Judging from the surprising number of manuscripts that survive, Ælfric's
Grammar was one of the most popular texts of eleventh- and twelfth-century
England. We have complete or partial copies of fourteen manuscripts of
the Grammar and two transcripts of a lost fifteenth manuscript; Kenneth
Sisam notes, "no other book in Anglo-Saxon approaches it in the number
of copies that survive." Written around 995, the text has long been recognized
as the first grammar of Latin written in a vernacular language. The limited
study of the text has focused largely on its vocabulary, the Old English
grammatical terminology developed by Ælfric. Little has been written
about it as a grammar.
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