This module discusses the place of labor in the four texts of SEAFARER and concentrates on the place of labor as both activity and idea in the early Middle Ages.
Contents: the Narrative discusses the following subjects:
Part 1: The Sexual Division Of Labor: The Garden Of Eden
Part 2: Labor as a Research Subject
Part 4: The Old English Vocabulary
To learn about the Links and Images that accompany this narrative, click on the appropriate hyperlink. We recommend that you consult So What? after you have read one or two parts of the narrative below. Note that the sources used in the narrative are listed in the Bibliography and are cited here only by author and page or by author, title, and page.
To the woman he said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you." And to Adam he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, `You shall not eat of it,' cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
Genesis 3.16-19
Of this passage, Susan Stanford Friedman writes, "God's punishment of Adam and Eve in Genesis has provided divine authority for the sexual division of labor. Adam's labor is to produce the goods of society, by the `sweat of his brow,' an idiom that collapses man's muscular and mental work. Eve's labor is to reproduce the species in pain and subservience to Adam" (76).
The sexual division of labor created lasting stereotypes. Following the iconography suggested by the description of Adam and Eve being driven from Eden, medieval artists associated Adam, the father and prototype of Christ, with gardening, and Eve, the mother, with domestic activity, including weaving and spinning. (IMAGE01 is in production and not yet available in the program) Accounts nearly contemporary with the lives of Ceolfrith and Leofgyth show that, by the ninth century, "woman's work" (muliebria opera, in Latin) had been defined by certain activities for which women were particularly valued. Young women in the area now France and Germany were, in this period, praised for cooking, nursing, and weaving and dyeing cloth (Herlihy 52). They cared for the household, taking care of animals, gardening, and brewing. Women of the upper classes also did learned work, as we see in the case of Leofgyth, writing, teaching, and painting.
Men's work, of course, was more diverse and not as specifically linked to sexual identity, but men are rarely praised for work requiring brute strength, and indeed such labor was considered a sign of a lower nature. Hercules is an exception, of course, a hero renowned for his labors. In Paradise Lost, as the poet looks ahead to the departure of Adam and Eve from Paradise, Milton compares Adam to the "Herculean Samson" and Eve to the harlot-like "Philistean Dalilah" (PL Book 9:1060-61). This is a poem that has played an important part in shaping our understanding of how work is related to gender identity (GND). (LINK 1) Milton's account of the Fall can also lead us to connect Renaissance culture and Old English; when we examine Old English versions of the event in two famous poems, Genesis A and Genesis B, we find that Milton might have known one of them (LINK 2).
Raymond Williams, an important English Marxist critic, stresses the importance of the link between sexual identity and work. He writes that, although the use of "labor" in childbirth continues today, "otherwise the word is not often used outside its specific modern contexts" (173). We will say more about these "modern contexts" in the next section; you will find further discussion of gender in the Rank module of SEAFARER.
The link between labor and sexual activity, directly connected to the concept of labor as punishment for sin, is manifest in Middle English more clearly than in the Old English period. For example, in Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale, the narrator wants to make fun of January, a repulsive and proud old man, in his passions for May, his beautiful young wife. At their wedding feast, January imagines how he will make love to her. He makes every effort to be rid of the wedding guests, the narrator ways (vocabulary is glossed in brackets):
1765 And finally he dooth al his labour, [takes all pains]
As he beste myghte, savynge his honour,[keeping his honor]
To haste hem fro the mete in subtil wyse. [from the feast]
When they are gone and the newly weds are in bed, the narrator uses "labor" to degrade the sexual act and mock the old man's apparent impotence. January says to his wife:
1821 "Ther hys no werkman, whatsoevere he be, [worker, whoever]
That may bothe werke wel and hastily; [Who]
This wol be doon at leyser partifly.
[i.e., make love; done] at leisurely, perfectly]
1841 For we han leve to pleye us by the law." [permission]
Thus laboureth he til that the day gan dawe. [dawned]
Thus, when January has finished his speech, the narrator ironically describes sexual "play" ("We have permission to play," January says in line 1841), as "labor." The husband's sexual ambitions are mocked: the male lover is cast as a "workman," his wife represented as a task or project (quite literally here, a "sex object"), and sexual intercourse is parodied not as play--which it is to the male--but as labor, for it is an effort for the old man to make love. And the narrator lets us know how May responded, not by telling us what she thought, but (as Chaucer often does), by not telling us:
1851 But God woot what that May thoughte in her herte [knows]
Whan she hym saugh up sittynge in his sherte...
