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Robert Recorde wanted to make his math books clear and accessible. He was the first to write such books in English, rather than in the Latin or Greek of the educated elite.

Also, little more about this subject on the PBS site:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/ance-equals.html

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"It doesn't seem that Recorde gained from his innovation, for it remained in bitter competition with the equally plausible "//" and even with the bizarre "[;" symbol, which the powerful German printing houses were trying to promote. But by Shakespeare's time a generation later Recorde's victory was finally certain."

I think that sounds exactly like people defending bizarre syntax rules in modern languages.

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