Slavery and society in medieval Scandinavia 9780300041217

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Preface (page ix)
Introduction (page 1)
1 Slavery and Servitude in Medieval European Society (page 5)
2 The Identity of the Slave in Scandinavia (page 40)
3 The Slave in the Scandinavian Economies (page 69)
4 The Legal Construction of the Slave (page 96)
5 Slavery and Freedom (page 122)
Conclusion (page 164)
Appendix: Note on the Use of Sources (page 167)
Abbreviations (page 185)
Notes (page 189)
Bibliography (page 259)
Index (page 301)

Citation preview

Yale Historical Publications, 135

Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia | RUTH MAZO KARRAS

Yale University Press New Haven and London

Published with assistance from the Kingsley Trust Association Publication Fund established by the Scroll and Key Society of Yale College.

Copyright © 1988 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by James J. Johnson and set in Trump type by the Composing Room of Michigan, Grand Rapids, Mich. Printed in the United States of America by Edwards Brothers, Inc., Ann Arbor, Mich.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Karras, Ruth Mazo, 1957Slavery and society in medieval Scandinavia / Ruth Mazo Karras. p. cm. — (Yale historical publications. Miscellany ; 135) Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN o-—300—04121-—7 (alk. paper)

1. Slavery—Scandinavia—History. 2. Scandinavia—Social conditions. 3. Slavery—Europe—History. 4. Europe—Social conditions—To 1492. I. Series. HT1211.K37 1988

306’.362'0948—dc19 87—32167 CIP

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 § 4 3 2 ~*'!1

TO JOAN AND ROBERT MAZO

Contents

Preface ix Introduction I

1 Slavery and Servitude in Medieval European Society 5

2 The Identity of the Slave in Scandinavia 40 3 The Slave in the Scandinavian Economies 69

4 The Legal Construction of the Slave 96

5 Slavery and Freedom 122

Conclusion 164

Notes 189 Bibliography 259 Index 301 Abbreviations 185

Appendix: Note on the Use of Sources 167

*

Preface

The nature of this study makes terminology extremely important. Several assumptions, discussed in chapter 2, are involved in translating a word as “slave.” In cases where the translation seems at all questionable I have indicated what word appears in the original. Except as noted, all quotations are my own translations. Most of the exceptions are translations of poetry or of citations from either Saxo Grammaticus or the first half of the Icelandic law code Grdagas, of which excellent translations exist. Where I have used published translations of

these sources, it is noted. A list of English translations of Icelandic literature is provided in Donald K. Fry, Norse Sagas Translated into English (New York: AMS Press, 1980). In the case of Russian, Arabic,

and Irish sources J have not consulted the original and cite only the translation used; I follow the translators’ transliteration. Where secondary works are available in English translation I have used the translation; where they are available only in the original language all quotations are my own translation. I have used the Islenzk fornrit series for the texts of Icelandic family

sagas, Heimskringla and Landnadmabok. Though these texts are not critical editions, they are readily available for consultation and most

modern translations are based on them. All references to sources are given by chapter or line number rather than page number (except in the case of short, undivided works} so that the text may be consulted in any edition or translation. The Danish and Swedish law codes are not available in any English translation, and even the Old Danish and Old Swedish editions are not widely available. Any reader who wishes to consult in English translation any passages from these law codes cited here can order from University Microfilms a copy of my dissertation (Yale University, 1985}. In the dissertation full quotations and translations of all cited legal passages appear in footnotes. I have Anglicized Old Norse names to the extent of leaving off the -r of the nominative singular. Names of provinces are given in the modern 1X

x PREFACE language of the appropriate country, with the exception of Jutland, whose name is well known in English.

