The name (Alnecestre, Alyncester) signifies “the camp on the Alne.” A small Romano-British town or village was situated here, on the road which runs from Derby and Wall, near Lichfield, to join the Fosse Way near Cirencester. Its name is not known. A relief figure in stone, some pavements, potsherds, coins and burials have been found, but nothing to indicate an important station. No written document relating to Alcester exists before the reign of Henry I. No mention occurs in Domesday, but it is given in a list of serjeanties of the reign of Henry III. as having been a royal borough in the time of Henry I., and in 1177 it rendered four marks’ aid with the other boroughs of the county. However, there is no evidence of the grant of a royal charter, and the title of borough soon lapsed. In the reign of Henry III. a moiety of the manor was purchased by Sir Walter Beauchamp, who granted a charter to the inhabitants of the town establishing a Tuesday market for corn, cattle, and all kinds of merchandise, and also obtained grants of fairs at the feasts of St Giles (afterwards transferred to the feast of St Faith) and St Barnabas. In 1444 Sir John Beauchamp purchased the remaining moiety of the manor, and was granted an additional fair at the feast of St Dunstan. From this date the Beauchamps were lords of the whole manor until it passed by female descent to the Grevilles in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1140 a Benedictine monastery was founded here by Ralph Boteler of Oversley, and received the name of the Church of Our Lady of the Isle, owing to its insulation by a moat meeting the river Arrow. The monastery was suppressed among the smaller houses in 1536. Traces of the moat and the foundations are still to be seen in Priory Close. The ancient fairs survived to the end of the 19th century. In 1830 the needle-manufacture employed nearly a thousand hands.
ALCESTIS (Alkestis), in Greek legend the daughter of Pelias and Anaxibia, and wife of Admetus, king of Pherae in Thessaly. She consented to die in place of her husband, and was afterwards rescued by Heracles. This beautiful story of conjugal devotion forms the subject of the Alcestis of Euripides, which furnished the basis of Robert Browning’s Balaustion’s Adventure. Sophocles also wrote an Alcestis, of which only fragments remain.
See Dissel, Der Mythos von Admetus und Alkestis, 1882.
ALCHEMY. In the narrow sense of the word, alchemy is the pretended art of making gold and silver, or transmuting the base metals into the noble ones. The idea of such transmutation probably arose among the Alexandrian Greeks in the early centuries of the Christian era; thence it passed to the Arabs, by whom it was transmitted to western Europe, and its realization was a leading aim of chemical workers down to the time of Paracelsus and even later. But “alchemy” was something more than a particularly vain and deluded manifestation of the thirst for gold, as it is sometimes represented; in its wider and truer significance it stands for the chemistry of the middle ages. The idea of transmutation, in the country of its origin, had a philosophical basis, and was linked up with the Greek theories of matter there current; thus, by supplying a central philosophical principle, it to some extent unified and focussed chemical effort, which previously, so far as it existed at all, had been expended on acquiring empirical acquaintance with a mass of disconnected technical processes. Alchemy in this sense is merely an early phase of the development of systematic chemistry; in Liebig’s words, it was “never at any time anything different from chemistry.”
Regarding the derivation of the word, there are two main views which agree in holding that it has an Arabic descent, the prefix al being the Arabic article. But according to one, the second part of the word comes from the Greek χυμεία, pouring, infusion, used in connexion with the study of the juices of plants, and thence extended to chemical manipulations in general; this derivation accounts for the old-fashioned spellings “chymist” and “chymistry.” The other view traces it to khem or khamé, hieroglyph khmi, which denotes black earth as opposed to barren sand, and occurs in Plutarch as χυμεία; on this derivation alchemy is explained as meaning the “Egyptian art.” The first occurrence of the word is said to be in a treatise of Julius Firmicus, an astrological writer of the 4th century, but the prefix al there must be the addition of a later copyist. Among the Alexandrian writers alchemy was designated as ἡ τῆς χρυσοῦ τε καὶ ἀργὐρου ποιήσεως τέχνη θεία καὶ ἱερά or ἡ ἐπιοτήμη ἱερά. In English, Piers Plowman (1362) contains the phrase “experimentis of alconomye,” with variants “alkenemye” and “alknamye.” The prefix al begins to be dropped about the middle of the 16th century.
