This is based on a facebook post I wrote for some medieval groups I'm on, where its often complained that there's very little discussion of peasants in contrast to the near constant posts about what kings, queens, dukes, earls and barons were up to/ were not up to. Early medieval slavery is something that's fascinated me since my first year as an undergraduate, not least given how it links to the legacy of the Roman world and its transformation (a recurring theme on this blog) and to the Feudal Revolution debate that I'm so fixated on, for which I will one day get round to doing a post on here for your benefit and mine.
Anglo-Saxon Slavery
Could these be Anglo-Saxon slaves at work in this early eleventh century manuscript?
There certainly was a lot of slavery in Anglo-Saxon England. It’s been estimated that, in the period 800 - 1066 , at least ten percent of the population of Anglo-Saxon England were slaves, though that figure may have been as high as 30%. If the latter estimate is correct, then that would mean that, proportionally speaking, there were almost as many slaves in Anglo-Saxon England as there were in Roman Italy from c.100 BC to 400 AD, according to Keith Hopkins’ estimates.
How did these slaves become slaves? Some would have been born into that condition – following ancient precedent, slavery was a hereditary condition and any child born to an enslaved parent/s was automatically a slave. Others were formerly free peasants who had been pushed below subsistence level by bad harvests or debt, and therefore needed to bargain away their freedom in order to receive the food and clothing needed for them and their families to survive from a slave master or mistress. For example, one wealthy Anglo-Saxon woman in her will gave freedom to:
“Ecceard the smith and Alfstan and his wife and all their children born and unborn, and Arcil and Cole and Ecgferth and Ealdhun’s daughter and all those people who had bowed their heads to her in return for food when times were bad.”
Others still were foreigners either captured in war or purchased at slave markets. Slave-raiding was a very standard part of warfare in the early medieval British Isles. This was a very ancient practice indeed, that can be seen in ancient Near Eastern texts and in the Bronze Age Mycenaean/ Archaic Greek societies described in Homer’s Iliad. At the same time as the Anglo-Saxons, it was very common in Viking age Scandinavia, along the eastern frontiers between the Frankish empire and the Slavic tribes and in the Islamic world, with the famous Moorish razzias. For example, when the people of Northumbria in 1065 rose up in revolt against the heavy-handed and unpopular administration of Earl Tostig, who had been imposed on them by Edward the Confessor, they, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, invaded the Mercian shires and
“They took many captives and carried them off north with them.”
Thirteen years earlier, Harold Godwinson, after he had gone into exile in Ireland after being deprived of his earldom in 1051, invaded the coast of Somerset with a force of Irish and Hiberno-Norse mercenaries and, according to the ASC
“Seized whatever he pleased, in cattle, captives and property.”
And in 1036, when Edward the Confessor and his brother Alfred tried unsuccessfully to invade England from Normandy to reclaim their throne from the Danish king Harald Harefoot, while Edward escaped, Alfred and his companions were not so lucky and, according to the ASC:
“Some of them were sold for money.”
Alfred himself, and some of his companions, were even less fortunate – they were horrifically mutilated and died shortly afterwards. It was not yet considered honourable to be merciful to captives in war, even if they were highborn – this was a pre-chivalric age. The typical choice for any defeated warrior in the early medieval period was simple – death or slavery.
Turning to slave markets, those were also widespread in Anglo-Saxon England. There were two primary slave-trading zones – the North Sea and the Irish Sea. William of Malmsbury (1080 – 1143), looking back on the mid-eleventh century from the 1120s, describes how Gytha Thorkelsdottir, the Danish noblewoman who was the wife of Earl Godwin of Wessex, would
“Buy parties of slaves in England and ship them back to Denmark, young girls especially, whose beauty and youth would enhance their price.”
Turning to the slave trade for West Britain and Ireland, in his “The Life of St Wulfstan”, William of Malmsbury also describes the slave market at Bristol, where merchants
“Would purchase people from all over England and sell them off to Ireland in the hope of profit; and put up for sale maidservants after toying with them in bed and making them pregnant. You would have groaned to see the files of the wretches of people roped together, young people of both sexes, whose youth and beauty would have aroused the pity of barbarians, being put up for sale every day.”
