Freedom and slavery in Anglo-Saxon England

 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:

1. Pay rent in kind, in the form of a swine a year.
2. Perform carting services.
3. Perform reaping and mowing services for his lord.
4. “Keep up places from which deer may be shot”
5. Build and fence the lord’s house

For the cottar (a small-holding peasant owning five acres of land) the duties were as follows:

1. Perform labour services on the demesne every Monday, or for three days a week at harvest time.
2. 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.
3. He can also be expected to do coastguard and work on the king’s deer-fence

Finally, the Boor's obligations were as follows:

1. 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.
2. 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)
3. 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.
4. Each boor must maintain one hunting dog and provide 6 loaves to the swineherd.
5. 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.

The life of Charles the Simple (879 - 929) part the first: early years and rise to power (879 - 898)

This series also began its life as facebook posts I did for a medieval history group. The West Frankish kingdom in the long tenth century (c.880 - 1030 lets say) is very close to my heart - indeed its the area I wrote my masters thesis on, and the Feudal revolution debate I've been obsessing over since I was a first year undergraduate, essentially hinges on the last decades of it. Yet its political history is little known and has received little attention from academic medievalists post-WW1 (the last time a biography of Charles the Simple was written was in 1899), though in the last couple of decades that has started to be rectified. Through this blog I want to show that the last Carolingians and early Capetians can be interesting, so we'll start at the beginning ...

Charles the Simple was born in 879, five months after the death of his father, King Louis II the Stammerer of West Francia. Louis was the son of King Charles the Bald (843 - 877), who had been given West Francia at the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when the Carolingian Empire was divided up by the sons of Emperor Louis the Pious (814 - 840) after a three year civil war. However, unlike Henry VI of England, Charles was lucky enough not to have the kingship thrust on him as an infant. He had two teenaged elder half-brothers, Louis III and Carloman. They had some promise in them. Louis won a great victory against the Vikings at Saucourt in 881, that would not long afterwards be immortalised in one of the oldest surviving epic poems in German, the Ludwigslied. By 884, however, both of them were deceased. The West Franks were not going to have a five year old boy rule over them, so they got in Charles the Fat (these Carolingian kings really do have great names don't they), the king of East Francia and Italy and the son of Louis the German (Charles the Simple's great uncle) to rule over them. Thus the Carolingian Empire was briefly reunified. However, Charles, who was widely held to be incompetent, was soon faced with deposition and rebellion at the hands of his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, who had the support of the German nobility, in East Francia in 887, and in January 888 he suffered a stroke and died.

This was the final undoing of the Carolingian Empire and a seismic moment for West Francia. For the first time since 751, when Charlemagne's father Pepin the Short overthrew the last king of the Merovingian dynasty, Childeric III, and was anointed king of the Franks, there was not a single adult male Carolingian candidate for the throne of the West Frankish realms. Arnulf was not gonna become king of West Francia, because his support base lay squarely in Germany and to a lesser extent Italy. There was the Carolingian cadet branch of the House of Vermandois, descended from Charlemagne's grandson Bernard of Italy, but for some reason they always stayed out of succession disputes - though that didn't stop them from throwing their weight around otherwise. The branch of the Carolingian dynasty ruling over the Middle Kingdom (Lotharingia), had died out in 869. The only Carolingian candidate for the throne was of course Charles the Simple, and he was only nine years old. Now could not be a worse time for a child king. The Vikings had laid siege to Paris only two years earlier, and their attacks were only intensifying, given that in the last two decades they had been losing ground in the British Isles thanks to the efforts of Alfred of Wessex and Rhodri Mawr of Gwynedd. As you might have guessed earlier, there was no principle of primogeniture under the Carolingians. And while there was a sort of dynastic principle - the anointing of kings had been monopolised by the Carolingians for almost 150 years - a non-Carolingian king was not inconceivable. So the nobles and bishops of the West Frankish kingdom, figuring they needed an energetic warrior on the throne, gathered together and elected Odo, count of Paris, who had led the defence of the city of Paris during the Viking siege whilst Charles was away in Italy, as their king. At the same time, non-Carolingian kings were coming to power in Transjurane Burgundy (basically modern day Switzerland and the Franche Comte region of France) and Italy, and a non-Carolingian dynasty, the Bosonids, already ruled in Provence. The annalist of Fulda complained about "kinglets" and another contemporary chronicler, Regino of Prum, claimed that kings were being spewed from the guts of the old empire.

Odo seemed like a good choice on so many accounts. He was one of the most powerful officers in the kingdom and and major landowner - he was ex officio count of Paris, Etampes, Orleans, Blois, Touraine and Anjou (and those were just his most important ones) and lay abbot - part of the Carolingians' programme of monastic reform, was to appoint lay men as abbots to take care of estate management, political representation and military organisation while the monks got on with prayer and study - of seven monasteries, including Saint-Denis and Saint Martin of Tours, two of the oldest and most prestigious in the kingdom. He had also, like many ninth century Frankish noblemen, received a good education in the liberal arts (certainly grammar, rhetoric and logic - which would have involved the study of lots of Classical Roman texts) at Saint-Denis. The one thing that could be held against him was his background. Odo's father, Robert the Strong, had been a prominent government official and military commander under Charles the Bald, but nothing is known of his ancestry before then, beyond the realm of pure speculation - the whole theory linking Robert the Strong to Count Robert of Worms in c.800 strikes me as being rooted in essentially circular reasoning. I suspect, Odo's ancestors prior to his father were not noble, in the sense they didn't belong to the circle of prominent families who frequented the royal court - the reichsaristokratie (imperial nobility) as they're referred to in German scholarship. To my knowledge, Noble status defined by law did not emerge in Western Europe until the thirteenth century, and the Carolingians seem to have had a relatively open aristocracy, created and defined through service to the king and the state as well as landownership. Blood was largely insignificant (though family connections were certainly of no small importance to political success). Thereby, snobbery wasn't going to be too much of a problem, but above all Odo was not a Carolingian and that was going to come back to bite him.

From what little detail we have of his reign, Odo was a fairly successful ruler to begin with. He called the kingdom-wide royal ban - summons for all the free men in the realm to partake in military service for the Frankish state - against the Vikings and won some victories against them in Neustria (Normandy and Anjou area) and Aquitaine. But soon he received a knife to the back from Archbishop Fulk of Rheims. Fulk had resisted Robert's election in 888 but had been forced to yield. As soon as Odo started experiencing setbacks against the Vikings in Aquitaine in 893, Fulk made his move and anointed the not yet fourteen year old boy Charles the Simple, who was in his care, as king of West Francia. For the next four years, Fulk and Charles constantly harassed Odo, not managing to depose him but making his life very difficult. In 897 they came to an agreement - Odo would continue to reign as king until his death, but Charles would succeed him as king and Odo's brother Robert would succeed him in his offices (countships and lay abbacies) and family estates. Odo died the next year, leaving the pathway to the throne for Charles the Simple unobstructed at last.