One of the works which Ælfric probably composed in the first instance to meet his own needs as a teacher in the monastic school at Cerne Abbas (see p. 4) is the Excerptiones de arte grammatica anglice (‘Extracts on Grammar in English’). It is a schoolboys' Latin grammar-book, written at a fairly elementary level and intended, as Ælfric explains in the preface (given below), to make Latin accessible to boys at an early stage in their monastic careers. These boys, known as ‘oblates’ or ‘novices’ (who in many cases, like Ælfric himself, would have been placed in a monastery at the age of about seven), had to learn not only to read and write but also to speak Latin. From the start, they had to participate in the Divine Office, the series of services performed daily in Latin in the monastic church according to a strict timetable set out in the Benedictine Rule (see 1/headnote). They were expected to learn by heart the psalter (with its one hundred and fifty psalms) and hymnal (dozens of hymns and chants regularly used in the liturgy), and in the classroom they would have to progress eventually to the texts which constituted the standard medieval curriculum, covering subjects such as rhetoric and dialectic, and grammar itself.

Well-known grammars such as the Ars minor of Donatus had long been adapted for the use of English-speaking learners, but they were still written in Latin.