One of the trickiest questions about understanding slavery in the medieval world is how best to understand manumission, or the freeing of enslaved persons. The practice of manumitting slaves stretches back far into the human past, with allowances for the practice present in both the Code of Hammurabi and the Hebrew Torah. Roman jurisprudence around manumission held that freed slaves should take the name of their former owners (linking them and their descendants perpetually to their former enslavers) and owed ongoing obligations to them (these obligations, the rights of patronage, were not transmitted across generations). By the early Middle Ages, manumission was usually a localized practice. While the Latin and Greek churches occasionally preached manumission as a good deed, there was never any sustained, ecumenical[1] imperative for Christians to free slaves on religious grounds.

In early England, the slave trade never really died down after the gradual withdrawal of direct Roman control. Gildas and Bede, monks writing in the sixth and eighth centuries, attest to the enslavement of war captives and a continental-linked trade out of major urban centers like London. The seventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, dictated a penitential[2] with several precepts governing the proper labor demands and marriages of enslaved people. By the tenth and eleventh centuries, early England was drawn more closely into the global trading networks of the Vikings, with sites like Dublin and Bristol emerging as centers for the trade in captives.

Beginning possibly in the late ninth century, but certainly in the tenth and eleventh centuries, English monks began to record the exchange of slaves between monasteries, the gifts of enslaved people to monasteries, and the outright freeing of enslaved people in the margins of manuscripts. Many of these texts were ornate copies of the Gospels, likely used in masses, which perhaps indicates some connection between a religious performance and the recording—at least one manumission accompanied the coronation of the English king Æðelstan (r. 924-39 CE) in 925.[3] These manumissions tend to cluster in cities near the borders of the English kingdom: many come from Bath, Exeter, and Durham. The text below is one such manumission document, from a book kept at the cathedral in Durham.

[1] From the Greek word οἰκουμενικός, meaning world-wide or universal.

[2] An advice book for priests to assess the proper penance for sins admitted during confession.

[3] The character ð, was a holdover from the runic alphabet used in Old English. It makes a “th” sound.

Transcribed and translated from Old English by Jacob Bell. The manumission appears in London, British Library, Cotton MS Domitian A VII, f. 47r. This translation CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Geatfled gives freedom for the love of God and for her soul’s need. That is Eccard the smith, and Ælstan and his wife, and all their children, born and unborn, and Arcil, and Cole, and Ecferð, daughter of Aldhun. And all those men whose bodies she enslaved for their sustenance in those evil days. Whosoever shall alter this and deprive her soul of this, may God Almighty deprive them of this life and the heavenly kingdom. And may he be cursed dead, and quick, forever to eternity. And she has also freed the men she purchased from Cwæspatrik. That is Ælfwald, and Colbrand, and Ælsie and Gamal, his son, Eðred, Tredewude, and Uhtred, his stepson, Aculf, and Þorkill, and Ælsige. Whosoever shall deprive them of this, may God Almighty and St. Cuthbert be wrathful towards them.

Discussion Questions

  1. What can this source tell us about the values of the early English world that produced it? What is important to them, in your opinion?
  2. Can we take Geatfled’s rationale seriously? Does her reliability as a narrator impact how we can understand this document as an historical source?
  3. What can this entry tell us about Geatfled’s economic conditions? How might this angle help us to better understand attitudes towards slavery in early England?

Related Primary Sources

Related Secondary Sources

  • Poul Holm, “The Slave Trade of Dublin, Ninth to Twelfth Centuries,” Peritia 5 (1986): 317-45.
  • Charles Insley, “Kings and Lords in Tenth-Century Cornwall,” History 98, no. 1 (Jan. 2013): 2-22.
  • David Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading in Early England,” Anglo-Saxon England 9 (1981): 99-114.
  • David Wyatt, Slaves and Warriors in Medieval Britain and Ireland, 800-1200 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2009).

Themes

Religion, Labor, Law, Manumission, Trade