Historiae Cantebrigiensis Academiae ab urbe condita, liber primus [-secundus]

meet in the discipline, and are sent by their near relatives and parents; they are said to learn a great number of verses there. Therefore, some remain in the discipline for twenty years, nor do they think it right to commit them to letters, although in almost all other public and private affairs they use Greek letters. They seem to me to have instituted this for two reasons: because they do not want the discipline to be spread to the common people, and because those who learn, trusting in letters, study their memory less, which happens to almost everyone, so that by the help of letters, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly and their memory. In particular, they want to persuade that souls do not die, but pass from some to others after death, and they think that people are moved to virtue by this especially, the fear of death being neglected. Many other things they dispute about the stars and their motion, about the magnitude of the world and the lands, about the nature of things, about the power and strength of the immortal Gods, and they hand these down to the youth. These things Caesar, although he attributes them to the Gauls, recalls that they first received them from the Britons; our historians also testify to this, and give faith to the historians, both by the continued use of these sciences to our own ages and by books excellently published by many Britons, not only on the motion of the stars but on the dimensions of the world and on occult and natural philosophy. An infinite force of Greek vocabulary, received and retained in use, speaks to the same thing, especially in the interior parts of England and in Wales, as we shall say in our book On the Harmony of British Voices, and all the more so because Brutus the Trojan, the author of our race, was Greek, from whom it seems the Druids received these things, and handed them down to others by teaching. For thus the Greek language was instituted among us from the Greeks, as the Latin language was from the Romans when they had ruled there. They ruled, however, from the death of Lucius to King Arthur, for 274 years, during which the Britons paid to the Romans every year six thousand pounds. At which time it was instituted that whoever wished to hold a magistracy should learn the Latin language. And by the same reason that we have many Greek words, we retain many Latin words in the vulgar tongue to this day. So it may seem less of a wonder if we sometimes seek the origin and interpretation of our vocabulary from Greek and Latin terms, of which matter we shall speak separately in the Harmony of British Voices. From which it may be known that there was a clear profession of the sciences in Britain before the arrival of Caesar, especially indeed at Cambridge and Glamorgan, the refuge of the Cambridge people through the storms of fortune, as we shall report later, when Oxford did not yet have an origin, as we shall propose in the following pages. And I do not know whether Scribonius Largus, a Roman man and the first among Latin physicians after Celsus, came into Britain with Claudius Caesar for any other reason than to understand the learning of the Britons. There were, however (as Suidas is the author), Druids παρὰ γαλάταις οἱ φιλόσοφοι χὲ σεμνόθεοι among the Gauls, the philosophers and the priests, whose religion was forbidden under Augustus and completely abolished by the fifth Emperor, Claudius, as Suetonius writes.

Britons used Greek letters.