SLAVES

Richard Hellie

The slave is typically, with some exceptions, at the bottom of society. This was true in Renaissance and later Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic as well as in nearly all other times and places. Other constants also apply to nearly all slaves throughout history. For one, the slave is nearly always an outsider, someone whose race, religion, or nationality is different from that of the slaveowner. The slave typically is socially dead, excluded from participating in society, whether through voting, office holding, access to the slave-owning society's burial rituals, or simply joining in festive activities. All slaves are legally owned by someone or a corporate organization, and the powers of the state are available to slaveowners to enforce their claims to their chattel. These state powers range from registration of chattel to providing court services for the resolution of disputes over whether a person really is a slave or over which owner has the right to possess the chattel. In the eyes of the law, the slave is universally an object, never a subject.

World history knows basically two types of slaves: household (domestic) slaves and slaves owned because they produce value in agriculture, mining, industrial, or other production for their owners. Production slaves are relatively rare in world history, confined to classical Greece and Rome and in the New World after 1500. Europe after 1250 knew almost nothing but household slavery until the Nazis enslaved "subhumans" to man their factories and the Soviets enslaved "political undesirables" as well as common criminals in the Gulag, the vast penal system of labor camps. Probably even including these two episodes, slavery was never central for European economic development.

Because slavery in Europe is partly a political phenomenon defined by states in their laws as well as a nationality phenomenon in deciding who is an "insider" and who an "outsider," slavery can be discussed in terms of the major political entity in which the slaves lived, the country or nation in which they were enslaved, and under whose laws they were held in bondage. The discussion is best conducted from east to west, from Russia to England and Ireland—that is, from countries with more extensive and enduring slavery practices to places with less extensive slavery that was abolished much earlier. Thus this essay begins with Russia, then moves to the Slavic countries and the Ottoman Empire; Italy, Iberia, and France; and northern Europe; and ends with England, Scotland, and Ireland. It does not deal with Europe's role in the slave trade of non-Europeans or in the abolition movement involving non-Europeans.

RUSSIA

From earliest known times in the areas that are now Russia and Ukraine, slaves were relatively common. Russia and Ukraine had the most developed system of slavery in all of Europe; its impact there was the most prolonged in all of Europe, with the twentieth-century Soviet system of slavery lasting longer than any other country's. After 1132, whatever political unity in Rus' had existed in the previous quarter millennium evaporated as smaller and smaller principalities were created that warred with one another. Slave raiding became one of the major objects of warfare, and some of those war slaves were housed in barracks and forced to farm in an attempt to give value to land that otherwise had none for the social elite, other than as a source of taxes on the agricultural population. This situation was only made worse by the Mongol conquest of 1237–1240, for the Mongols enslaved at least 10 percent of the East Slavic population. This initiated the process of making Slavdom into one of the world's two great slave reservoirs, the other being Africa. Indeed, in many European languages the word "slave" comes from the word "Slav." The Mongols and their heirs the Crimean Tatars "harvested" Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, and Poles) and sold them throughout Eurasia, the Middle East, and North Africa, where buyers inspected them along with black Africans.

After Moscow put an end to the anarchy on the East European Plain by creating Muscovy, a unified Great Russian State, in the late thirteenth century, slavery, perhaps unexpectedly, continued to play a major role. A perceived labor shortage was a major feature of most of Russian history, with the years 1870–1917 being perhaps the sole exception. In such an environment the demand for slaves and slavelike chattel was intense. In the mid-sixteenth century a central bureau, the Slavery Chancellery, was created to record slaves, slave transactions, and disputes over slaves. Muscovy was the sole country in the world ever to have a single, centralized office for the recording of slaves. At least eight kinds of slavery existed there: for debt (which was worked off by females at the rate of 2.5 rubles and by males at the rate of 5.0 rubles per year); for indenture (a young person, typically male, agreed to work for an owner for a number of years in exchange for training and some cash upon manumission, or release); pawnship (a special category of urban slaves); special military captives (who had been seized as military booty by Muscovite soldiers but might have to be released upon the signing of a peace treaty); hereditary slaves (the offspring of slaves, who could never look forward to manumission regardless of how many generations they had been enthralled); reported slaves (elite slaves who managed estates); military slaves (men who sold themselves to cavalrymen to accompany and to assist their owners in warfare—their price was considerably higher than that of other slaves); and limited service contract slaves.