This passage brings into focus two things. One being the brutality of the slave system in Anglo-Saxon England. The second being the range of different roles for slaves. Historians of slavery often usefully speak of the concept of “social death” – that upon becoming enslaved, a slave ceases to be recognised as a human being and a member of society with rights, and becomes something else i.e., the ancient Greek philosopher Plato famously described the slave as being a “tool with a voice.” Certainly, a degree of violent and inhumane treatment was built into the Anglo-Saxon slave system, like with all other slave systems. The punishments for transgressive behaviour could be very harsh, including being branded like cattle, blinded, castrated, stoned to death by other slaves (if male) or burned alive (if female). As alluded to earlier in that passage from William of Malmesbury, like in all patriarchal societies which also have systems of slavery, female slaves in Anglo-Saxon England were extremely vulnerable to sexual assault from slave merchants, masters and their agents, lacking as they did the protection mechanisms available to free women – the law and family honour. William of Malmsbury also suggests that there was a certain incentive to rape female slaves – getting them pregnant would mean churning out more slaves. However, in contrast to Classical Greece and Rome, free men showing their sexual dominance over their inferiors (women and slaves) was a much less integral part of Anglo-Saxon masculinity, and over time the force of Christian moral reform began to be felt, however slowly.
Yet there are some signs that “slavery as social death” was starting to weaken by the ninth century. By this point, almost all slaves would have been Christians and many, if not most, of them would have been the same ethnicity as their masters, unlike in the immediate post-Roman period (c.450 – c.680) when the majority of Anglo-Saxon slaves would have been conquered Romano-Britons/ proto-Welsh – these factors would have made it more difficult to make slaves seem other and not “people like us.” And so we do start to see slaves gaining some legal rights and recognition of their humanity. For example, the laws of King Alfred the Great (r.871 – 899) state:
“These days are to be given to all free men, but not to slaves and unfree labourers: twelve days at Christmas; and the day on which Christ overcame the devil (15 February); and the anniversary of St Gregory (12 March); and the seven days before Easter and the seven after; and one day at the feast of St Peter and St Paul (29 June); and in harvest-time the whole week before the feast of St Mary (15 August); and one day at the feast of All Saints (1 November). And the four Wednesdays in the four Ember weeks are to be given to all slaves, to sell to whomsoever they please anything of what anyone has given them in God’s name, or of what they can earn in any of their spare time.”
A folio of the Laws of King Alfred
While it is clear that slaves are not afforded the right to enjoy the same Christian holidays as the free, at the same time their agency as human beings is recognised in that the are allowed to engage in buying and selling objects at their own volition during Lent. And it is also hinted at that slaves could do certain additional tasks for rewards and wages, and were also the recipients of gifts given as pious acts of charity by the free, the latter recognising that slaves were human beings with souls and that treating them kindly would please God.
Slaves could be employed in all kinds of things. Given that this series is about peasants and agriculture, it is of course important to remember, as noted from the outset, that many slaves were employed as agricultural workers, but some were employed as domestic servants, artisans or even priests. And as hinted at from the allusions to the prettiness of the slave girls sold by Gytha, many female slaves may even have served primarily as entertainers and concubines to their masters, much like the harem women of the Islamic world.
Let’s finish our discussion Anglo-Saxon slavery with a quote from Abbot Aelfric of Eynsham (955 – 1010), a prodigiously learned man who produced translations of Latin works into Old English and wrote an Old English grammar textbook and glossary. Aelfric describes the life of the field slave as follows:
“I go out at daybreak, goading the oxen to the field, and I join them to the plough; there is not a winter so harsh that I dare not lurk at home for fear of my master.”
As you can see, there’s no sugar-coating of the slave’s condition in that description, however brief, and a measure of human sympathy.
