Bede, a Hisperic Etymology, and Early Sea Poetry.

Alan K. Brown.

THE fourth chapter of Bede’s major calendrical treatise has a passage which escapes rather startlingly from its context of basic definitions of duodecimal fractions:

Si in quattuor [partiri vis], quarta pars quadrantis nomen, residuae tres dodrantis accipiunt. Et huius disciplinae regula solvitur quod plerosque turbat imperitos; quia Philippus in expositione beati Iob, aestum maris Oceani cotidie bis venire describens, adiunxerit hunc: unius aequinoctialis horae dodrante transmisso tardius sine intermissione sive die venire sive nocte.

The word for a fourth part is quadrans, and for the remaining three fourths it is dodrans. And the rule of this mathesis can be used to solve a problem which has been confusing a number of unskillful persons, namely that in his commentary upon Job, while picturing the twice-daily arrival of the Ocean tide, Philippus has added that it “arrives unfailingly, day or night, later by the passing of the dodrans of an equinoctial [i.e. mean or standard] hour.” All that is dear from this remark is that unnamed persons have been confused or misled about the use of the word dodrans “three fourths”, and that their difficulty can be cleared up by a mere mention of the proper definition, in the context of a passage quoted from the Philippus commentary upon job. But what is the difficulty? Bede’s editor has suggested tentatively that Philippus is being attacked for having slightly understated the average daily retardation of the tides as three fourths of an hour instead of the slightly more accurate figure of four fifths which Bede himself used. This is an ingenious explanation; however, it is unlikely to be the correct one, since it is not Philippus who is at the focus of Bede’s criticism but rather some moderns who through ignorance (imperiti is sarcastic slight understatement) have failed to understand the word. Even if we were to suppose that these unknown persons had been interpreting Philippus’ dodrans as though it referred to a larger fraction than three quarters (and of course the actual tidal retardation is about five sixths of an hour, even larger than Bede’s figure), the same objection would apply. And in any case, it is difficult to see why Bede’s criticism is injected into a terse chapter on fundamental duodecimal reckoning, instead of being mentioned in his much later chapter devoted especially to the tides.

Alan K. Brown. Bede, a Hisperic Etymology, and Early Sea Poetry. Mediaeval Studies, Volume 37, pp. 419-432. 1975.

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