gramarye

alternative gramary · alternative grammary

1. obsoleteuncountableGrammar; learning.

   […] I dearly love to climb / Time's ladder, and identify / Myself with worthies long gone by – / And Lucerne seems (at least to me) / Fit circle for such gramarye; […]

   1835 April, “Tour of Oliver Yorke’s Rhyming Cousin”, in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, volume XI, number LXIV, London: James Fraser, 215 Regent Street, →OCLC, page 405

2. archaicuncountableMystical learning; the occult, magic, sorcery.

   My mother was a weſterne woman / And learned in gramaryè, / And when I learned at the ſchole, / Something ſhee taught itt me.

   1765, Thomas Percy, compiler, “King Estmere”, in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: […], volume I, London: […] J[ames] Dodsley […], →OCLC, book I, page 64, lines 143–146

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   And, but that stronger spells were spread, / And the door might not be opened, / He had laid him on her very bed. / Whate'er he did of gramarye [footnote: Magic.], / Was always done maliciously. / He flung the warrior on the ground, / And the blood welled freshly from the wound.

   1805, Walter Scott, The Lay of the Last Minstrel: A Poem, 2nd edition, London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster-Row, and A. Constable and Co., Edinburgh, by James Ballantyne, Edinburgh, →OCLC, canto III, stanza XI, page 81

   She took a spell of grammary, and threw it on the knight: / Still he stood, and moved not: (I tell the tale aright:) / She took from him his falchion, unlac'd his hauberk bright. / Mournfully Wolfdietrich cried, "Gone is all my might.[…]"

   1814, “The Book of Heroes. Book Second. Of Hughdietrich, and His Son Wolfdietrich.”, in [Henry William Weber, Robert Jamieson, and Walter Scott], editors, Illustrations of Northern Antiquities, […], Edinburgh: Printed by James Ballantyne and Co. for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, London; and John Ballantyne and Co., Edinburgh, →OCLC, adventure IX, page 80

   Had I possessed any power of ‘gramarye,’ you would certainly have found yourself all of a sudden transported through the air.

   1836, Henry F[othergill] Chorley, chapter II, in Memorials of Mrs. Hemans: With Illustrations of Her Literary Character from Her Private Correspondence. [...] In Two Volumes, volume II, London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit Street, →OCLC, pages 58–59

   Whilst a tale of gramary, or love, will draw thousands to Melrose or Loch Katrine, few are willing to read the history of Popish ascendency, or Protestant reformation, amidst the ruins of St. Andrew's.

   1836, Lord Teignmouth [i.e., Charles John Shore Teignmouth], “St. Andrew’s, Cathedral, Castle, Churches, University, Education, Clergy, Harbour, Bell-Rock Light-house, Fifeshire”, in Sketches of the Coasts and Islands of Scotland, and of the Isle of Man; […] In Two Volumes, volume II, London: John W[illiam] Parker, West Strand, →OCLC, page 131

   But the daughter of my uncle (this gazelle) had learned gramarye and egromancy and clerkly craft from her childhood; so she bewitched that son of mine to a calf, and my handmaid (his mother) to a heifer, and made them over to the herdsman's care.

   1885, “Tale of the Trader and the Jinni. [The First Shaykh’s Story.]”, in Richard F[rancis] Burton, transl., The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: […], volume I, [s.l.]: Privately printed by the Burton Club, →OCLC, page 28

1. literaryrareThe island of Britain.First known use 1930s

   You must remember that this was in the old Merry England of Gramarye, when the rosy barons ate with their fingers, and had peacocks served before them with all their tail feathers streaming, or boars' heads with the tusks stuck in again— […]

   1958, T[erence] H[anbury] White, chapter XV, in The Once and Future King, New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam's Sons, →ISBN, part I (The Sword in the Stone), page 137

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   When they had reached the top, he sat down puffing, and the old man sat beside him to admire the view. It was England that came out slowly, as the late moon rose: his royal realm of Gramarye. Stretched at his feet, she spread herself away into the remotest north, leaning towards the imagined Hebrides. She was his homely land.

   1977, T[erence] H[anbury] White, chapter 18, in The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once and Future King, Austin, Tx.: University of Texas Press, published 2011, →ISBN, pages 108–109

   […] "She comes from the same place I do." / "And where is that?" / The boy's voice dropped to a whisper. "From a country called Wales, part of the isle my master calls Gramarye. And from a time … in the future." / […] "That must have required great power." / "Yes." Even beneath the soot, I could see his cheeks flush. "But it's not a power that belongs to any person. It belongs to the Mirror. That's how I came here. And that's how I'm going to take you back to Gramarye."

   1999, T[homas] A[rchibald] Barron, “Great Power”, in The Mirror of Merlin (The Lost Years of Merlin; book 4), New York, N.Y.: Philomel Books, →ISBN; 1st Scholastic edition, New York, N.Y.: Scholastic, November 2001, →ISBN, page 170

   This is an England of the literary imagination. It goes beyond bricolage; it is the mimesis of a book whose own internal mimesis is the result of the organic growth of a Bookland England. It is the Gramarye which, for most of [Connie] Willis's readers, began as [Geoffrey] Chaucer's pilgrims rode down Watling Street.

   2017, Helen Conrad-O'Briain, “Bookland: Connie Willis’s Construction of England”, in Mark J. P. Wolf, editor, Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology, New York, N.Y.; Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 318