Hornbook

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In law, a hornbook is a textbook that gives a basic overview of a particular area of law, see Hornbook (law)

Miss Campion holding a hornbook, 1661. From Tuer’s History of the Horn-Book.

A hornbook was a primer for children consisting of a sheet containing the letters of the alphabet, mounted on wood and protected by a thin sheet of transparent horn. Sometimes the sheet was simply pasted against the slice of horn. The wooden frame often had a handle, and it was usually hung at the child's girdle. The sheet, which in ancient times was of vellum and later of paper, contained first a large cross, from which the horn-book was called the Christ Cross Row, or criss-cross-row. The alphabet in large and small letters followed. The vowels then formed a line, and their combinations with the consonants were given in a tabular form. The usual Trinitarian formula - "in the name of the Father and of the Sonne and of the Holy Ghost, Amen" - followed, then the Lord's Prayer, the whole concluding with the Roman numerals. The hornbook is mentioned in William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost, act 5, scene 1, where the ba, the a, e, i, o, u, and the horn, are alluded to by Moth:

ARMADO. [To HOLOFERNES] Monsieur, are you not lett'red?

MOTH. Yes, yes; he teaches boys the hornbook. What is a, b, spelt backward with the horn on his head?

HOLOFERNES. Ba, pueritia, with a horn added.

MOTH. Ba, most silly sheep with a horn. You hear his learning.

HOLOFERNES. Quis, quis, thou consonant?

MOTH. The third of the five vowels, if You repeat them; or the fifth, if I.

HOLOFERNES. I will repeat them: a, e, I-

MOTH. The sheep; the other two concludes it: o, U.

It is also described by Ben Jonson in his play Volpone, act 4, scene 2:

CORVINO: … And yet I hope that I may say, these eyes
Have seen her glued unto that piece of cedar,
That fine well-timber'd gallant; and that here
The letters may be read, through the horn,
That make the story perfect.