The humor in this case depends partly on our remembering that not only that January is very old (he's sixty, a great age in Chaucer's time) but also an "worthy knyght" (1246); he is someone whose age and class should keep him from labor of any kind. If you consult a concordance to Chaucer's works, you can discover other ways in which labor serves as a metaphor, many times for ridiculing the poet's subject. (LINK 3) Such humor does not necessarily indicate a lack of respect for labor or for laborers themselves; the point rather is that when a task is difficult (or inappropriately "difficult," as having sex), an author can create mockery by calling something "labor" that is not really work in the sense of producing commodities: labor is instead a figure of speech. Such figures of speech may express deep-seated cultural attitudes derived from the view, already old in Chaucer's time, that work degraded rather than ennobled who perform it. (See the SEAFARER module on "Rank and Social Relations" for a discussion of the "three estates" model.) Among the authors who write vividly rather than figuratively about the experience and realities of poverty, the foremost example in English literature is surely William Langland. (LINK 4)
The link of labor to man's fallen state, which originates in the paradigm of work as punishment for sin, had far-reaching consequences for the development of medieval social systems. It is necessary to do more than refer to "labor" and "work" in our discussion because such terms are commonplace and are, because they are so familiar, difficult to analyze. Moreover, unless we have a more precise idea of what these terms are, and of what elements work together to constitute them, we will not be able to examine texts carefully. Once we become aware of the differences between abstract and concrete ideas of labor, and once we break labor down into the parts that create the "labor process," we can turn to our texts with some clear ideas of what to look for in them.
Our discussion of the sexual division of labor requires that we know more about the term "labor" itself as it has developed in intellectual history. Labor is "an interaction between the person who works and the natural world such that elements of the latter are consciously altered in a purposive manner." Labor is valued through the "labor process," a term which describes this synthesis of how labor is given material or objective form. The work must be "purposive" or directed at a productive activity; the work must be performed on something (on raw materials); and the labor involves tools and other existing means the enable the work to be done (these range from roads and harbors to specialized work instruments like knives (Bottimore 267). The raw materials and tools are usually referred to as the "means of production," and it is very important in economic analysis to know which social forces (the Church) control the means of production.
What are the "modern contexts" to which Raymond Williams says "labor" now refers? There appear to be two: "the economic abstraction of the activity" of work, and "the social abstraction of that class of people who performed it" (179, 178). We are familiar with such expressions as "labor force" and "labor relations," and "laborer" is still in current use to indicate those who perform certain kinds of physical work, unskilled or skilled. Today we refer to one's "work" rather than one's "labor," and so we are less likely to associate labor with pain or trouble, an association, we shall see here, that had enormous importance for the status of the working poor in the Middle Ages. But "work," like "labor," had an early association with pain and toil, and the history of both words indicates the relationship between modern attitudes and medieval institutions. "Work" retains the general, neutral sense of "doing something," but "working" usually means "working for pay," so that someone who is not working for hire (e.g., the traditional housewife, or the child who belongs to a working-class family and works on a farm or other family-owned business) could be described as "out of work," even though they work all the time (Williams 335).
In order to understand labor more clearly, we need to differentiate between its abstract and concrete forms, between "labor force" and actual workers. Marx later distinguished between "social labor" and "concrete labor," with the latter representing the forms labor takes to produce commodities. "Concrete labor" is the visible appearance of labor, and when concrete labor produces its commodity in excess of demand (when there are more cars than car buyers, more televisions than shoppers who want them), the price of the commodity must fall and, hence, the value of that labor will decline (Sowell 87-88).
Labor as a term in political economy is a modern idea, and medieval forms of labor differ somewhat from modern labor categories. In pre-modern systems (before say 1700), labor meant "all productive work," but thereafter, in a system of modern political economy, it came to mean "that element of production which in combination with capital and materials produced commodities" (Williams 177). Within this abstract system, when we speak of "labor" we speak of "the actual exercise of human productive powers to alter the use value of, and add value to, commodities" (Bottimore 265). Workers do not sell their labor; rather, they sell "labor power," which is defined as "the capacity to do useful work which adds value to commodities," to capitalists for wages paid in money (Bottimore 265).
