Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco

Germans “were never subdued by any, for albeit the Romans with exceedingly great cost, losse & long trooble, might come to bee the comaunders of some parte thereof; yet of the whole never.”³⁴

      Whether ancient Britons had been enslaved or Anglo-Saxons had always been free, the moral of these stories remained the same: “The nature of our nation is free, stout, haultaine, prodigall of life and bloud,” boasted Sir Thomas Smith in the 1560s, “contumelie, beatings, servitude and servile torment and punishment it will not abide.” William Harrison echoed Smith in his preface to Holinshed’s Chronicles by claiming that Englishmen cherished freedom to such a degree that they would sooner suffer death than “yield our bodies unto such servile halings and tearings as are used in other countries.” For this reason, Harrison claimed, “our condemned prisoners [go] cheerfully to their deaths, for our nation … cannot in any wise digest to be used as villeins and slaves, in suffering continually beating, servitude, and servile torments.” Englishmen detested slavery so much, Harrison added, that “if any [slaves] came hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterly removed from them.”³⁵ As far as English patriots were concerned, there was no overstating the case: one could not be both English and a slave, England was the fountainhead of liberty, and where there was England, there could be no slavery.

      English scholars may have disagreed on the particulars, but their collective effort to chart the history of England contributed to a language of slavery and a broader understanding of human bondage in early modern England. Competing arguments continued to circulate about whether slavery was an institution buttressed by natural law, as the Aristotelian tradition would have it, or the law of man, as the Roman Digest characterized the situation. However, Englishmen uniformly celebrated their national rejection of slavery and liked to claim that England itself was enlivened by the struggle against slavery. But just how widely did these ideas circulate? Historical and antiquarian writings could inform popular conceptions of human bondage to a limited degree.³⁶ Therefore, how people may have developed thoughts about slavery, including both what it meant to be a slave and what slavery entailed for a society as a whole, must be conceptualized beyond the important but limited confines of religious and intellectual traditions.

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      Whatever rhetoric existed about the sacrosanct freedoms of Englishmen, there was a remarkable disparity between the pious proclamations made for public and transnational consumption and social practice in English cities and the countryside. The mythological freeborn Englishman who would rather suffer death than endure bondage actually inhabited a society where human bondage was perpetuated by conscious design. Indeed, just as Tudor Englishmen were increasingly inclined to insist that they were unique in both a global and European context in their commitment to liberty, there was a perceptible rise in the incidences of human bondage within England and some serious discussion that the nation could benefit from the application of certain kinds of slavery in unique circumstances.

      If slavery was rare in Tudor England, it had been much more common in earlier eras. As late as the eleventh century, at least 25,000 slaves, roughly 10 percent of the total population, could be found scattered throughout England.³⁷ In certain counties, such as Cornwall and Gloucester, the number of slaves was significant, perhaps comprising more than 20 percent of the population. Even so, it is difficult to argue that the plight of slaves in medieval England was exceptionally harsh. The use of slaves (nativi or servi) in agricultural labor had been common throughout the medieval period, yet the social and economic status of slaves in England does not appear to have been all that different from the lower orders of free society (the villani, bordarii, and cotarii). Human bondage may therefore have been an even more galling issue to the English because they were a favored target for slave traders during the medieval period. The future St. Patrick, who was born in southwestern England, was famously taken and sold into slavery in Ireland while still a teenager. The Venerable Bede, writing in the eighth century, reported that the soon-to-be Pope Gregory the Great was first introduced to Englishmen in a Roman slave market when he came across “some boys put up for sale, with fair complexions, handsome faces, and lovely hair” who identified themselves as Britons. William of Malmesbury, a twelfth-century Benedictine monk and historian, recorded that some medieval English rulers were “in the habit of purchasing companies of slaves in England, and sending them into Denmark; more especially the girls, whose beauty and age rendered them more valuable.” In the northern regions, according to eleventh- and twelfth-century English chroniclers, “whoever seemed suitable for work” by invading Scots, was “driven bound before the enemy” and “Scotland was filled with English slaves.”³⁸

      During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, largely as a result of long-term economic, social, and religious transformations, Anglo-Norman lords unfettered their enslaved plowmen and oxherds.³⁹ Similarly, the practice of preying on English men and women to serve as slaves in foreign lands also diminished. Nonetheless, a perpetual and an inheritable unfree status continued to characterize the lives of many of the lower orders of late medieval English society. Rather than liberating their slaves outright, masters simply reclassified many of their bondmen as serfs.⁴⁰ Parallel to this transition from slavery to serfdom was the simultaneous reduction in status under the law of a group of people categorized as free in the Domesday Book at the end of the eleventh century—the villani. Serfdom and villeinage, terms often imprecisely used interchangeably, actually have distinct points of origin in the English past. Serfs, in general, were the descendants of enslaved peoples from the Conquest Era (those listed as nativi, or the unfree by birth, in the Domesday Book). Thus, although the medieval legal scholar Andrew Horn characterized villeins rather innocuously in the late fourteenth century as “cultivators of the fee, dwelling in upland villages,” he pitied the plight of serfs who, as “servi a servando,” could not own anything in their own name—“they do not know in the evening what service they will do in the morning, and there is nothing certain in their services. The lords may put them in fetters and in the stocks, may imprison, beat and chastise them at will, saving their lives and limbs.” If legal slavery perished in medieval England, then, human bondage involving physical and psychological coercion, as well as other traditional characteristics of unfreedom, persisted.⁴¹

      Although some observers continued to emphasize distinctions between the originally free villeins and the serfs who descended from slaves, these subtleties became increasingly irrelevant as the customary exactions of legal unfreedom were applied to both groups in the late medieval period. Even in Horn’s lifetime, English lords expected villeins to labor on their behalf, pay death duties (heriot), pay their lords upon the marriage of a son or daughter (merchet), pay for permission to sell livestock (toll), and pay an annual tax (arbitrary tallage). English lords treated villeins and serfs equally as chattel. Lords, or masters, could even exercise the customary prerogative common to all slave cultures of selling their bondmen. Certainly, some villeins benefited from protective rights that prevented them from lapsing into a state of categorical slavery. Despite the common-law notion that the property of bondmen was ultimately the lord’s property, many villeins also acquired their own property and defended it in their own name, according to the medieval doctrine of possession.⁴² Still, their legal status placed them in a precarious position and there was often little they could do to protect themselves from persistent or opprobrious lords.

      Technically, villeins were not slaves, but many of those who remained in the archaic condition seem to have believed there was little in their status to distinguish them from that lowliest of conditions. Bondmen and their sympathizers were quite vocal about the abuses they suffered and repeatedly pointed out the problem of reconciling the rights of freeborn Englishmen with the rights of English lords over their human property. In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer asserted in the homily of the Parson’s Tale that bondage was not a natural condition and condemned those who “taken they of hire bond-men amercimentz [i.e., a discretionary penalty or fine], whiche myghten moore resonably be cleped extorcions than amercimentz. Of which amercimentz and raunsonynge of boonde-men somme lordes stywardes seyn that it is rightful, for as muche as a cherl hath no termporeel thing that it ne is his lordes.”⁴³ John Fitzherbert reiterated this point in