A ‘colloquy’ is a sort of formal dialogue between a master and his pupil and was a format much used as an educational tool in the Middle Ages, both for imparting essential knowledge and in the learning of languages, especially Latin. The text known today as ‘Ælfric's Colloquy’ is ascribed to Ælfric on the strength of a note written in one of the manuscripts by someone who may have been a pupil at Cerne Abbas in Dorset, where Ælfric spent some twenty years teaching in the monastic school. Ælfric was the most prolific and influential of the writers who made the later tenth century, following the reform and expansion of the monasteries, the most productive in Anglo-Saxon letters. Little is known about the man himself, but he was probably born about c. 950 somewhere in Wessex and entered the Old Minster at Winchester as a boy, attending the monastic school run by Æthelwold. Probably in 987, he moved to the monastery at Cerne Abbas, newly founded by ÆthelmÆr, son of the wealthy Æthelweard, who was a kinsman of King Æthelred and ealdorman (i.e. ruler under the king) of the West Country. ÆthelmÆr and Æthelweard were great patrons of the church, and thus of learning, and Ælfric dedicated a number of his works to them, including his two great series of Catholic Homilies (see p. 181) and his Lives of Saints (see p. 170).