This book has gone through several incarnations and many people have helped it to reach its present state. Research in Sweden was made possible by a research grant from the Thord-Gray Fund of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. Travel expenses and research in Denmark were covered by a grant from the Yale Consortium on International and Area Studies. While in Scandinavia I relied on the resources of

the Kungliga Bibliothek, Stockholm; Uppsala Universitetsbibliothek; Riksarkivet, Stockholm (where Clara Nevéus and Birgitta Fritz were particularly helpful); Kungliga Vitterhets Akademiens Bibliothek, Stock-

holm; and the Kongelige Bibliothek, Copenhagen. I had particularly stimulating and helpful conversations with Elsa Sjoholm, the leading expert on the Swedish provincial law codes, and Thomas Lindkvist of Uppsala University, who was kind enough to read an entire draft of an early version of this work. I also benefited from conversations with Goran Dahlback of the University of Stockholm, Olle Ferm and Sigurd Rahmavist of the Riksantikvarieambetet research project Det Medeltida Sverige, Peter Sawyer and Birgit Sawyer of Goteborg University, and Niels Lund of the University of Copenhagen.

To the codirectors of my doctoral dissertation, John Boswell and Jaroslav Pelikan, I am grateful for their helpful comments and encouragement. Other members of the Yale faculty who provided advice on various points include Paul Bushkovitch, David B. Davis, R. Emmett McLaughlin, Conrad Russell, Robert Stacey, and Robin Stacey. Seth Ward provided invaluable technical assistance in the production of the dissertation. David Pelteret of the University of Toronto also provided useful advice.

For help in the process of revision and rewriting I am extremely grateful to Edward Peters of the University of Pennsylvania. Other colleagues, including Lee Cassanelli, Robert Engs, Albert Lloyd, David Ludden, and Alexander Riasanovsky, were kind enough to answer questions or make suggestions on particular points. I also benefited from the comments of Jesse Byock of the University of California at Los Angeles. Jeff Mazo corrected my Icelandic spelling; any errors that remain are of course my responsibility. Christopher Karras, in addition to providing the usual spousely emotional support and help with the production of the manuscript, also read

the entire text at least three times and edited it extensively. Without him this book might never have been started, let alone finished.

Introduction

Medieval Scandinavian slavery is relevant to a wider set of problems than those of Scandinavian society alone: the nature of freedom and unfreedom in medieval Europe in general, the relation of economic dependence to legal disability and social status, the reasons why a culture constructs a particular sort of identity for the people at the bottom of society. This book compares the four Norse-speaking countries, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden, and considers the broad social and cultural context of slavery. The existence of slavery in medieval Scandinavia comes as a surprise

to many historians who are not medievalists and to many Scandinavians who are not historians, but it is not a new discovery.2 Anyone who

has read Icelandic sagas has seen slaves lurking in the background, though English translations tend not to use the term slave. Discussions of slavery globally, or in medieval Europe, mention Scandinavian slavery, albeit very briefly and based on secondary literature. The institution does not often appear in any detail in discussions of medieval European social history. Among specialized works examining Scandinavian slavery as an isolated institution or discussing it in the broader context of Scandinavian society and economy, few have treated it in the context

of slavery elsewhere in the world or even related it to forms of unfreedom elsewhere in medieval Europe. Whether written in English or

in the Scandinavian languages, these works tend to use thralls and thralldom (or their cognates) to refer to the Scandinavian slaves, despite the existence of cognates of the words slave and slavery that the Scandinavian languages use for ancient and New World slavery.‘

It is self-evident, and not a thesis of this book, that Scandinavian “thralldom” is a form of slavery (by any of the definitions discussed in chapter 1}. One purpose of the book is to better understand the institution by identifying it as slavery and not a unique institution. Some older

authors may have chosen to retain the term thralldom to emphasize that the institution was different from New World slavery; perhaps some did not want to think of medieval Scandinavians as slaveholders.

