SOURCE: “The Labor Structure of Ælfric's Colloquy,” in The Work of Work: Servitude, Slavery, and Labor in Medieval England, edited by Allen J. Frantzen and Douglas Moffat, Cruithne Press, 1994, pp. 55-70.

In the following essay, Ruffing discusses Ælfric's writings on primary workers and secondary providers, as well as on the relationship between the secular and the religious worlds.

As a cohesive and finely-wrought dialogue on various occupations, Ælfric's Colloquy must have been an effective exercise for teaching quotidian Latin to monastic oblates. Mitchell and Robinson also find it “of particular value to modern readers because it offers an informal glimpse of Anglo-Saxon social structure, with representatives of various occupations explaining their function in the society in which they lived.”¹ But for either group of readers, I would argue that social structure, and in particular the structure of its labor, to be no less formal and no less communicated...