LECTURE

ADELARD OF BATH, THE FIRST ENGLISH SCIENTIST

Louise Cochrane on 10 March 1999

Louise Cochrane, a graduate of Bryn Mawr College, USA, first came to this country 35 years ago. It was while she and her husband were living at Corsley near Bath that her interest in Adelard was kindled by a reference to a Benedictine monk who travelled in the Middle East at the time of the Crusades. At the local library she discovered that the only biography had been written in German in 1936. In fact, many specialist scholars were researching individual aspects of Adelard's life, and recent scholarship has made many more details available. However, her book on Adelard published in 1994 was the first book for the general reader in English. She had much help from local librarians both in this area and in Edinburgh. Dr Robert Dunning, the Somerset historian, helped establish the Domesday link.

In reality, Adelard was not a monk but rather a clerical scholar. He was born in Bath around 1080. His father Fastrad was a member of the `familia' or household of Bishop Giso of Wells and also one of his tenants mentioned in the Somerset Domesday Survey. Giso was succeeded by Bishop John of Tours, who initiated reform in Bath, having bought it for £500 from William II. Little remains of his building projects except for the Norman chapel in the Abbey and the arched stonework of the King's Bath.

Adelard was educated at the Benedictine school set up by Bishop John. As a lay member of the Benedictine Order he could travel freely and he was sent to Tours to complete his education. His first book De eodem et Diverso (`Of the Same and the Different') describes how he was walking one evening by the river Loire in Tours with his teacher who left him so that he could think things out for himself. He had a vision of Philosophy as a beautiful woman with her handmaidens, the Seven Liberal Arts. In this work Adelard uses a variety of literary techniques including allegory and poetry. Dr Burnett has recently published this text in bi-lingual form together with the texts on `Natural Questions' and on Falconry. The fact that Adelard had experience of falconry and his account of having played the `cithara' to the Queen suggest that he moved in high social circles, though it may also be that he had some contact with William the Conqueror's falconer who was also a tenant of Bishop Giso.

Adelard returned to Bath in 1106 where he witnessed a charter as `Adelardus filius Fastradi'. He went next to Laon to study techniques of the abacus with Ralph of Laon who taught a method used at the Exchequer. He took with him a group of students from noble families in Bath. From Laon, Adelard travelled to the Middle East and particularly to Syria. He left about 1110 AD and returned about 1118/9. He witnessed an earthquake at Mamistra in the region of Antioch, which can be dated to 1114. It is interesting that arches rebuilt in the later Gothic style can still be seen on the bridge there. It was probably here that Adelard obtained the manuscript of the Elements of Euclid which he later translated from Arabic into Latin.

Slides of Chartres showing representations of the Liberal Arts in stone illustrated the idea that Adelard's Euclid was used by Thierry of Chartres to confirm his architectural designs for the rebuilding after the fire of 1145. In the stained-glass windows at Laon, which have a similar theme, Medicine is shown as an eighth Liberal Art. It is thought that Adelard got some information on medicine at Salerno and in Sicily.

The Lecturer showed a slide of the initial letter from the l4th-century Leiden manuscript of the Rules of the Abacus, which carries a portrait of Adelard teaching his pupils. The abacus, first used by the Greeks, had been reintroduced to the West by Gerbert, who became Pope as Sylvester II about the year 1000. His rules used Arabic numerals and his abacus had nine columns and disks with numerals on, but did not use zero. Adelard's Rules written for his pupils at Laon describe a similar abacus.

It is interesting that arabic numerals were used on 13th century statues at Wells though the cathedral accounts do not show their use until the 17th century. Possibly people were nervous of their associations with magic.

After Syria, Adelard returned to England and spent the rest of his life at Henry I's Court or in Bath with, at first, a role at the Exchequer. He collaborated with a Spanish convert to Christianity, Petrus Alfonsi, to translate the Zij or Astronomical Tables of Al-Khwarismi, a 9th-century Arab astronomer and mathematician, who gave his name
to the words algorithm and algebra. These tables were much used for both astronomy and astrology as was the astrolabe. Adelard himself also cast horoscopes .

Adelard's most important work on the astrolabe was written for the future Henry II who, as a boy of twelve, was brought over to Bristol by his uncle, Robert of Gloucester. As Adelard was living here in Bath it was possible for him to be summoned to Bristol to coach the boy in maths.

The lecturer demonstrated the use of the astrolabe on an ornamental instrument from Iran, and by showing slides of the `Carolingian' astrolabe in the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the earliest known astrolabe in the West.

 

An astrolabe
Forerunner of both the slide-rule and the analogue computer, the astrolabe was used for navigation, and as a calendar and a clock. The wedge which holds the parts together may be shaped like a horse's head and is mentioned in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale when the host told the time from the length of the shadows and then "he folded his little horse away". Chaucer wrote a similar treatise to Adelard's on the astrolabe two centuries later.

Adelard and his contemporaries were careful to distinguish between Theology and Science, or Natural Philosophy, as they called it. A panel at Bath Abbey museum quotes Adelard. "God rules the Universe but this does not mean that Man should not use the Reason with which God has endowed him to study Natural Causes". If the audience could imagine modern science without a readily comprehensible system of numerals; art and architecture without geometry and the aesthetic symmetry of the Golden Section; astronomy without trigonometry, then they might understand the conceptual revolution led by Adelard, which provided scholars for generations with the means for further rational enquiry. They would also appreciate why Louise Cochrane called her book Adelard of Bath, the first English Scientist.

Joy Whalley