ABSTRACT
Ælfric's Colloquy was written primarily for schoolchildren. It is, first and foremost, a teaching tool, and it was used in a classroom to educate young Anglo-Saxons, aged seven and above, in spoken Latin. As a teaching tool, the Colloquy is engaged in a long tradition of shaping the English student. As well as suggesting something about Anglo-Saxon pedagogy, the Colloquy offers a glimpse of the social world of Anglo-Saxon England—if only in stereotypes. Like Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales almost four hundred years later, Ælfric briefly describes plowmen and huntsmen, monks and knights, cooks and merchants. His purpose is to introduce students to vocabulary specific to these crafts and, as one might expect, to introduce the nuances of Latin grammar. Students probably would have had to memorize the Colloquy and recite it under threat of a beating. The Colloquy presents a number of characters who engage a master in dialogue, each trying to outdo the other in expressing the necessity of his craft to the welfare of the community. In this stilted exuberance, each character is able to expound in some detail on the method and aim of his adopted trade. The Colloquy suggests something about the dynamism, if not the drama, of an early medieval classroom just after the turn of the first millennium. 1
