gramarye

noun

1. (obsolete, uncountable)Grammar; 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; […]”

2. (archaic, uncountable)Mystical 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.”

   “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.”

name

1. (literary, rare)The island of Britain.

   “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— […]”

   “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.”

   “[…] "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."”

   “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.”