Ductor in Linguas (Minsheu, 1617/1627)

John Minsheu's English multilingual dictionary (1st ed. 1617; 2nd ed. 1627, London). Its entry s.v. "Bishop" — dated by Minsheu to 1499 usage — is the earliest documented English source describing the chess piece as "cloven in the head like a miter," the foundational primary behind the mitre-naming detail the vault's chess-etymology claims rest on. The vault has only read this entry at one remove, via Murray's 1913 quotation of it (p. 424); the dictionary itself has not been fetched or read directly.

References

• claim-minsheu-1627-describes-chess-bishop-as-mitre-shaped
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