Gramarye

[…] 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; […]

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

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.

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.[…]"

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

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.

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.

Long ago, when magic was the only written knowledge, our business was called simply Knowing. But there is far too much to know in your day, on all subjects under the sun. So we use a half-forgotten word, as we Old Ones ourselves are half-forgotten. We call it "gramarye".