Reluctance to equate the “thrall” with a “slave” may be salutary in I

2 INTRODUCTION intention, discouraging the reader from jumping to conclusions about the nature of the institution based on slavery in other societies. Still, by refusing to use the more general term, we risk losing valuable opportunities for comparison. To refuse to translate terms avoids the danger of doing violence to the period and culture under study by imposing modern categories but abdicates the scholar’s responsibility to interpret. We today may be able, from a longer and wider perspective, to understand past cultures in ways they did not understand themselves, but to do so we must use a common scholarly vocabulary. Most general histories of Viking Age or medieval Scandinavia have devoted some attention to slavery. Some claim that Scandinavian society was once based entirely upon slavery, though this claim depends less on the available sources than upon theories about how societies and economies develop.5 Works on the Viking Age are more common than

those on the subsequent period, and a number of these works treat slavery as part of their discussion of Vikings at home, but their sources are mostly limited to texts dated later than the Viking Age.°® These general works on Scandinavian history have drawn on several

specialized studies on Scandinavian slavery. Clara Nevéus has discussed the evidence from Swedish and Danish laws and charters; Peter Foote, in an article on Icelandic slavery, is an excellent example of a scholar who goes beyond the face value of the source material; Claus

Krag and others have recently engaged in a debate on the nature of slavery in Norway. Niels Skyum-Nielsen attempted to treat slavery in all the Scandinavian countries and place it in the context of other slave systems, although he published only very preliminary work on the subject before his death.” Several articles deal specifically with the end of slavery in the various Scandinavian countries.8 A few other works are less useful than the preceding ones: Marlis Wilde-Stockmeyer’s work on slavery in Icelandic literature is more valuable on the nature of the sagas than on the nature of slavery, though it provides a useful caution against taking sagas as evidence of what slavery was really like; Harald Herdal’s study of Scandinavian slavery, directed at a popular audience, does not discuss the evidence critically; Agnes M. Wergeland’s work treats Germanic society as a unit, failing to distinguish clearly enough between various societies and to note factors other than time that might account for differences between, for example, the laws of the Visigoths and those of Norway; Joan Dyste Lind applies an anthropological model to the ending of slavery in Sweden but does not treat the sources critically.° Several other works are simply outdated.!° The most detailed work in English on any aspect of Scandinavian slavery, Thraldom in Ancient Iceland by Carl O. Williams (1937), is unreliable, using sources in a completely uncritical manner. Williams treats literature as history and has an evident bias toward portraying Icelandic slavery as harshly as

INTRODUCTION 3 possible. He fails to distinguish between family sagas and fornaldarsdgur, sagas of mythical antiquity.!! As discussed in the appendix, the relationship of the extant sources to the social reality of the time at which they were created, let alone the earlier time of which they speak, is problematic. The sources are not direct evidence but artifacts of the

culture that created them. Most analyses of slavery, in Scandinavian or other societies, treat slavery as an economic system or slaves as a social class. They take as a given that a group of slaves existed and ask questions about what kind of work those people did, how the society treated them, how they became free, why they disappeared. This study treats those questions, too, but also asks why the category of slavery existed in the first place. Slavery in Scandinavia was not primarily an economic system, so economics cannot explain why people were classified as slaves. Chapter 3 will discuss the economic role of the slave, but only to show that slavery does not require or imply any particular type of economic structure. The purpose here is to analyze the social and cultural reasons for slavery, not as an economic system but as a social classification.

The evidence about slavery in medieval Scandinavia, which comes | from the ninth through the mid-fourteenth centuries, dictates the chronological scope of this work. It covers what Scandinavian historians view as two distinct historical periods, distinguished both by changes in political and social structure and by changes in the types of evidence available. This study concentrates on the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, when written sources, both legal and literary, are more abundant, but also brings to bear such material as exists from the Viking Age, which lasted until the mid-eleventh century. !2 Historians have written the history of medieval Scandinavia (as with the rest of Europe} largely as a history of the relations among kings, nobles, and the Church, setting the boundaries between periods to coincide with changes of dynasty or with important battles or treaties. Even _ contemporary historians, who pay more attention to society and economy than did previous generations, have tended to retain these periods. !3 All three continental Scandinavian countries were moving toward political centralization during the Middle Ages, but the persistence of a strong provincial tradition appears here in the proportion of the evidence that comes from provincial law codes. Sweden was united under one king in the eleventh century, but the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a time of dynastic struggle and provincial particularism. There was no royal administration nor standing army. The distinction between the two tribal groups of the Svear and the G6tar remained important.!4 Denmark was unified under one king in the Viking Age, and the centuries following the end of the Viking Age witnessed the development of royal power, disrupted from time to time