About half the slaves in Muscovy were limited service contract slaves, who violated the social scientific norm that slaves were supposed to be outsiders. Prior to the 1590s, in a limited contract, slaves signed a contract to work for someone for a year in lieu of paying interest on a loan (a form of antichresis); upon default, they became full slaves whose offspring would become hereditary slaves. After the 1590s they could not repay the loans—which they almost never did—and were freed upon the death of their owners. For the slaves, this was a form of welfare in which the slaveowners agreed to feed and clothe their chattel. All of these types of slaves were registered in the books of the Slavery Chancellery, and they were all treated alike, for example, in case of flight or ownership disputes. Except for limited service contract slaves after the 1590s, manumission was rare for Russian slaves. The numbers of slaves cannot be calculated with any precision, but they may have composed 10 percent of the population, certainly a much higher percentage than anywhere else in Europe after 1300.

In Europe after 1300 slave rebellions occurred solely in Russia. Khlopko was a slave who led others on the southern frontier in an uprising against the government in 1603. Bolotnikov, the leader of the vast uprising of 1606 under his banner, was a runaway military slave (many of the rebels were not slaves). After these experiences the government diminished the role of elite slaves in the army, thus depriving them of combat training. After Bolotnikov no slave led a rebellion in Russia, although fugitive slaves are known to have participated in the Us and Razin uprisings of 1667–1671. They also participated in the 1682 uprising in Moscow led by musketeers against Sophia, Ivan, and Peter, the sibling trio of rulers, during which they made sure to burn the records of the Slavery Chancellery. There were probably no such episodes elsewhere in Europe because of the low concentrations of slaves in Christian Modern Europe.

Slavery served as the model for serfdom in Muscovy, even more so than was the case in the territories of the decaying Roman Empire. The major difference was that the serf was still the subject of the law and owned things that his owner legally could not claim. He also had to pay taxes, whereas the slave, as chattel, generally did not. Serfdom was consolidated by the Law Code (Ulozhenie) of 1649, after which peasants began to sell themselves as slaves with increasing frequency so as to avoid paying taxes. After a census was taken in which the government discovered what was happening, all farming slaves in 1679 were converted back into serfs. Being a household slave offered one other tax dodge. Serfs, peasants, and others began to convert themselves into household slaves, whereupon the government in the early 1720s converted all household slaves into household serfs and, with the new soul tax (a head tax on every male), put them all on the tax rolls. This essentially abolished slavery in Russia, although its impact lived on in the institution of serfdom, which after the middle of the eighteenth century was increasingly slavelike in that the serf owners could dispose of serfs as though they were slaves: move them around, sell them without land, force them to work demesne lands, and control them as though they were their personal chattel. The Nazimov Rescript of 1857 proclaimed the intention to free the serfs from their owners' control, but they were to remain bound to the land until they had paid for it (over a period of forty-nine years). The slavelike element of serfdom—personal dependency on a serf owner—was abolished in 1861, but the serfs were not fully freed until 1906, when, with the cancellation of the redemption payments, they were allowed to move wherever they wanted and became almost full citizens.

