Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco

shaped English society’s ideas and attitudes about slavery, many of which tended to characterize slavery as commonplace but not necessarily a product of natural law. Most elite Englishmen, for example, including not only many gentry and professionals but also a few of the “middling sort,” were remarkably well-informed about human bondage through their university or grammar school education in the classics. Legal and political slavery were important themes in the writings of Sallust and Cicero, whose works were routinely used in the instruction of Latin.¹⁶ Livy’s Romane Historie and Tacitus’s Germania were also fundamental and popular reference sources for English knowledge about classical slavery. Indeed, both works were laced with references to slaves performing mundane tasks; they considered how people fell into a state of bondage or, in Livy’s case, might be manumitted, and they commented on the propriety of slavery as an institution. Significantly, they were not available only in their original language; these works also underwent English translations near the end of Elizabeth’s reign, which allowed the texts to reach an even wider audience.¹⁷

      For educated Englishmen—a small but rapidly growing cohort in the last decades of the sixteenth century—the essence of classical slavery was contained in the Roman Digest, a collection of legal writings compiled by the Roman Emperor Justinian during the sixth century. Here readers could discover the rather straightforward convention that there were three classes of men: “free men, and set against those slaves and the third class, freedmen, that is, those who had stopped being slaves.” These categories, however, were a product of civil society. Roman law was premised on the idea that slavery was legitimate insofar as it could be legalized, but it was also essentially unnatural. Thirteenth-century jurist Henri de Bracton [Henry of Bratton] articulated this idea clearly when he wrote that servitude was “an institution of the jus gentium, by which, contrary to nature, one person is subjected to the dominion of another.” By this logic, the bondman could actually be a free man because “with respect to the jus gentium they are bonds, [but] free with respect to the jus naturale.” Educated Englishmen, whose knowledge of bondage had been primarily informed by Latin texts, therefore were instructed with the idea (and presumably accepted) that the essence of slavery involved being in potestate domini, in the possession of another. The Roman Digest also encouraged the view that, although human bondage was against nature (i.e., it could not exist in a perfect world), it could be justified under the law and reasonably applied in appropriate circumstances. Fundamentally, then, it was an idea of slavery that had nothing to do with harsh physical treatment, essential or superficial differences in character or appearance, or labor demands.¹⁸

      The Roman Digest was also central to emerging English, and broader European, conceptions of freedom. According to Roman law, “Manumission means sending out of one’s hand, that is, granting freedom. For whereas one who is in slavery is subjected to the hand (manus) and power of another, on being sent out of hand he is freed of that power. All of which originated from the jus gentium, since, of course, everyone would be born free by the natural law, and manumission would not be known when slavery was unknown.”¹⁹ From this perspective, freedom was incomprehensible without reference to its antithesis in history, law, and social status. All free humans were therefore more accurately termed “freed” humans in recognition of the larger and longer history of human bondage out of which the much more recent innovations, such as the concepts of freedom and liberty, emerged.²⁰

      The idea that slavery was an unnatural condition, a product of the law of man rather than the law of nature, was also supported in other popular contemporary texts. The French political theorist Jean Bodin, for one, provided a clear analysis of both the history and the inherent problems of slavery in his Six Bookes of a Commonweale, a work that first appeared in England in 1606. Bodin was concerned with whether slavery could exist in a commonwealth or, to be more specific, whether a commonwealth could endure as long as it condoned slavery. Like a growing number of authors of his day, Bodin’s treatment began with the Aristotelian conclusion that slavery was natural. Bodin, however, contrasted this view with the contention that lawyers, “who measure the law not by the discourses or decrees of Philosophers, but according to the common sense and capacitie of the people, hold servitude to be directly contrarie unto nature.” He acknowledged that slavery appeared at first glance to be natural, based on its ancient and seemingly universal history, but slavery was also fundamentally irrational. For example, slavery “is well agreeing unto nature” when a strong, ignorant man yields his obedience unto a wise and feeble man. But what could be more unnatural than for “wise men to serve fools, men of understanding to serve the ignorant, and the good to serve the bad?”²¹ This possibility elicited some of the strongest language a century earlier in Thomas More’s Utopia when he ridiculed the idea that “a lumpyshe blockhedded churle” with “no more wytte than an asse” could possess “manye wyse and good men in subjection and bondage” simply because he was wealthy. Conversely, give gold “to the moste vile slave and abject dryvell of all his housholde, then shortly after he shal go into the service of his servaunt.”²² If slavery were theoretically natural, then, it could manifest itself in a fashion that ran contrary to nature.

      Theological, philosophical, and legal treatises kept slavery alive in the minds of many early modern Englishmen, but they tell us little on their own about slavery’s resonance in contemporary society. What gave these printed sources real significance, then, was the conviction that slavery, natural or otherwise, was not simply an abstract consideration. Englishmen believed they could speak with authority about human bondage, in part, because it was an important piece of their national story. In 1576 the English cleric William Harrison was commissioned to write a Description of Britain for Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Ireland.²³ Harrison’s task was to provide a historical overview of England and Scotland down to 1066, and the story he had to tell was nothing short of a catalog of successive waves of invasion, violence, and subjugation. “Manie sorts of people,” he claimed, “have come in hither and settled themselves here in this Ile.” The island’s first inhabitants were “a parcell of the linage and posteritie of Japhet, brought in by Samothes [1,910 years] after the creation of Adam.” After several hundred years, “Albion the giant … repaired hither with a companie of his owne race proceeding from Cham” and reduced Japhet’s descendants “into miserable servitude and most extreame thraldome.” The giants of Albion were subsequently conquered by “Brute the sonne of Sylvius with a great traine of the posteritie of the dispersed Trojans…” The Romans came next, and “with them came all maner of vice and vicious living, all riot and excesse of behaviour into our countrie.” The Scots, “a people mixed of the Scithian and Spanish blood” who were “given to the eating of mans flesh,” also plagued Britain around the time of Christ. The Saxons soon followed, having been “sent for by Vortiger” in the fifth century “to serve him in his warres against the Picts” (a people about whom Harrison claimed to know little except that “they were setled in this Ile long before the time of Severus, yea of Caesar”). In time, the Saxons managed to get “possession of the whole, or at the leastwise the greatest part of our countrie; the Britons in the meane season being driven either into Wales and Cornewall, or altogither out of the Iland to seeke new habitations.”

      Matters hardly improved during the eleventh century, Harrison observed, when the Danes and Norman French descended on the British Isles. The Danes, who invaded Britain under the leadership of Canute in 1015, were characterized by their “lordlinesse, crueltie, and insatiable desire of riches, beside their detestable abusing of chast[e] matrons, and young virgins (whose husbands and parents were daile inforced to become their drudges and slaves …).” In their wake came the Normans, “a people mixed with Danes” who “were so cruellie bent to our utter subversion and overthrow, that in the beginning it was lesse reproch to be accounted a slave than an Englishman, or a drudge in anie filthie businesse than a Britaine.” Harrison lamented: “Oh how miserable was the estate of our countrie under the French and Normans, wherein the Brittish and English that remained, could not be called to any function in the commonwealth… Oh what numbers of all degrees of English and Brittish were made slaves and bondmen, and bought and sold as oxen in open market!” The ancient Britons were particularly devastated. Had not Edward the Confessor, the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king of England, “permitted