Origins of Alchemy.—Numerous legends cluster round the origin of alchemy. According to one story, it was founded by the Egyptian god Hermes (Thoth), the reputed inventor of the arts and sciences, to whom, under the appellation Hermes Trismegistus, Tertullian refers as the master of those who occupy themselves with nature; after him later alchemists called their work the “hermetic art,” and the seal of Hermes, which they placed upon their vessels, is the origin of the common phrase “hermetically sealed.” Another legend, given by Zosimus of Panopolis, an alchemistical writer said to date from the 3rd century, asserts that the fallen angels taught the arts to the women they married (cf. Genesis vi. 2), their instruction being recorded in a book called Chemā. A similar story appears in the book of Enoch, and Tertullian has much to say about the wicked angels who revealed to men the knowledge of gold and silver, of lustrous stones, and of the power of herbs, and who introduced the arts of astrology and magic upon the earth. Again, the Arabic Kitáb-al-Fihrist, written by al-Nadím towards the end of the 10th century, says that the “people who practise alchemy, that is, who fabricate gold and silver from strange metals, state that the first to speak of the science of the work was Hermes the Wise, who was originally of Babylon, but who established himself in Egypt after the dispersion of the peoples from Babel.” Another legend, also to be found in Arabic sources, asserts that alchemy was revealed by God to Moses and Aaron. But there is some evidence that, in accordance with the strong and constant tradition among the alchemists, the idea of transmutation did originate in Egypt with the Greeks of Alexandria. In the Leiden museum there are a number of papyri which were found in a tomb at Thebes, written probably in the 3rd century A.D., though their matter is older. Some are in Greek and demotic, and one, of peculiar interest from the chemical point of view, gives a number of receipts, in Greek, for the manipulation of base metals to form alloys which simulate gold and are intended to be used in the manufacture of imitation jewellery. Possibly this is one of the books about gold and silver of which Diocletian decreed the destruction about A.D. 290—an act which Gibbon styles the first authentic event in the history of alchemy (Decline and Fall, chap. xiii.). The author of these receipts is not under any delusion that he is transmuting metals; the MS. is merely a workshop manual in which are described processes in daily use for preparing metals for false jewellery, but it argues considerable knowledge of methods of making alloys and colouring metals. It has been suggested by M. P. E. Berthelot that the workers in these processes, which were a monopoly of the priestly caste and were kept strictly secret, though fully aware that their products were not truly gold, were in time led by their success in deceiving the public to deceive themselves also, and to come to believe that they actually had the power of making gold from substances which were not gold. Philosophical sanction and explanation of this belief was then found by bringing it into relation with the theory of the prima materia, which was identical in all bodies but received its actual form by the adjunction of qualities expressed by the Aristotelian elements—earth, air, fire and water. Some support for this view is gained from study of the alchemistical writings of the period. Thus, in the treatise known as Physica et Mystica and falsely ascribed to Democritus (such false attributions are a constant feature of the literature of alchemy), various receipts are given for colouring and gilding metals, but the conception of transmutation does not occur. This treatise was probably composed at a date not very different from that of the Leiden papyrus. Later, however, as in the Commentary on this work written by Synesius to Dioscorus, priest of Serapis at Alexandria, which probably dates from the end of the 4th century, a changed attitude becomes apparent; the more practical parts of the receipts are obscured or omitted, and the processes for preparing alloys and colouring metals, described in the older treatise, are by a mystical interpretation represented as resulting in real transmutation.
But while there are thus some grounds for supposing that the
