence, 
hundreds of proverbs grouped by language: Latin, Greek, Dutch, German, 
French, Italian, and Spanish. Gruter lamented the absence of a list of “prov-
erbia Britannica,” a lack that was supplied for the 1611 edition by none other 
than Gruter’s friend William Camden, who furnished a collection of 335 
English sayings. If he submitted his proverbs as the alphabetical list that 
appeared in the second edition of Florilegium ethicopoliticum, then possi-
bly Camden, rather than Gruter, can still get credit for initiating the long 
and useful practice of alphabetizing English proverbs. That list coincides 
very closely with the one that Camden himself published three years after-
wards, with 54 sayings added (the contents of Camden’s lists seem much 
indebted to John Heywood). 
Of course, alphabetical sequencing can pose its own challenges, especially 
for an age in which spelling was not yet standardized. For instance, Gruter 
listed under the letter Y the proverbs “Yll gotten, yll spent” and “Ynough, is 
as good as a feast” – as did Camden, only Camden’s entry actually spelled 
the former expression “Ill gotten ill spent.” 
A more troubling difficulty was the early alphabetizers’ practice of us-
ing the very first word in a proverb as the determiner of placement, even if 
that word was a, an, the, there, he, it, you, or other terms of no substantial 
significance. In actual usage, the same proverb can occur with or without 
such initial words, and the compilations’ sequencing usually suggested no 
relationship of image or application among proverbs listed in proximity. On 
the other hand, the procedure could make obvious some structural similari-
ties, like the Better ___ than ___ pattern, of which Camden gave sixteen 
instances.
Essentially the same procedure of alphabetizing English proverbs that 
Camden and Gruter had initiated persisted (with compilations of various 
sizes) through the remainder of the seventeenth century – and well beyond. 
Scottish Proverbs. Gathered by David Fergusson Sometime Minister at Dun-

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Charles Clay Doyle 
fermline (1641) listed nearly a thousand sayings (without glosses). David 
Fergusson had died in 1598; if the manner of presentation could safely be 
credited to him and not an anonymous editor, then Fergusson and not Cam-
den or Gruter should wear the title “First Alphabetizer of English Prov-
erbs”; however, Ferguson’s precise relationship to the book that bears his 
name, published 43 years after his death, cannot be ascertained. 
Other important alphabetical collections are Proverbs English, French, 
Dutch, Italian, and Spanish, attributable only to a certain “N. R., Gent.” 
(1659), with about 2,000 sayings in English (despite the title, no proverbs 
in a foreign language are to be found); Robert Codrington’s Collection of 
Many Select, and Excellent Proverbs (1664), with over 1,000 sayings (the 
collection first appeared, with a separate title page, as pages 183-231 of The
Second Part of Youths Behaviour, or Decency in Conversation amongst 
Women; then, somewhat augmented, as a separate book in 1672 – where 
the proverbs are not only alphabetized but also numbered, 1–1,465); and 
Adagia Scotica. Or, A Collection of Scotch Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases
by one B.R. (1668), with about 1,000 sayings, nearly all of them full sen-
tences, notwithstanding the subtitle. 
A monumental improvement in the practice of alphabetizing was ef-
fected in John Ray’s masterful Collection of English Proverbs. First pub-
lished in 1670, with a second edition in 1678, Ray’s collection saw six 
further editions from 1737 to 1818 – and then, as reprinted to constitute 
the major portion of Henry Bohn’s Hand-Book of Proverbs (1855), itself 
with 14 or so editions, it essentially remained in print through 1910. The 
collection was not remarkable for the sheer quantity of its entries, al-
though the annotations that accompany almost half the entries are illumi-
nating; rather, the usefulness of the collection consists in its manner of 
sequencing entries. Ray alphabetized proverbs not by the very first word 
but rather by the first key term. He based his collection on the most ambi-
tious program of assembling and collecting to date – one of those “scien-
tific” projects that flourished in Restoration England; Ray proudly an-
nounced himself on the title page as “Fellow of the Royal Society” (he 
was best known to his contemporaries as a botanist). Not only did he 
comb all the extant printed compilations but he also, according to the 
preface, “employed my friends and acquaintance in several parts of Eng-
land […], who afforded me large contributions”; so he actually relied on 
folkloristic “field” research – if not with the rigor demanded nowadays, 
then at least in the fashion that prevailed in Great Britain well into the 
twentieth century. 

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