Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco

region in 1557, and Giles Fletcher, who was sent to Russia as a special ambassador in 1588.¹⁰ Both Jenkinson and Fletcher located the hub of slavery in the central Asian regions on the southern border of Russia. There, Jenkinson observed, slavery manifested itself prominently in the form of concubinage. Jenkinson even attributed some of the internal turmoil he witnessed to the absence of “natural love among them, by reason that they are begotten of divers women, and commonly they are the children of slaves.” Slavery was so common in Bokhara that merchants from India and Persia attended the famous bazaars, in part, to purchase Christian slaves. Even Jenkinson came away with some slaves. When he boarded a ship on the Caspian Sea for his return trip to Moscow, he had with him “25. Russes, which had been slaves a long time in Tartaria, nor ever had before my comming, libertie, or meanes to gette home, and these slaves served to rowe when neede was.” Upon reaching Moscow in late 1559, he demonstrated his willingness to participate in the indigenous system of bondage and exchange by presenting some of his slaves to the Tsar as a sign of his gratitude for the favors bestowed on English traders.¹¹

      Giles Fletcher’s travels were not nearly as wide-ranging as those of Jenkinson, but he also provided an insightful picture of human bondage in sixteenth-century Russia. Indeed, Russian slavery may have been relatively easy for Fletcher to grasp, involving as it did categories familiar in contemporary English discourse on the subject. Fletcher was deeply interested in the plight of “the poor people that are now oppressed with intollerable servitude,” such that “people for the most part … wishe for some forreine invasion, which they suppose to bee the onely meanes, to rid them of the heavy yoke of this tyrannous government.” Everyone, in Fletcher’s mind, suffered from an absence of political liberty, but he believed “that there is no servant nor bondslave more awed by his Maister, nor kept downe in more servile subjection, then the poore people are.” In his description of “Novograde,” Fletcher elaborated on the situation of Scythian slaves who had rebelled but were then subsequently put down by their masters with nothing more than horsewhips “to put them in remembrance of their servile condition, thereby to terrifie them, & abate their courage.” Continuing to emphasize the parallels between slaves and animals, Fletcher recounted how the chastened slaves “fled altogether like sheepe before the drivers.”¹² Outside Russia proper, Fletcher characterized the Tartars, or Mongols, in even less flattering terms as a people who engaged in more extensive forms of human bondage. Fletcher claimed that the “chiefe bootie the Tartars seeke for in all their warres, is to get store of captives, specially yong boyes, and girls, whom they sell to the Turkes, or other their neighbors.” These eastern slave raiders, however, had little patience or compassion for their victims, such that if any of their captives “happen to tyer, or to be sicke on the way, they dash him against the ground, or some tree, and so leave him dead.”¹³

      English governmental affairs and commercial interests inspired curiosity about Russia and the reports of English merchants, including what they had to say about slavery, indicate that even though Russia was located nearby (at least on a global scale), geographic proximity had little bearing on cultural similarity. Russians were different and their active embrace of slavery was a clear indication of that difference. This point was made even more baldly when the English turned their attention to Ireland. Tudor and Stuart Englishmen thought and wrote about Ireland a great deal, arguably more than any other place in the world in the early modern era.¹⁴ When they did so, they rarely had nice things to say. Collectively, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland constituted the English marchlands during the early modern era. Beginning in the eleventh century, the Norman kings inaugurated what turned out to be a protracted, grinding effort to subdue these territories and their inhabitants under Anglo-Norman rule. Medieval Scotland and Wales were less unified nations than ill-defined regions consisting of multiple hotly contested principalities and fiefdoms whose inhabitants posed a serious threat to their English neighbors. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Scots repeatedly invaded northern England. As a result, the English chronicler Symeon of Durham lamented, “Scotland was filled with English slaves.” The invasion of 1138, John of Hexam detailed, led to the death of countless men while “the maidens and widows, naked, bound with ropes, were driven off to Scotland in crowds to the yoke of slavery.”¹⁵ The attempt by King Edward I, and other English monarchs, to subdue the Scots was partly an effort to extend English sovereignty, but English incursions were also designed to eliminate slave raiding on the northern frontier.

      The situation in Ireland was different. Most Englishmen subscribed to long-held and deeply embedded derogatory ideas about the Irish people, ideas that often drew directly on the foundational writing of Gerald of Wales, the twelfth-century chronicler who had journeyed to Ireland in 1185 with an Anglo-Norman force led by the future King John. Gerald’s scurrilous characterizations were the rhetorical armament of an invading army, but they proved long-lasting and his observations were translated into English and reprinted, or echoed, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁶ In Gerald’s telling, the Irish were naked, wild, and unfriendly people who had more in common with animals than with men. Or, in the unguarded words of Andrew Trollope in a letter to Francis Walsingham written in 1581, the Irish “are not christian, civil human creatures, but heathen or rather savages and brute beasts” who “go commonly all naked.” Clearly intent on making sure Walsingham did not miss the point, Trollope added that “[i]f hell were open and all the evil spirits abroad, they could never be worse than these Irish rogues—rather dogs or worse than dogs.” Or, most famously, in Edmund Spenser’s telling, the Irish “steal; they are cruel and bloody, full of revenge and delighting in deadly execution, licentious swearers and blasphemers, common ravishers of women and murderers of children.”¹⁷

      Of course, English observers routinely heaped scorn on all sorts of people throughout the world, but the Irish were favored targets because foreign observers could easily compare them with the English. Unlike the people and societies that might be found throughout the Mediterranean world, Asia, Africa, or the Americas, the only thing that separated the Irish from the English was a short stretch of easily navigable water. On the surface, as Barnabe Rich noted, “the English, Scottish, and Irish are easy to be discerned from all the nations of the world, besides as well by the excellency of their complexions as by all the rest of their lineaments, from the crown of the head, to the sole of the foot.” All the peoples of the British Isles were more alike than unlike and therefore the supposed barbarity of the Irish people and the rudeness of their customs were problems in need of explaining. How was it, Rich wondered, “that a countrey scituate and seated under so temperate a Climate” could be “more uncivill, more uncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish … then any other part of the world that is knowne”?¹⁸ Colonialism needed to be justified, but who the Irish really were was an even bigger problem because that question could not be addressed without broaching the larger problem of what it meant to be English, a problem that confronted England repeatedly from the late medieval through the early modern era.¹⁹

      Ireland therefore presented England with a series of overlapping social, political, and cultural challenges that were worked out over the course of many generations.²⁰ Predictably, English commentators addressed the subject of slavery in Ireland, but they did so in curious ways during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Although the English had been in Ireland since the late twelfth century, their control over the island was generally limited to the area around Dublin—the so-called Irish Pale—and often hotly contested. During the sixteenth century, a series of local rebellions took place that shaped English colonialism on the island. In the wake of Thomas Fitzgerald’s failed rebellion in 1534, Henry VIII recommitted the English government to imposing its sovereignty on the island, even having himself declared “king” rather than “lord” of Ireland in 1541. This effort met with stern resistance throughout the rest of the century, most famously during two large-scale conflicts: the Second Desmond Rebellion (1579–83), which sought to eject the English from Munster, and Tyrone’s Rebellion (1594–1603), led by the capable Hugh O’Neill, which spread outward from Ulster and nearly succeeded in defeating the English.²¹ The bloody effort to impose English rule in Ireland, and the refusal of both the Anglo-Irish and Gaelic Irish to be brought to heel, combined therefore to create a compelling rationale for English invaders to write about slavery.

      Irish resistance to English suzerainty virtually demanded