By many definitions the extensive Russian use of penal servitude was another form of slavery. Exile for criminals was introduced in the seventeenth century with the twin purposes of "cleaning up" the central areas and populating the frontiers, especially the southern frontier south of the Oka and the Siberian frontier east of the Urals. Classic exile demanded that a felon, who was either a common criminal or, increasingly, a political dissident resettle involuntarily from a desired locale to an undesirable locale. After 1700 this typically meant sending someone out of Europe into Asia. Over a million were so relocated between 1649 and 1917. A slavery element entered into the equation when the felon was forced to work. Gold mining was a frequent occupation chosen for the forced-laborer exiles in Siberia and the Russian far east.

The Russian heritage of slavery was revitalized in an example of path dependency in the Soviet period. The peasants were again bound to the land in 1930 as part of the collectivization of agriculture (sometimes called "the second enserfment," in which they were not issued passports, with the result that they could not move from their collective farms) and in the Gulag system of forced labor. The NKVD (secret police) got into the business of operating huge slave labor camps as part of the intensified industrialization drive of the Five Year Plans. Soviet central planners in Moscow relied on the slave miners in Vorkuta, for example, for 40 percent of Leningrad's coal. Again, this system was unusual from a world perspective, for most of these "slaves" were not outsiders but native Soviet citizens who were made artificially into "outsiders" by the heaping on of derogatory appositions: enemy of the people, exploiter, wrecker, traitor, scum, insect. (They were supplemented by genuine "outsiders," Poles and people from the Baltic states, as the Soviet Union expanded in 1940 and the NKVD arrested and sent to the Soviet forced labor camps anyone who was considered capable of opposition. They were followed by Germans POWs during World War II.) The Gulag slaves were freed only upon closure of the concentration camps after the death of Stalin in 1953. Most were freed by 1957, and allegedly there were few slave laborers in the Gulag when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. The exact total number of Gulag slaves is unknown, but numbers up to twenty million are mentioned in the literature. The Gulag was known for high death rates until Stalin's death, which made the Soviet institution look much like the Nazi dual-purpose camps—extraction of labor until the victim was exterminated.

SLAVIC COUNTRIES AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Other Slavic countries in Central Europe also had slaves. Poland had privately owned slaves in the Middle Ages, peaking in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but they blended into serfs as the "second serfdom" expanded in the late Middle Ages. Slaves originated primarily from capture in war but also from punishment for criminal activity, indebtedness, and self-sale. Polish slaves were freed by owner manumission, by the slave's working his way to freedom, or as a punishment of the master (who was deprived of his property). A slave turned out by his owner during a famine automatically gained his freedom. Slavery was abolished in Lithuania by the Lithuanian Statute of 1588.

The Balkans (Byzantium, which fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, Albania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Greece, Macedonia, and Serbia) present insuperable problems for a short essay. About 40 percent of Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, lay in Europe; it was Orthodox Christian and used Roman law. Slavery in Byzantium yielded to serfdom and essentially died out in the Middle Ages, after 1100. On the other hand, the Ottoman Empire's faith was Islam, and slavery was revived there by the Turks. The Ottoman Turks by 1500 conquered most of the rest of the Balkans and imposed the slave norms of the Qur'an and the Shari'a (the fundamental code of Islamic law) where they could. The result was a revitalized system of household slavery as well as military slavery in the form of the infantry janissaries and galley slavery in the Mediterranean. In addition to the janissaries, there were elite slaves—as many as 100,000 in 1609—who belonged to the sultan and worked in the palace. State slaves were also used in large construction projects such as marketplaces, schools and mosques, and hospitals. Household slaves fulfilled their traditional roles—domestic service, cleaning, cooking, running errands, standing guard, tending children, and so forth. Islam permitted slave women to be concubines, which was the assured destination of almost every young female slave. Slaves were also used in the silk and textile industries and other small businesses.

