Slavery in Early Mediaeval England (review)

Certain things will be expected of a book that is in the main a study of Anglo-Saxon slavery, and most of these expectations are well answered in Pelteret’s work. There is, first of all—to list the clichés in order—the textbook statement regarding period and chronology: the North German tribes who invaded post-Roman Britain (in numbers we still have not established for certain) fall into the historiographical murk, or relative blankness, of the “Dark Ages,” and so our data on society and economy (and slavery’s position) are not likely to be plentiful or even apparent. Then there is the assumption that in the post-Roman ‘tribal’ period slavery as such is a nugatory phenomenon, since ‘history’ causes its disappearance just as the ancient world and its economy and society and arts and artifacts disappeared, in a dialectical fashion. Finally, there is the dramatically fatal terminus of Anglo-Saxon society and civilization as it appeared in 1066, with the triumph of a Norman invader bringing with him Continental manorial forms and privileges—and the advent of serfdom. All, as it happens, are proven to be pretty much wrong as assumptions go.

What Pelteret lays out, in an excellently detailed but occasionally confusing narrative-structural scheme, is a picture of a lively early-medieval ‘conquest’ society with a varied and sizeable unfree component, and also a society that moved and developed toward the estate-centered, true ‘medieval’ socioeconomic mode well before the violent advent of William the Bastard and his motley Norman and mercenary crew. So far as reaching the earliest layers of Anglo-Saxon society and reality, we do have the predictable problem of sources, though there are some; even when the sources are available “we won’t get to know individual slaves” (40)—which is true, of course, for almost any slave-holding context. The earliest data seem to identify a preponderence of Welsh (Briton) slaves, both in terms of the descriptive words used (as, wale for slave-woman) and the physical descriptions; these undoubtedly would have been British war-captives, and war-captives probably make up the original core of any slave-population, anywhere—the unfortunate “captives of the spear.” (The Anglo-Saxon population was by no means safe from this fate, as would become clear when the fearfully destructive Viking raids and larger expeditions began in the early 9th century). From the first we ought to be aware that Anglo-Saxon servile terminology was at least somewhat affected by a literary traditon that emphasized ‘kenning,’ that is elaborate poetic decoration and variation (it is of interest that the Norse terminology was not so affected—a rael is a rael—and that the greatest Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf, has almost no slaves to be seen in it at all). In any case, Pelteret helpfully adds a 70-page Appendix listing the Anglo-Saxon terminology for slavery and for freedom, from &00IR;ht (something owned, property) to wite-eow (penal enslavement).

The chief themes governing early medieval Anglo-Saxon slavery are a) that slavery, here as elsewhere in the pre-modern world, was “a natural part of the social order” (64) and unquestioned; b) that enslavement—especially by capture in war or raid—might fall on anyone, and c) that the very earliest data already show shifts and shadings in and rising out of the older ‘tribal’ concept of status and personal freedom (and servitude). These themes are drawn from a body of evidence that bears on slavery in different ways, obviously depending on the intent or focus of the evidence; legal codes on the one hand, religious documents (wills would be counted in this category, and more clearly the newly-introduced ‘penetentials’) on the other hand will tell us different things about the slave. Not much of what these data do tell us will be any sort of surprise to specialists in the study of early medieval or any other type of (or...