The Life of a Fisherman
Written circa A.D. 1000

Master: What is your craft?
Fisherman: I am a fisherman.
Master: What do you obtain from you work?
Fisherman: Food and clothing and money.
Master: How do you take the fish?
Fisherman: I get into a boat, and place my nets in the water, and I throw out my hook and lines, and whatever they take I keep.
Master: What if the fish should be unclean?
Fisherman: I throw out the unclean fish and use the clean as food.
Master: Where do you sell your fish?
Fisherman: In the city.
Master: Who buys them?
Fisherman: The citizens. I cannot catch as much as I can sell.
Master: What fish do you take?
Fisherman: Herring, salmon, porpoises, sturgeons, oysters, crabs, mussels, periwinkles, cockles, plaice, sole, lobsters, and the like.
Master: Do you wish to capture a whale?
Fisherman: No.
Master: Why?
Fisherman: Because it is a dangerous thing to capture a whale. It is safer for me to go to the river with my boat than to go with many ships hunting whales.

Wright, Thomas, Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies, Vol. I, p.88, Trubner and Co., London, 1884.