Traditional Enumeration in the North Country

The Table of numerals represents a traditional mode of enumeration apparently once common in the North of England and Southern Scotland. This tradition remains strong chiefly in the minds of amateur antiquarians and historians in the region. Interest in the system evidently became considerable in the mid and late nineteenth century after Alexander J. Ellis, one of the most eminent philologists and dialectologists of the day, had used two sets of the numerals in a paper given to the Philological Society, in which he used the foreign-sounding words to illustrate an experimental phonetic alphabet. By 1877, Ellis had collected over fifty examples from correspondents but was compelled to report that although the numerals were widely known at second-hand, he had failed to record them at first-hand whilst they were being employed for any utilitarian purpose. Those who have investigated the counting system since his day have always come up against the same persistent difficulty that they are available only at second-hand, - one can never run to earth an informant who really uses them - but many local antiquarians remain undaunted in their conviction that they are indeed in use, even at the present time.