Meanings of hornbook in English

Who would be always reciting from a hornbook to Mistress Minerva?

Not more familiar is his hornbook to the scholar, than are the heavens to my knowledge.

It was difficult to get books in those days, and a hornbook would last a long time.

Simply dame-schools, with the hornbook for boys and girls, and perhaps a little sewing for the latter.

There is a little maid from Bemerton, who comes daily to learn her hornbook and her sampler.

Why am I an enigma as dark as the Sibyls, and your metaphysicians as plain as a hornbook?

When her education had proceeded no further than the hornbook, she lost her mother, and thenceforward she educated herself.

They also tell of the use of the hornbook and the sun-dial, describe the making of soap and candles, and so forth.

Why am I an enigma as dark as the Sibyls, and your metaphysicians as plain as a hornbook? Again the sardonic laugh.

And, Captain Borroughcliffe, as you appear to be forgetting the use of your own language, here is even a hornbook for you!

Inadventurous, unstirred by impulses of practical ambition, I was capable of sitting twenty years teaching infants the hornbook, turning silk dresses and making children's frocks.

The next of Dekker's tracts or pamphlets was the comparatively well-known "Gull's Hornbook."

His "Gull's Hornbook" is written against coxcombs, and he says their "vinegar railings shall not quench his Alpine resolutions."

The other two were perfectly ignorant, but Mrs. Aylward procured hornbooks, primers, and slates, and Aurelia began their education in a small way.

I was not surprised when a school-fellow of Carlyle's told me that his favourite poem was, when a boy, 'Death and Doctor Hornbook.'

And Fletcher has "upse-freeze;" which Dr. Nott explains in his edition of Decker's "Gull's Hornbook," as "a tipsy draught, or swallowing liquor till drunk."