4 INTRODUCTION by civil war. During the “Age of the Valdemars,” which began with Valdemar I in 1157, Denmark was a major power in the Baltic. This ended in the mid-thirteenth century when power shifted into the hands of the German towns.!5 In Norway, Olaf Tryggvason had attempted to unify and convert the kingdom, but it became fragmented after his death in 1000. The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the beginnings of Norway’s statehood: the development of a central administration and new

forms of taxation, and the growing influence of the Church, which helped bring Norway into Europe. Dynastic conflict continued until 1240 when Hakon IV Hakonsson stamped out rebellion. Hakon not only

unified Norway under his rule but also seized control of the Hebrides from Scotland and placed the Orkneys, Greenland, and Iceland under the control of the crown. His son Magnits Lagabeter (“Law Improver”), 1263—80, codified Norway’s first national law.16

Iceland had no kings but it did create a rich literary heritage, so historians have divided its history into periods derived from the literature instead of reigns or dynasties. The Age of Settlement ran from 870 to 930; the Saga Age, in which the events related in the Icelandic family sagas took place, until about 1030; the Age of Peace from 1030 until 1180; and the Age of Troubles (also sometimes called the Sturlung Age, although strictly speaking this term applies only after 1220} from 1180 until the submission to the Norwegian crown in 1262. The Saga Age is defined as a separate period not because of any historical unity but for reasons of literary subject matter. The concept of the Age of Peace derives from a belief that Christianity, adopted in the year 1000, greatly

changed the social structure of Iceland and decreased the disputes among men of power. After a period of prosperity and peace came a period of concentration of power under a few families, which caused a gradual breakdown of the legal system. In the Sturlung Age violent fighting among several aristocratic families reduced Iceland to such anarchy that only the Norwegian crown could restore order.!” Along with these political and dynastic changes in the Scandinavian countries came important social and economic changes—the growth of

a distinct noble class and shifts from estate to tenant farming. It is within the context of these social changes that the institution of slavery, as we know it from the sources, was constructed.

Slavery and Servitude in Medieval European Society

No society in medieval Europe can be classed as a “slave society” in the

sense that ancient Rome or various New World societies were slave societies. Slavery was not central to the social structure or the operation of the economy as it was in the antebellum American South, for example. Nevertheless slaves did exist in medieval Europe, in a wide variety of social and economic roles, and were culturally if not economically significant. The Scandinavian version was only one of the forms slavery took in Europe. Moreover, slavery was only one of a variety of forms of servitude known in medieval Europe. An understanding of the meaning of “freedom” and “unfreedom” in other medieval societies illuminates (and is illuminated by) the Scandinavian case. Patterns in slavery and other forms of servitude in Europe from the later Roman empire to the late Middle Ages illustrate the broad range of meanings for “unfree” and its place as the polar opposite of “free.” The difference between slavery and serfdom, the form of unfreedom generally considered characteristic of medieval Europe, is fundamentally an economic distinction: slaves and serfs performed different functions but both suffered from the same classification as unfree. To discuss the role of slavery in medieval Europe requires that we be

able to identify slavery. In the New World, slavery was an economic system, a juridical status, and a social phenomenon, and everyone can agree on labeling it “slavery.”! In medieval societies, these three components did not always coincide. Where one identifies slavery in medieval

Europe depends on how one uses the term, and to assume that everything that scholars have called slavery shares particular characteristics with New World or ancient slavery is badly to confuse the situation. The main problem in discussing slavery in medieval Europe is distinguishing it from other forms of unfreedom. It is difficult to create a definition of slavery comprehensive enough to cover all social institutions generally classified as slavery yet sufficiently clear to distinguish it from other forms of dependence. What follows is not a globally applicable definition of slavery but one that is useful in discussing slavery in the medieval world. 5