The free peasantry in Anglo-Saxon England
The majority of the population in Anglo-Saxon England was, however, comprised of peasant families who owned landed property and were legally free – these people were known in Old English as ceorls. Being legally free didn’t just mean not being a slave. Free peasants had the right to have both disputes concerning their property and redress for crimes done towards them and their dependents brought before the public law courts of shire and hundred, supervised by the king’s officials (ealdormen, shire reeves, reeves, bishops and abbots). At these courts, juries that would include free peasants (ceorls) as well as thegns (the gentry of Anglo-Saxon England) would participate, giving the facts of the case and eventually reaching a verdict. Free peasants also had the right to bear arms, and concomitant to that were liable to be called up for military service in the fyrd – the royal armies of levied free men (thegns and ceorls) raised in the shires by the king’s officials (ealdormen and shire reeves). They could also, on occasion, have their grievances heard and addressed in the Witan – the royal assemblies kings held several times a year to take counsel, settle disputes and make government policies, which were attended mostly by bishops, abbots, lay magnates (earls and king’s thegns) and some ordinary thegns representing the shires. Thus they were fully participating members of the public sphere which, like in ancient Greece and Rome, was the central defining feature of their free status.
However, the ceorls were not as homogenous a class as they appear. Some ceorls were clearly doing better than others, for as Archbishop Wulfstan of York (d.1023) wrote in the laws of King Cnut, if a ceorl possessed five hides (a unit of tax assessment) of land, a proprietary church, a kitchen, a bell house and a burgh gate and an office in the King’s Hall, he could become a thegn. This indicates that some free peasants were, by the early eleventh century, getting so rich from the rapid economic growth that had been taking place since the Reconquest of the Danelaw and the onset of the medieval warm period in c.900, that they were building up what were in effect manorial estates and thus attaining thegnly (gentry) status through the backdoor.
The kitchen, proprietary church, bell house and burgh gate described by archbishop Wulfstan depicted in a modern illustration of an Anglo-Saxon thegnly residences - clearly some free peasants were getting incredibly wealthy if they could build such country residences and get considered for thegnly status under the law
At the other end there was a lot of downward mobility. In the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, a combination of oppressively high taxation through the geld (the only systematic land tax levied in Western Europe at that time), the costs of military service and the obligations to repair roads, bridges and fortresses that were imposed on the free peasantry meant that many ended up as slaves or entering into some form of dependency to lords. Meanwhile, the economic growth of the tenth and eleventh centuries was leading to the emergence of a much more developed manorial system in Wessex and Mercia, based on more extensive direct exploitation of the land by lords. By the mid-eleventh century, a complex rural pecking order seems to have been in place. A document called the “Rights and Ranks of People”, written in Old English sometime in the reign of Edward the Confessor and copied in Latin in the twelfth century. Between the thegn and the slave, this document specifies three types of free peasant instead of the traditional ceorl – (in descending order of status) the geneat, the cottar and the boor.
The obligations of the geneat (the original meaning of that word was courtier/ companion, but by the 11th century it just simply meant a free proprietor of some standing) were completely subject to regional variation, butc could include the following:
- Pay rent in kind, in the form of a swine a year.
- Perform carting services.
- Perform reaping and mowing services for his lord.
- “Keep up places from which deer may be shot”
- Build and fence the lord’s house
For the cottar (a small-holding peasant owning five acres of land) the duties were as follows:
- Perform labour services on the demesne every Monday, or for three days a week at harvest time.
- He has to pay Peter’s pence (a tax of one penny paid by any freeholder with land above a certain value to the Holy See, abolished by Henry VIII in 1534) on Ascension Day and the tithe on Martinmas like the former two.
- He can also be expected to do coastguard and work on the king’s deer-fence
Finally, the Boor's obligations were as follows:
- On some estates he has to work on the lord’s demesne (land directly farmed by the lord for his benefit) for two days a week.
- At Michaelmas he pays 10 pence in cash rent, and rents in kind at Martinmas (23 sesters of barley and 2 hens) and at Easter (a young sheep)
- He must plough three acres as “boon work” (additional labour services performed at specific times of the year) and perform various other supplementary labour services where appropriate too.
- Each boor must maintain one hunting dog and provide 6 loaves to the swineherd.
- In return he gets two oxen, one cow, six sheep and seven acres of land as well as tools for his work and utensils for his house, though all this reverts to the lord after his death
I'm going to follow up with this post very soon with one on the Continental situation in the same period, for which there are many parallels, which will involve a close look at the ninth century Carolingian polyptychs - how exciting! There will also be a post about how slavery came to an end in both continental Western Europe and England - spoiler alert: the feudal revolution does feature and the Normans (contrary to how a lot of people like to see them, most of the time anyway) aren't the bad guys in this.