As an illustration, we might think of what it means to buy and sell slaves. We see in the Anglo-Saxon period that slaves were sometimes valued because of their rank. Before capture a slave might have been a thane of an important household, as Bede tells us in the example of Imma (Ecclesiastical History, Book 4, Chapter 22). Bede reports that a trader from Frisia (now the Netherlands) in London bought Imma, presumably indicating the activity of the slave trade at the time. But slaves were not valued for themselves, usually, but for the labor they could perform: for their capacity to do work, for their "labor power." (LINK 5)
These general statements about labor as both an ideological and an economic factor lead us to examine the role of labor both as a concept and as specific practice in the four SEAFARER texts. In texts from the Middle Ages, "labor" refers not to an abstraction but to the people who work, and in the texts included in SEAFARER we read about laborers and their activities rather than categories of production. It is no doubt at least in part because there is no theory of labor in this period, outside that supplied by the association of labor with punishment for sin, that there is so little yet written about labor in the Old English period in particular. The theological ideas seem commonplace; economic systems functioning behind and within those ideas are difficult for general readers to detect.
We will discuss the Colloquy first, then the Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, and finally the the lives of Ceolfrith and Leofgyth.
1. LABOR IN THE Colloquy
In the Colloquy, the teacher asks several characters who participate in the dialogue about their work. Words for work are prominent in his discussions with the plowman, the shepherd, and the ox driver. "Plowman, what do you say? How do you perform your work?" "Oh, dear lord, I work hard," the plowman replies. "I go out at daybreak, driving the oxen to the field and yoke them to the plow. Never is the winter so severe that I, for fear of my lord, dare to hide at home." Images of plowmen in medieval manuscripts are common. Our first, from an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, shows a heavy, wheeled plow drawn by four oxen, with a plowman and two helpers. (IMAGE02) The second shows much smaller plow, without wheels, drawn by two oxen. (IMAGE03) The third, our latest example, is from a fourteenth-century manuscript. (IMAGE04) The teacher then asks the shepherd about his work. (IMAGE05) Later he asks the same question of the oxherd, who replies, "O, lord, I do a lot of work." Students interested in theater and drama in the medieval period will want to compare these representations of rural workers with the representations in one of the most famous medieval dramatic texts, the Second Shepherds' Play, which is available in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (Vol. 1), and elsewhere. (LINK 6)
The most telling discussion of labor in the Colloquy comes at the end, when the teacher asks the pupils to rank the various occupations and to distinguish them on the basis of their holiness. Curiously it is the plowman who triumphs, at least in the teacher's final settling of the dispute that breaks out. One of the "wise ones," a counselor whose learning is essential to the community (a monastic elder?), says, "It appears to me that God's service holds sovereignty among these crafts, just as it say in the Gospel: First seek God's kingdom and his righteousness, and all things will be given to you." When asked which is supreme among the "worldly crafts" the wise one replies, "Agriculture, since the plowman feeds us all."
This prompts a dispute in which other workers insist that their skills are more important than plowing. The smith (IMAGE06) and the carpenter (IMAGE07) and others stress the essential nature of their work. They point out that without metal tool--e.g., the plowshare--agricultural work could not be done. Metal parts are important to plows, as you can see in two images of plowmen above in particular (IMAGE02, IMAGE04). Other workers using metal tools include diggers, whose spades have wooden handles but metal "shoes" (IMAGE08), and mowers and reapers (IMAGE09). Other crafts referred to in the text also require metal tools; among these are shoes (IMAGE10) and other kinds of leather gear for horses (see the Colloquy text, lines 147-50) and clothes, which were made and ornamented by women (IMAGE11).
Thus it quickly becomes apparent that the attempt to idealize agricultural labor in the Colloquy is based on the assumption that agriculture is independent of other kinds of labor. Just by focussing on tools using metal parts, we can see how important "non-natural" and non-organic work was (and is) to all other kinds of creative, productive, and expressive arts and crafts. But the wise one is not persuaded. He says, "Truth indeed says so, but it is better for us to dwell with you, the plowman, than with you, because the plowman gives us bread and drink." And he concludes,
"Yes, companions and good workers, let us set aside these disputes the more speedily, and let there be peace and harmony among us, and let everyone help the other with his craft, and always agree with the plowman, from whom we have we food for ourselves and fodder for our horses. And I give this advice to all workers, that each one should diligently practice his craft, because if he neglects his craft, then he is forsaken by his craft. Whichever you are, a masspriest, a monk, a peasant/ceorl, or a warrior, practice or instruct yourself in this, and be what you are, because it is great humiliation and shame for a man not to wish to be what which he is and that which he is obliged to be."
Thus the text ends by reinforcing the trifunctional model and indicating that work is an activity ordained for the good of the general social order: if there is to be harmony and productivity for all, the workers must know and keep to their places.
