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SCIENCE
The main achievements of the Merton school in astronomy
were in the field ofmeasurement and calculation. Basing thenv
selves in the first
place on the so-called Alfonsine Tables made
at Toledo for King Alfonso X of Leon and Castile about
1272, men like John Maudith, William Rede, and Simon
Bredon constructed astronomical almanacs for Oxford which
of Green^
gave this city something like the modern position
wich. They have left manuscripts describing the construction
of a variety of instruments, mainly for measuring and com-'
paring altitudes and for representing planetary
motions. Most
striking are the instructions for making two such instruments,
invented by himself,left by Richard of Wallingford (PL 125 J),
son ofa blacksmith and eventually abbot ofSt. Albans; and at
St. Albans he constructed, about 1320, an elaborate astro'
nomical clock, showing the motions ofthe sun, moon, planets,
and stars, and the ebb and flow of the tides. The excellent
treatise on the astrolabe, a standard work on the subject in
English, written later in the century by Chaucer, poet and busy
administrator, is a product ofthis Oxford school (PL 126). No
less important than the work on measuring instruments were
the improvements made by the Merton astronomers in mathe^
matical in
technique, especially trigonometry, ofwhich John
Maudith, Richard ofWallingford, and the contemporaryPnv
venjal Jew, Levi Ben Gerson may be considered the founders
in its rigorous modern form. So important did astronomy be^
come that William of Wykeham made special provision for
two fellowships in the subject in the statutes ofNew College.
Another set of problems to which Merton mathematicians
and other Oxford philosophers made fundamental contribu^
tions in the fourteenth century were those of dynamics and
kinematics. In many respects these were the central problems
ofmedieval physics, and in them can be seen most cleaxly that
process of reformulation, leading to replacement, of originally
Aristotelian conceptions and methods, which was the chief
and essential medieval contribution to the revolution in physics
completed in the seventeenth century.
Aristotle had conceived of the motion of a body from one