6 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY DEFINITIONS OF SLAVERY

Slavery is first and foremost a conceptual category, a way of labeling and classifying people. The law may express the classification but the conceptualization of the social order, not the legal status, creates the slave. Slavery is not primarily a social or an economic system, because slaves can serve a wide variety of social and economic functions, even within the same society.? Identical legal status may mask the economic differences between different types of slaves, but it reflects a deeper conceptual similarity. In the Middle Ages, as today, slavery could be defined as the opposite of freedom. Clearly such a definition alone is not sufficient. Some law codes and other documents from various periods and places in medieval Europe present “free” (Jiber or ingenuus) and servus as two polarized categories that together cover all of society.? But freedom had many other meanings in the Middle Ages too, as it does today. Nearly everyone in medieval society was legally dependent in some way upon someone else; even nobles, whose feudal dependence would not make them unfree in the eyes of their contemporaries, had a set of specific freedoms—liberties or privileges granted by a king or emperor—rather than a generalized freedom. A person was not free to do anything not granted as a specific freedom or privilege. Sources refer to various people in a general sense as “free,” but exactly what sort of freedoms that entails

depends on the other groups with whom the source is contrasting them.4 Even if one could claim that slavery and freedom in the Middle Ages were polar opposites, this would not help in distinguishing slavery from other forms of servitude. By way of a general definition of slavery Moses

I. Finley suggests that “what separates the slave from the rest [of the forms of labor on behalf of another], including the serf or peon, is the totality of his powerlessness in principle, and for that the idea of property is juristically the key—hence the term ‘chattel slave.’” Slaves can be

reduced to property, can be compelled to work, because they are outsiders, deracinated, legal nonpersons. Yet Finley recognizes that it is not

possible to draw an absolute line between what is slavery and what is not. “One may speak of a spectrum of statuses between the two extremes of absolute rightlessness and of absolute freedom to exercise all rights at all times. ... The latter has never existed, nor has the former.”5 If slavery exists in a particular society, it would be that status closest to the rightless end of the spectrum, but this definition provides no absolute criteria for deciding whether slavery does exist in a particular society.

A definition of slavery, valid cross-culturally, that will allow the classification of a particular group as slaves or as some other sort of

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 7 dependents should be conceived not as a spectrum but as a graph with multiple axes. A group’s degree of rightlessness or powerlessness may vary in different areas of social and economic life. Finley suggests the following indicators for determining where a particular status falls on the spectrum or spectra: “1} Claims to property, or power over things.... 2) Power over human labor and movements, whether one’s own or another’s. ... 3) Power to punish, and, conversely, immunity from punish-

ment. ... 4) Privileges and liabilities in judical [sic] process. .. . 5) Privileges in the area of the family. .. . 6) Privileges of social mobil-

ity. ... 7) Privileges and duties in the sacral, political and military spheres.” A group close to the bottom on all these scales could surely be called slaves. The “thralls” of medieval Scandinavia, here translated as “slaves,” certainly fill this bill. The question may be a bit more difficult when it comes to dealing with a group that belongs high on some scales and low on others. Finley’s seven criteria rely entirely on legal norms. A person may have many abstract rights yet not benefit from them in practice because of an adverse economic situation, as with a free peasant’s son who has every right to own property, marry, or bring lawsuits but cannot afford to do so. A person may have no legal rights to own property or to marry but may do so without formal rights, protected by long-standing custom (in the nonlegal sense of habit). Someone who has no formal right to do a thing has no legal protection if a master prevents him or her from doing it, but even people with abstract rights may lack recourse. A legal definition of slavery may still ignore essential aspects of the