Ottoman slaves were outsiders. Taken by the Crimean Tatars from the neighboring Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and some Hungarians, they were almost always Christians, sometimes animists, and typically Slavs. Up to 2.5 million slaves are calculated to have passed through the Crimean market in Kaffa (Kefe) alone in the years 1500–1700, most of them destined for the Ottoman Empire. The Muscovites set up a special tax to ransom their nationals taken by the Crimeans into slavery, and individuals paid such monies as well. Muscovite attempts to keep out the Crimeans were the major factor motivating the first Russian service-class revolution and the creation of a garrison state—in which the autocrat ruled supreme—that had serfdom as one of its major constituents. The Polish government did not engage in the ransom of its subjects, although occasionally individuals did. In 1607 a Polish-Ottoman treaty required that Polish slaves be returned without the payment of ransom, but that had little impact on the Crimeans. In spite of the treaty, Poles continued to be taken into captivity, especially after the Russians completed in the years 1636–1653 the construction of the Belgorod fortified line, which kept the Crimean predators out of Muscovy and deflected them into the Rzeczpospolita (the commonwealth). Catherine the Great liquidated the Crimean Khanate in 1783, which put an end to Crimean slave raiding. After that slaves in the European parts of the Ottoman Empire were so-called "white slaves" kidnapped from the Caucasus (Circassians and Georgians) or black slaves imported through Egypt from Africa. Turkey increased its number of galley slaves in the seventeenth century, most being from Muscovy and some from Italy. Galley slaves had one advantage over others: while in port, when not chained to their oars or benches, they could jump ship and make their way to freedom; but the number who did was very small. The Crimean War brought the trade in Christian Georgians to the attention of the British, who in the 1850s convinced the Ottomans and Russians to suppress it. The trade in Islamic Circassians was suppressed four decades later. The Ottoman slave trade was abolished officially only in 1909. As always, the abolition of the trade did not signify the abolition of slavery itself. Slavery in the Ottoman Balkans was extinguished only by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after 1878 and World War I. The modernizing reforms of Kemal Atatürk, who proclaimed the state of Turkey with himself as president in the early 1920s, fully brought slavery to an end.

Census records indicate that, in spite of the huge numbers of slaves known to have been imported, slaves never exceeded 5 percent of the total population of the Ottoman Empire because Islamic practice encouraged frequent manumission by slaveowners. In other words, the "outsiders" were considered to be "insiders" after a very brief period of time. On the other hand, the Islamic world was addicted to slaves. Social relations were established so that the society could not function without slaves. Frequent manumission meant that it was necessary to replace those manumitted either by frequent slave raids or frequent trips to the slave market. Slavery became a form of involuntary migration marked by the high death rates of those who resisted capture into slavery or died en route to their final destination of enslavement. These high death rates (often only one in ten reached a slave destination) prefigured the high death rates in Soviet and Nazi slave systems.

Roma (Gypsies) comprised an interesting subset of the slaves in the Balkans, primarily in Romania, Wallachia, and Moldova. Many of them were brought there from India by the Ottomans and remained into the twenty-first century. As a visible minority, a number of them were converted into slaves, and their enslavement was recognized by law. They were probably first enslaved by the Ottomans, who viewed them as outsiders. This view was adopted by the indigenous peoples as the Turks allowed them significant local control. As usual, the slaves can be divided into field and household slaves. Among the latter the Roma were valued as slaves in the sixteenth century as artisans and laborers. A Moldovan law code of 1654 referred to the Roma as slaves. The monarch, private individuals, and the church all could own slaves. An Ottoman Wallachian penal code included all the Roma among the slaves. When the Russians moved in (1826–1834), they tried to limit Romanian slavery. In 1837 and 1845 some slaves were freed in Moldova, and in 1847 the church in Wallachia freed its chattel. In 1855 the Moldovan parliament and in 1856 the Wallachian parliament voted to free the slaves, and in 1864 the ruler declared all Roma to be free people.

After the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, the northern part of what was to become Yugoslavia (especially Croatia) remained Catholic and fell under the domination of the Habsburgs in Vienna. While slavery was being revitalized south of the Sava River under the Muslim Ottomans, in Croatia it yielded to serfdom and did not reappear again until the Nazi conquest. Here Austria set the tone. In Austria slavery was largely irrelevant in the modern era.

