Slimming for the Beach

In Eng­land the sta­tus of the slave had been grad­u­ally improv­ing since Alfred the Great, in that his laws, from the late ninth cen­tury, had rec­og­nized a slave as hav­ing some min­i­mal rights. Iron­i­cally in this he may have been influ­enced by Old Tes­ta­ment pas­sages from Exo­dus in ver­sions of Irish ori­gin.¹ (Exo­dus 21 con­tains legal pro­vi­sions gov­ern­ing the treat­ment of slaves).

But the arrival of the Nor­mans, and the sub­se­quent accel­er­a­tion of the mano­r­ial sys­tem and the mon­e­ti­za­tion of the econ­omy meant that it made increas­ing sense to absorb the agri­cul­tural slave into serf­dom, ie as a depen­dent small holder, pay­ing rent, work­ing his plot of land for him­self, as well as work­ing for his lord. In turn, the estab­lish­ment of vil­lages and towns with their mar­ket places, usu­ally beside the lord’s cas­tle, meant that agri­cul­tural pro­duce was more eas­ily mon­e­tized. The process didn’t hap­pen overnight, and was more or less marked in dif­fer­ent areas.²

Within half a cen­tury it was rare to have a slave behind a lord’s plough in Eng­land, but slaves remained in the house­hold for a con­sid­er­able period – well into the 12th cen­tury, and on reli­gious estates change was even slower.³

As Pel­teret points out, ‘as long as slaves were regarded as the only sec­tion of the pop­u­la­tion that could be owned by a lord, there was a ten­dency for the num­ber of slaves on eccle­si­as­ti­cal lands to remain sta­ble, because canon law pro­scribed the per­ma­nent alien­ation of church prop­erty.’⁴

Nev­er­the­less, by the mid-thirteenth cen­tury, there were hardly any records of slaves in Eng­land – at least male agri­cul­tural slaves.

An ancilla was a female slave, usu­ally domes­tic, but often flex­i­ble in her duties. One curi­ous point emerges about ancil­lae and indeed non-demesne male slaves in England.

The com­mis­sion­ers who recorded data for the Domes­day Book were only inter­ested in what added value to a manor, a manor being, gen­er­ally speak­ing, a lord’s estate farmed by ten­ants who owed him rents and ser­vices. In this con­text, a slave who was part of a plough team was counted, as this added value. On the other hand, ancil­lae very often were not counted. Nei­ther were slaves who were owned by two classes of depen­dent ‘freemen,’ the villein, and the soke­man, as these would not add value to the lord’s estate.⁵

The case of the ancilla is par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing.⁶ Sta­tis­ti­cally speak­ing, like the slaves of the soke­man and villein, she was invis­i­ble. What this means for the record of the end­ing of slav­ery in Eng­land is hard to say. Cer­tainly, in the offi­cial record it declined sharply in the twelfth cen­tury to the point where it does not exist.

In parts of Europe its dis­ap­pear­ance took much longer. The last records in Swe­den are from the 14th cen­tury,⁷ and slave trad­ing was actu­ally revived in the late thir­teenth and early four­teenth cen­tury. Chris­t­ian Greek slaves, among them chil­dren, were sold in the mar­ket at Barcelona in 1314.

Or as Fred­erik Pijper⁸, por­ing over the records of var­i­ous syn­ods, put it:

One finds slaves among the Chris­tians of the sev­enth, and eighth cen­turies; they are not lack­ing in the tenth and eleventh; in the twelfth, thir­teenth and four­teenth, and later, they still exist.

Even the Holy Roman Emperor, Fred­er­ick II, a man noted for his patron­age of the arts and sci­ences, and who spoke sev­eral lan­guages, nev­er­the­less kept per­sonal black Mus­lim slaves.⁹

He died in 1250. His suc­ces­sor Fred­er­ick III, who had obvi­ously read his Exo­dus 21, man­u­mited Greek Chris­t­ian slaves in the sev­enth year of their enslave­ment in 1310.

In 1287, about 40,000 Major­can Mus­lims were enslaved.¹⁰

And so on.

Pre­dom­i­nantly female slaves were pur­chased by Ital­ian mer­chants at the mar­ket in Ragusa (present-day Dubrovnik), for sale at a high profit in Venice, Genoa and else­where.¹¹

This par­tic­u­lar revival of a mar­ket which had flour­ished as far back as the eleventh cen­tury ¹² coin­cided with the grow­ing power of the mer­chant class, cou­pled with a short­age of labour due to the Black Death plague, for a cen­tury until about 1450, when the Ottoman inva­sion of the Black Sea area cut off the sup­ply.¹³

As Susan Mosher Stu­ard has observed,¹⁴

‘A mar­ket niche existed for imported slaves des­tined to work alter­nately in domes­tic tasks, com­merce and production.’

One of her com­mer­cial func­tions was to carry goods on her back within the city, or in the case of Venice, from the gon­do­las into the merchant’s palace. It was this female flex­i­bil­ity which made the ancilla so valu­able. A woman with skills such as cook­ing, weav­ing, spin­ning, sewing and wet­nurs­ing,¹⁵ com­manded a high price. Fash­ion,¹⁶ of all things, ensured that a skilled seam­stress was in high demand, and she was often if not usu­ally a slave. Indeed, as an aside, she may at one point have used Irish wool. In 1284–85, the Norman-Irish Richard de Burgh and Nico­las Sea­grave under­took to sell 50 sacks of wool to one Baron­cino Gual­teri for £333.6s.8d, or 500 marks.¹⁷

In sum­mary, medieval social and eco­nomic evo­lu­tion was so com­plex and var­ied, influ­enced by war, plague and the rise of com­merce and bank­ing, that it is impos­si­ble to say exactly when slav­ery died out com­pletely or if indeed it did. How­ever, it is evi­dent that its exis­tence depended not on moral­ity or social sophis­ti­ca­tion, but on eco­nom­ics. While it was cheaper to buy and main­tain slaves than to hire free labour, or where free labour was scarce, slav­ery more than likely existed. And it would also appear that the enslave­ment of Euro­peans lasted, at least to an extent, and par­tic­u­larly in Mediter­ranean coun­tries, until the six­teenth century.