LABOR IN THE "VOYAGES"
The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan offer a striking change from the ecclesiastical perspectives on work we have just encountered. Ohthere's voyage is presented as exploratory, but it also clear why he travels among the Beormas: "His main reason for going there, apart from exploring the land, was for the walruses, because they have very fine ivory in their tusks--they brought some of these tusks to the king--and their hide is very good for ship-ropes." Ohthere's voyage does more than bring him into contact with people at work: the voyage itself is dangerous and difficult work, and shows us how he earns his living. We can compare Ohthere to the Merchant who speaks in the Colloquy who also comments on the difficulties of the sea voyage. He reports: "I go on board my ship with my cargo and row over the high seas and sell my goods and buy things that cannot be made on this land and bring them to you at great risk over the sea, and sometimes I suffer shipwreck with loss of all my goods. And I myself barely survive." Since we know that Ohthere was a trader, we also know that Ohthere's ship was probably of the type known as a knarr or a special kind of cargo-boat. (IMAGE12) This type of ship, 14-16 meters long (a meter equals 39.37 inches), was built to carry fairly heavy goods (such things as whetstones as well as furs and tusks). Ohthere was not a laborer, however, but what would, in the nineteenth century and after, have been called "labor aristocracy", that is, a member of the upper levels of the working class rather than a laborer. We make this suggestion not only because Ohthere obviously has a crew with him (estimated at eight to ten men) but also because he travelled to England and was present at the court of King Alfred, where his narrative was written down and inserted into Alfred's translation of the World History of Orosius. See the "Introduction" to the Voyages for further information on the text and its manuscript context.
References to labor in Ohthere's text are not limited to the sea. This text also discusses agriculture in Norway, but its emphasis is not on land-based work but rather on labor related to the sea and its products. The narrator of Ohthere's text notes the animals that the visitor owned and discusses the kind of wealth they represent. At this point we learn that Ohthere owns many reindeer but little of the livestock that the English writer expects a man of means to have. "And the little that he ploughed he ploughed with horses," the writer tells us, prompting us to ask who plowed for Ohthere and indicating that, as the Colloquy tells us, oxen were used to plow in England. We are reminded of agricultural work again when Ohthere observes that Norway is a narrow, rocky land and than only a small part of it can be cultivated or used for grazing.
The presence of labor in Wulfstan's voyage is less obvious, but the contrast between his journey and Ohthere's is important. Ohthere stopped at night and camped on land, he tells us; Wulfstan sailed continuously for seven days and thus employed different navigational techniques from those used by Ohthere (who anchored overnight). It is probable that Wulfstan too used a cargo boat. (IMAGE13). There is further discussion of navigational techniques in the Navigation module.
There are few references to land economy in Wulfstan's account, but his discussion of diet is revealing. Estland, he says, is famous for its honey and fishing. There, we learn, "the king and the most powerful men drink mare's milk, the poor men and the slaves drink mead." Mare's milk was, in nomadic societies, fermented into an alcoholic beverage known as qumys, which originated in Central Asia (Lund 66). Although this narrative does not mention agriculture or other servile work specifically, it implies the existence of a whole range of labor. Some of the work, including hunting and fishing, involved occupations that were considered valorous if not "heroic" (there are important hunting scenes in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for example), especially hunting, because it involved the use of weapons (IMAGE14). Fishing--hunting whales or walrus--is also, as the Colloquy reminds us, dangerous and therefore valorous labor. (IMAGE15) But other labor, of a domesticated kind, was not neither valorous nor glamorous (including agriculture, tending animals, and so forth). Aristocrats hunt; peasants tend sheep. In early medieval society, the slaves referred to here, who like the poor drank only mead, like the poor surely performed the most difficult tasks.
LABOR IN THE LIVES OF CEOLFRITH AND LEOFGYTH
The role of work in the Life of Ceolfrith and the Life of Leofgyth is not so obvious. In these texts labor assumes its "typical" or at least most frequent position in medieval sources, unacknowledged and assumed if not taken for granted.
The Life of Ceolfrith reminds us of monastic work, and we know that Ceolfrith himself worked as a baker, although we should remember that the hard manual labor of the monastery's economic community was not done by the monks themselves. (LINK07) Rather, such activities as baking, while obviously laborious, were not arduous; we can compare this kind of work to herding oxen or plowing. In this context, baking would seem to have more in common with producing manuscripts than with tasks demanding physical strength and exposure to bad weather.
