NECKAM, ALEXANDER (1 '57-12 I 7), English school man and man of science, was born at St. Albans in September "57, on the same night as King Richard I. Neckam's mother nursed the prince with her own son, who thus became Richard's foster-brother. He was educated at St. Albans Abbey school, and became schoolmaster of Dunstable, dependent on St. Albans Ab bey. Later he went to Paris, where by 118o he had become a dis tinguished lecturer of the university. By 1186 he was back in Eng land, where he again held the place of schoolmaster at Dunstable.
The assertion that he was ever prior of St. Nicolas, Exeter, seems a mistake, but he was certainly much at court during some part of his life. Having become an Augustinian canon, he was appointed abbot of Cirencester in 1213. He died at Kempsey in Worcester shire in 1217, and was buried at Worcester. Besides theology he studied grammar and natural history, but his name is chiefly associated with nautical science. For in his De naturis rerum and De utensilibus (the former of which, at any rate, had become well known at the end of the 12th century, and was probably written about i8o) Neckam has preserved to us the earliest European notices of the magnet as a guide to seamen—outside China, indeed, these seem to be the earliest notices that have survived in any country or civilization. It was probably in Paris that Neckam heard how a ship, among its other stores, must have a needle placed above a magnet (the De utensilibus assumes a needle mounted on a pivot), which needle would revolve until its point looked north, and thus guide sailors in murky weather or on star less nights. Neckam has no air of imparting a startling novelty:
he merely records what had apparently become the regular prac tice of many seamen of the Catholic world.
See Thomas Wright's edition of Neckam's De naturis rerum and De laudibus divinae sapientiae in the Rolls Series (1863) , and of the De utensilibus in his Volume of Vocabularies. Neckam also wrote Corrogationes Promethei, a scriptural commentary prefaced by a trea tise on grammatical criticism ; a translation of Aesop into Latin elegiacs (six fables from this version, as given in a Paris ms., are printed in Robert's Fables inedites) ; commentaries, still unprinted, on portions of Aristotle, Martianus Capella and Ovid's Metamorphoses, and other works. Of all these the De nat. rer., a sort of manual of the scientific knowledge of the 12th century, is much the most important: the magnet passage herein is in book ii. chap. xcviii. (De vi attractive), p. 183 of Wright's edition. The corresponding section in the De utensil., is on p. 114 of the Vol. of Vocabs. Roger Bacon's reference to Neckam as a grammatical writer (in multis vera et utilia scripsit : sed . . . inter auctores non potest . . . numerari) may be found in Brewer's (Rolls Series) edition of Bacon's Opera inedita, p. 457. See also Thomas Wright, Biographia Britannica literaria, Anglo-Norman Period, pp. (1846: some points in this are modified in the 1863 edition of De nat. rer.) ; C. Raymond Beazley, Dawn of Modern Geography, iii.