ITALY, IBERIA, AND FRANCE

In Italy the slavery of the Roman Empire merged into serfdom, but nevertheless Renaissance Italy was well acquainted with slavery, which persisted at least until the seventeenth century. In the period 1300–1700 slaves probably composed 5 percent of the population at any given time. Until the merchants of the Italian city states were driven out of the Black Sea by the Ottomans in 1475, a number of them engaged in the slave trade. Particularly noteworthy were the Genoese, who dispatched any number of Slavs to Italy. Italian merchants of the late Middle Ages were the most active in the slave trade. Florence in 1363 permitted unrestrained import of non-Roman Catholic slaves. Besides Genoa and Florence, slavery flourished in Venice, where thousands of Slavic slaves were sold in the first quarter of the fifteenth century alone. In Italy Slavic slaves were joined by Africans, and both were employed in domestic slavery, where females were typically preferred and sometimes used as concubines. A small minority of slaves were used as artisans in handicraft production, both on estates and in the thriving towns. Male slaves occasionally were used as business agents to extend the family firm, and they also traded on their own account.

Although wars were frequent on the Italian peninsula, the losers were rarely enslaved by the victors. Other factors had a greater impact on slavery practices. In areas close to Islamic lands of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa slavery was reinforced by virulent Muslim slavery, especially in Italy and Spain, where Islamic merchants with their slave merchandise and morality had a definite impact. Also important in the maintenance of slavery in Italy was the heritage of Roman law, in which slavery was one of the most evident social institutions. The Black Death of 1347–1348, following famine in the earlier 1340s, killed up to a third of the population in much of Europe, creating a labor shortage and therefore increased demand for slave labor in Italy. (Elsewhere in Europe the labor shortage led to the freeing of serfs and other servile workers as rising wages created an intense demand for free, mobile labor.) The cultivation of sugarcane in the Canary Islands prompted transference of slavery there from the eastern Mediterranean islands. Italian states with navies employed slaves, primarily purchased in North Africa, in their Mediterranean galleys into the eighteenth century. Other galley slaves came from Russia, the Rzeczpospolita, Greece, and from captured enemy ships.

Spain and Portugal both experienced slavery during the Renaissance and beyond. Spain was in regular combat with the Moors, who were subject to enslavement upon capture. Both countries also imported Africans for household employment. During the Renaissance and into the modern era, household slavery continued, as did the use of slavery to retain valued artisans. Córdoba, the leading city in Spain and one of the major cities in Europe, had a flourishing slave trade and slave community. Seville later became Spain's leading slave city in terms of slaves' percentage of the city's population. The king of Castile before 1265 ordered the law compiled in the Las Siete Partidas, which was based on Roman law and was confirmed by the Leyes de Toro in 1505. Thus Roman law entered Spain and subsequently much of the New World, including Louisiana. Spain owned the Canary Islands and transferred slave sugar cultivation from there to the New World. Given these factors, it was easy for Spain to develop slavery in its New World possessions. Up to half of the crews of Spanish galleys in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were slaves. Slaves were also employed in agriculture as shepherds, and household slavery persisted into the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Portuguese slavery became significant in the second half of the fifteenth century and peaked in the sixteenth century, when slaves constituted a significant portion of the population. Subsequently it declined and by the eighteenth century was reduced to occasional household slavery. Slaves in Portugal originated in the late Middle Ages from conflicts with Muslims, but became significant only when the Portuguese began to play a significant role in Africa after 1450. The economic pull, as elsewhere, was a perceived labor shortage resulting from wars and epidemics. Most Africans were reexported to northern Italy and Spain, but sufficient numbers remained to compose 2.5 percent of the total population. Besides Africans, slaves were imported from China, Japan, Brazil, and elsewhere. Slaves were primarily an urban phenomenon, where they were valued for their household service and their income-generating activities as employees in the iron and prepared-food industries, as artisans, clerks, and merchants. As was true in Russia, owners legally did not enjoy automatic sexual access to their female slaves, and the church regarded slave marriage as a sacrament. Slavery was abolished in Portugal in 1869.