Significant labor is formed the story of Ceolfrith, which, like the Life of Leofgyth, recounts the construction of monastic buildings and which evokes references to many kinds of labor: glassmaking, stone-cutting, wood-cutting, and the transportation of all these materials to the building site, some of them coming from overseas. Other kinds of work are implied in the text rather than represented, and in fact they constitute an entire and elaborate cultural context for the text in themselves. These include the design of the monastery at Monkwearmouth-Jarrow, which was presumably based on existing plans, some of them of continental origin. But the physical labor of building these structures is not evident. In this text a church "of excellent workmanship" is built with "great speed." In the same way, the great Heorot Hall in Beowulf seems to spring out of nowhere. But we have to remember that someone organized and supervised the labor force, and that this too is work. And we cannot forget the world of agriculture that had to exist in order to supply the parchment (calfskin) necessary to produce the important manuscript of the Bible that Ceolfrith takes with him to Rome. Here, as in the account of Wulfstan's voyage, we also meet the poor, although indirectly. We know that Ceolfrith is generous to the poor (Ch. 19) and that when he sets out for Rome the poor, to whom he has been an important benefactor, lament his departure as the loss of a father.
In the life of Leofgyth, labor is less evident because there is very little material production in the text. Whereas the life of Ceolfrith recounts the building of a monastery and refers to the creation of three Bible manuscripts and the work of taking them to Rome, the life of Leofgyth does not discuss the making or transport of any object. Nor are there references to production of other kinds, except that Leofgyth writes letters. For this reason we have included with the text of the Life a letter than Leofgyth wrote to Boniface, her uncle. The work of reading is also amply apparent in this text--even work done while the abbess slept. In para. 16 we learn that young nuns read to Leofgyth in her sleep, and that she corrected them in her sleep. Although the context here strikes us as humorous, both students and teachers recognize the underlying facts that learning and teaching are work. The point of the episode is that this important task is performed by the abbess virtually unconsciously.
The most important kind of work discussed in her life is the work of the Christian missionary, the difficult and obviously dangerous (that is, Boniface died as a martyr) work of preaching and teaching among the unconverted. It is Boniface and his activities, rather than Leofgyth and hers, that are used to bring the productivity of this activity home to us:
But concerning the monastery of Fulda, which he had founded in the wilderness of the vast Boconian forest, by the authority of Pope Zacharius and the favour of Carloman, king of Austrasia, he gave special commands; that, because the monks inhabiting that place were poor, and as yet had no other help, but supported themselves by the labour of their hands alone, he was to bring to completion the building of the church already founded there, and transfer his body after his death for burial there. (Para. 17) IMAGE 10
We note that these monks had to perform labor because they were poor, and that these circumstances are considered exceptional--that is, the monks "as yet had no other help, but supported themselves by the labour of their hands alone." Boniface is able to bring this church "to completion" only with royal assistance; but only because of his own distinguished intervention is the work completed.
Finally, we may consider the place of the work of missionary activity in the concluding exhortations from Boniface to Leofgyth to continue her "pilgrimage," passages which draw our attention to the difficulty (and the dangers) of the ventures of the Anglo-Saxon missionaries. Like Boniface, Leofgyth understood the role of a missionary is an obligation, It is not clear to what extent this obligation is related to class, but it seems important to note that the early missionaries to the continent came from Anglo-Saxon families of distinction, and that at least in part the importance and success of the Christian mission derived from the power and influence of the early converts to the new faith.
Just as "labor" requires analysis as a concept before we can understand the significance of labor in our texts, "labor" has to be looked at as a word in the Old English language (abbreviated hereafter as OE). Lexical analysis, or "word study," can occupy an entire volume, and indeed there are two important book-length studies (both in German and unfortunately not available in translation) of the vocabulary for "work" and its associate vocabulary in (see Szogs and Grinda in Bibliography). Most of this research concerns "work" and words for it in Old English. Among words related to "work" in the new Dictionary of Old English (still in progress) are "labor," "gedeor" and "to labor," "deorfan." Both are found in the Colloquy. Our word for work comes from the OE "weorc," which occurs very often in OE texts. The vast majority of examples of "gedeor" come from the homilies of Ælfric, author of the Latin text of the Colloquy, and from the Old English translations of monastic rules, including the Rule of St. Benedict and the Rule of Chrodegang, a bishop of Metz in Germany (d. 750?), whose text was translated into Old English. The Microfiche Concordance to Old English, published at the University of Toronto in 1980, gives further information about the range of Anglo-Saxon texts in which these words are found.
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