Deleted Chap­ter from Work-in-Progress by Philip Casey is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Deriv­a­tive Works 3.0 Unported License.

1. Pel­teret, Slav­ery in early medieval Eng­land. Intro­duc­tion pp82/83, — quot­ing Fournier in Le Liber ex leg Moysi, p 230 [↩]
2. ibid p195. The Domes­day Book is a famous sur­vey ordered by William the Con­queror to assess the wealth of landown­ers so he could tax them. Accord­ing to an entry con­cern­ing Shrop­shire in 1086, there were 4 manors with insuf­fi­cient free plough­men and no slaves; 12 manors with free and slave plough­men; 162 manors with suf­fi­cient slave plough­men; 24 manors with insuf­fi­cient slave plough­men, and just 66 manors with suf­fi­cient free plough­men and no slaves. [↩]
3. Pel­teret, Slav­ery in early medieval Eng­land. p 236 For exam­ple, the nuns of The Holy Trin­ity of Caen received sev­eral estates in south­ern Eng­land from the Con­querer, includ­ing Fel­sted in Essex. In the Domes­day Book, com­pleted in 1086, as well as var­i­ous classes of serf, the estate had eleven slaves. When a sur­vey of the convent’s Eng­lish lands was under­taken some­where between 1113 and 1130, the estate still had eleven slaves, and this time, three ancil­lae were counted [↩]
4. Pel­teret, Slav­ery in early medieval Eng­land, p224. [↩]
5. see Pel­teret, ibid, p 190–91 [↩]
6. The Eng­lish word ‘ancil­lary’ comes from ancil­iaris, which in turn comes from ancilla. When used as in ‘ancil­lary to’, it means sub­or­di­nate, or sub­servient. Con­cise Oxford Dic­tio­nary, 1990. When ancilla is trans­lated now, it is usu­ally as ‘maid ser­vant, as this is obvi­ously what her sta­tus evolved to over time. [↩]
7. Ruth Mazo Kar­ras, Slav­ery and Soci­ety in Medieval Scan­di­navia, New Haven,1988, pp. 138–40. quoted by Susan Mosher Stu­ard Ancil­lary Evi­dence for the Decline of Medieval Slav­ery [↩]
8. Fred­erik Pijper, The Chris­t­ian Church and Slav­ery in the Mid­dle Ages, The Amer­i­can His­tor­i­cal Review, Vol 14, No 4 July 1909 pp 675–695 [↩]
9. Rafa? Quirini-Pop?awski 1998 Rep­re­sen­ta­tions of Black Slaves in South Ital­ian Sculp­ture from the Ages of Fred­er­ick II Bar­barossa In: Niewol­nictwo i niewol­nicy w Europie od staro?ytno?ci p czasy nowo?ytne: pok?osie sesji zor­ga­ni­zowanej przez Insty­tut His­torii Uni­w­er­sytetu Jagiello?skiego w Krakowie, w dni­ach 18–19 grud­nia 1997 roku, edited by Danuta Quirini-Pop?awska. Wydawn. Uni­w­er­sytetu Jagiello?skiego, Krakau, pages 123–130. see http://url.ie/24h2 [↩]
10. Henri Bresc, 1990.
    L’Esclave dans le monde méditer­ranéen des XIVe et XVe siè­cles: prob­lèmes poli­tiques, religieux et moraux
    In: XIII Con­grés d’Història de Aragò (Palma de Mal­lorca, 27 setem­bre — 1 octubre 1987), vol. 4: Ponèn­cies. Insti­tut d’Estudis Baleàrics, Palma de Mal­lorca, pages 89–102. see http://url.ie/24h4 [↩]
11. Susan Mosher Stu­ard Ancil­lary Evi­dence for the Decline of Medieval Slav­ery, Past and Present, No. 149. Nov., 1995, pp. 3–28. Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press [↩]
12. Alexan­der Mur­ray, Rea­son and Soci­ety in the Mid­dle Ages, Claren­don Press, Oxford, 1978, pp49-50 [↩]
13. J.R. Hale, ed., A Con­cise Ency­clo­pe­dia of the Ital­ian Renais­sance, Lon­don, Thames and Hud­son, 1981. p 303 [↩]
14. Ancil­lary Evi­dence for the Decline of Medieval Slav­ery [↩]
15. Christoph Cluse, Frauen in Sklaverei: Beobach­tun­gen aus genue­sis­chen Notari­at­sreg­is­tern des 14. und 15. Jahrhun­derts. in Cam­pana pul­sante con­vo­cati. Festschrift anläßlich der Emer­i­tierung von Prof. Dr.Alfred Haverkamp, edited by Frank G. Hirschmann and Gerd Ment­gen. Klio­me­dia, Trier, pages 85–123. see http://url.ie/24h3 [↩]
16. ibid [↩]
17. Richard Brit­nell, Britain and Ire­land, 1050–1530, Econ­omy and Soci­ety, Oxford, OUP, 2004, p127 [↩]