France was the European country seemingly least affected by slavery in this period. It epitomized the processes at work after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Slavery survived into the twelfth century in the Loire Valley on a few monastery estates and elsewhere. The absence of state power had made the enforcement of slave laws nearly impossible, with the result that magnates preferred to retreat to their manors and rely on more tractable sources of labor that needed less compulsion and were probably cheaper besides. The demand for slave labor was also reduced by technological improvements including improved heavy plows, the horse collar and harnesses that permitted draft animals to pull heavier loads, and horseshoes, which gave horses (which were improved by selective breeding) more traction. Water mills replaced slave labor in such activities as grinding grain. More effective crop rotation improved yields. These factors combined to make slaves an inefficient form of rural labor. As was true in much of western Europe, by the eleventh century most slaves were assimilated into the class of serfs. On the other hand, in Marseille both slavery and the slave trade flourished in the Middle Ages but declined in the city as they had declined in the countryside. France had galley fleets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but no more than 20 percent of the oarsmen were slaves. When the French jurist Jean Domat compiled the law in the years 1689–1697, slavery was not mentioned because it did not exist in France. In the early modern period in France, "slave" was primarily a derogatory epithet rather than a reality.

NORTHERN EUROPE

In Norway, Iceland, and Denmark, slavery was extinct by the thirteenth century, in Sweden by the fourteenth. During the Viking era, circa 750–1050, the Norwegians, the Danes, and Swedes went "a-viking" (became pirates) throughout Atlantic Europe in search of loot and human booty. After that era household slavery existed in Scandinavia on a very small scale, with Celts (Irish) being the most common slaves in Norway and Iceland. The word "thrall" was the Old Norse word for slave. It is assumed that increasing population density and church pressure combined to terminate Scandinavian slavery.

The modern Dutch Republic had no slaves. In 1648 it was explicitly illegal, and attempts to establish slave markets in the major seaports were vetoed by local officials. Dutch merchants, however, were prominent in the international slave trade in both Asia and the New World, and overseas Dutch were prominent slaveowners wherever Holland had colonies. Intellectually, the Synod of Dort in 1618–1619, a gathering of Calvinist theologians from northwestern Europe, was noteworthy for its statement that baptized slaves were entitled to the same liberties as other Christians and should not be sold to non-Christians. The dogma did not require Calvinists to convert their chattel and thus effectively did not compel the manumission of slaves. The Synod's dictum was important in northwestern Europe in holding that anyone was capable of conversion to Christianity and thus capable of freedom. This ran counter to the belief that certain persons, for example because of their race, were suited for slavery and thus unsuited for freedom.

The Germanies had thriving slave systems in the High Middle Ages. German eastward expansion, the Drang nach Osten (press to the east), turned many Slavs in the conquered lands into slaves. Around the year 1000 there was a full range of slaves in Germany, with the majority of course on the bottom as household dependents. Some slaves, however, were even "slave ministers," figures who had positions of responsibility in the government, just as they did in the Byzantine Empire and in late medieval Muscovy. In the Germanies slavery where it existed and while it lasted tended to be a rural phenomenon, for the famous doctrine Stadluft macht frei (town air makes one free) put a damper on urban slavery, something that was not true throughout most of the rest of Europe. Anyone who was not a native was subject to enslavement in the Germanies. A kinless, "outsider" slave at emancipation was subject to various forms of clientage and a transitional status to freedom that might last as long for his heirs as three or five generations. As elsewhere in Central Europe, so in the Germanies slavery in the productive sphere tended to be pushed aside by serfdom, especially east of the Elbe. The reason for this phenomenon was clearly economic: the owner was responsible for his slave, whereas the serf was typically expected to fend for himself. In the household, of course, the situation was different. While the household slave worked, his or her output was not monetizable.

