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Introduction
Landmark anti-slavery legislation in 1807 and 1833, said Russian writer Aleksey Khomiakov, had earned England the gratitude of the whole human race. But it had not always been like this. True, by Elizabethan times the Church (with a little help from Mother Nature and the free market) had all but plucked the weed of slavery from our soil; but in our New World colonies, it was soon starting to run riot.
SLAVERY was part of everyday life in Britain both under the Romans and among the Celts, and following the Romans’ withdrawal in 410 the Anglo-Saxon newcomers continued to own and trade in slaves. The sight of English children in the slave markets of Rome prompted Pope Gregory to vow that he would send missionaries to England,* and Christians such as Adamnán in the 7th century and Wulfstan in the 11th campaigned vigorously against the practice.* Even so, one Englishman in ten was kept as a slave when the Domesday Book was compiled in 1086.
The Book listed forty percent of the population as ‘villeins’, tenant farmers treated more or less as free men. In the thirteenth century, the terms of tenancy became increasingly severe, but the Black Death of 1348 left so few labourers that landowners could no longer drive such hard bargains, and by Elizabethan times villeinage was all but extinct. However, by now Portugal and Spain were busily trafficking African slaves to Caribbean plantations, and in 1619 African slaves began to arrive in England’s first New World colony, Virginia.*
For Pope Gregory’s mission in 597, see The Baptism of Kent.
Adamnán, Abbot of Iona from 679 to 704, is best known today for The Law of the Innocents, an attempt to civilise Celtic society. Wulfstan was Bishop of Worcester from 1061 to 1092, and the last of the pre-Norman bishops: see Wulfstan and the Seal of Approval.
Many slaves in New World colonies were from the British Isles. Following the brutal siege and capture of Drogheda in Ireland (1649), Oliver Cromwell shipped the thirty survivors to the West Indies as slaves for the plantations there. Colonel Stubber, one of his trusted men, sent upwards of a thousand men to the Caribbean when he was Governor of Galway. English men and women were also sometimes carried off into slavery in the Arab world, where slavery had been a settled way of life for centuries until the newly-converted British Empire took a hand. See The Bombardment of Algiers.
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