Fractions

St Aldhelm, later Bishop of Sherborne and founder of the original Sherborne School (705), in a letter of c.680 to Bishop Haeddi:

"As to the principles of arithmetic what shall be said? when the despair of doing sums oppressed my mind so that all the previous labour spent on learning, whose most secret chamber I thought I knew already, seemed nothing, and to use Jerome's expression I who before thought myself a past master began again to be a pupil, until the difficulty solved itself, and at last, by God's grace, I grasped after incessant study the most difficult of all things, what they call fractions."

Quoted in A. F. Leach, Educational Charters and Documents 598-1909 (Cambridge University Press, 1911), p.11.