Crossword-Solution: ABACISTS 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 12

The period from the time of Gerbert until after the appearance of Leonardo's monumental work may be called the period of the abacists.

Even for many years after the appearance early in the twelfth century of the books explaining the Hindu art of reckoning, there was strife between the abacists, the advocates of the abacus, and the algorists, those who favored the new numerals.

The Abacists used a permanent board usually divided into twelve columns; the columns were grouped in threes, each column being called an “arcus,” and the value of a figure in it represented a tenth of what it would have in the column to the left, as in our arithmetic of position.

With this board counters or jetons were used, either plain or, more probably, marked with numerical signs, which with the early Abacists were the “apices,” though counters from classical times were sometimes marked on one side with the digital signs, on the other with Roman numerals.

The hidage of Essex in 1130 was 2364 hides.] The great difficulty of the early Abacists, owing to the absence of a figure representing zero, was to place their results and operations in the proper columns of the abacus, especially when doing a division sum.