Germany shares with Soviet Russia the dubious distinction of being one of the nation states of the twentieth century that revitalized slavery in a major way between 1938 and 1945. Unlike the Soviets, who preferred to enslave their own, the Nazis had a marked preference for "outsiders"—Jews, Slavs, communists, Roma, all of whom were called Untermenschen, subhumans who were suited for slave labor. French and other POWs were also added to the millions in the slave labor force. Over 7.5 million non-German civilians were transported to the Third Reich to work as slave laborers. Fritz Sauckel, Hitler's Plenipotentiary General for the Utilization of Labor, was the major organizer of this importation of millions of slave laborers. The Nazi choice of occupation for their slaves was somewhat different from the Soviet choice. Rather than logging and mining, canal and railroad building, the Nazis employed their slaves in manufacturing and agriculture, wherever there were labor shortages to meet World War II military needs caused by the drafting of 13 million men into the Wehrmacht. The Hitlerite labor shortage was aggravated by the Nazi mystique that women should stay at home and not replace in field and factory their men who had been inducted into the Wehrmacht. By 1945 nearly a quarter of Germany's labor force was non-German, and in agriculture it was close to half. A number of the biggest, most famous German companies, including I. G. Farben, Volkswagen, Mercedes, Friedrich Flick, BMW, Bayer, Hoechst, Siemens, Thyssen, and Krupp, used slave labor they leased at the bargain rate of four Reichsmarks per day per slave from Heinrich Himmler's SS; survivors in 1999–2000 were still suing those companies in an attempt to gain recompense for their labor. The Nazis in numerous cases followed the same noneconomic, extermination-through-labor policy that was employed in the Soviet Gulag. The Nazis also placed extraordinary priority on making their female chattel into sex slaves of the Wehrmacht.

ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND

In both England and Ireland after the year 500, Celtic and Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) peoples considered each other fair game for enslavement. Just before 1000 slavery was revitalized, and it endured throughout the eleventh century. In 1102 a church council at Westminster forbade the sale of slaves, a sign that slavery was on the wane. By 1500 it is probably accurate to say that slavery had died out in England, although not in Scotland. In 1569 (the eleventh year of Elizabeth's reign) occurred one of the most famous legal decisions of all time. In a suit brought by Cartwright, who was going to flog a slave he had imported from Russia (the slave might have been a Russian, Tatar, Pole, or Finn), it was held that "England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in." After that time, the issue of white slaves (other than indentured laborers) did not arise in England. A possible major source of slaves was ruled out when in 1601 Elizabeth ordered the expulsion of blacks from England. Early in the eighteenth century Lord Chief Justice Holt opined that "as soon as a negro comes into England, he becomes free." Nevertheless, a few black slaves were brought into England by their owners.

Throughout most of the eighteenth century English newspapers contained advertisements to sell slaves and to recover runaways. Then in 1772 the Lord Chief Justice Baron Mansfield ruled in the famous James Somerset v. Charles Stewart case that a slave essentially gained his freedom by landing in Britain. The plaintiff, a former Virginia slave, could not be shipped against his will back into slavery in Jamaica. Mansfield wrote that "a notion had prevailed, if a negro came over, or became a christian, he was emancipated." Henceforth slavery in England was unsupportable by English law. Although Englishmen subsequently were the major players in the international slave trade out of Africa and were the major slaveowners of the sugar islands of the Caribbean and the tobacco plantations of the South, slaves themselves had little or no physical contact with England.

See alsoThe Balkans; Russia and the Eastern Slavs; Roma: The Gypsies (volume 1);Serfdom: Western Europe; Serfdom: Eastern Europe; Military Service (volume 2); and other articles in this section.

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