institution. Orlando Patterson stresses the importance of the slave’s position as kinless outsider. He defines slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons’”’ and does not consider the slave’s role as property one of the constitutive elements of slavery.’ Patterson’s definition of slavery is not intended as a yardstick that permits us to identify slavery; it is meant to isolate the essence of an institution that he has already identified. It does serve to remind us that there is more to the cultural construct of slavery than legal rights. We may have access to the cultural construct only through the law, yet it is not the rights in themselves that are most important, but the conception of society that gives rise to them. One approach to distinguishing slavery from serfdom or other forms of unfree status would be to avoid the problem of abstract definition entirely, by taking those social institutions which scholars have generally termed “slavery,” discussing what they have in common, and exam-

ining what distinguishes them from institutions known by other names.® For medieval Europe, scholars seem in general agreement over what to identify as slavery even without a priori definitions, although this may be because all have tended to accept the categories established

8 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY by a few great scholars like Marc Bloch.? Scholars are also generally agreed on what may be identified as serfdom. As long as there is such general agreement on categories, it may be pointless to search for a systematic principle behind the classification; scholarly discussion can proceed from a common understanding without long quibbling over fine semantic points. This approach, while less logically rigorous than starting from a definition as first principle, can still provide useful results. After all, the purpose of giving varying social institutions a common label is to allow fruitful comparisons between them; the comparisons matter more than the label. If an institution is enough like what we call

“slavery” to enable useful comparisons, then much can be said for classifying it as such. The danger lies in assuming that because institutions share a label they must fit the same model: what David Brion Davis calls “the danger of imposing an abstract concept on incomparable institutions and of then tracing the supposed history of the reified term.”!° The generally accepted classification of medieval servitude into “slavery” and “serfdom” may go back to historiographic coincidence, and yet that accident can control our understanding of the institutions in question. It is not enough to agree on what institutions are slavery and what are not; we must agree on why, in order to discuss and compare, or we will miss essential similarities between institutions with different labels and es-

sential differences between institutions with the same label. We are dealing here with etic categories, those classifications created by the community of scholars, not with terms that would have been meaningful to those involved, for whom both the slave and the serf were servi. We can draw our categories in any way we please; if we accept those our

predecessors have drawn for us we must understand the basis for them.!! Recourse to medieval definitions does not help. It is pointless to ask when the term servus changes in meaning, for the medieval people who used it would not have seen its various meanings as mutually exclusive.

Rather, they were only different degrees of the same thing. Beaumanoir’s thirteenth-century Coutumes de Beauvaisis speak of sers as one class of people, although “this manner of people are not all of one condition, but there are several conditions of servitude.” He recognized that the sers of the Beauvaisis had only specific obligations to their lord and that other sers were subject to their lord’s will in every way, “and he is answerable only to God.” Here indeed, as Bloch noted, is a medieval writer who recognized what modern scholars consider the difference between slavery and serfdom.!2 But he did not recognize two separate institutions; rather, he spoke of one classification that could take many forms, much as we speak of “the unfree” or “dependents.” The division into two distinct forms of servitude is a modern division, for which we must now examine the basis.

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 9 When modern scholars define serfdom as opposed to slavery they depend to a great extent on legal criteria: the master’s rights over the slave are absolute, whereas his rights over the serf are strictly limited by local custom which may have the force of law. This distinction works for extreme cases, but for those in between it is problematic: what of the situation where the obligations of the dependent are clearly defined by custom, not arbitrary, but are extremely heavy so that an agricultural laborer will spend more time working his lord’s demesne than his own holding? What if the “strictly limited” obligations include tailles and corvées whose amount and frequency depends solely on the lord’s will? The master’s rights over the slave may not really be absolute either. Many slave societies have put some limits on what the master may do to the slave and protected the slave’s rights in areas like religion. Public opinion or local practice, too, may place restrictions on the master’s actions even if they have not reached the status of customary law. For example, in some places in the New World slaves were allowed by custom to work on their days off and keep the profits for themselves. !3 They had no legal right to do so, but the right was enshrined in custom and would have been difficult if not impossible for a master to withdraw. If the distinction between slavery and serfdom is to be drawn in legal

terms, we must remember that in the eyes of any law other than that of the lord’s own court neither was a legal person. The serf might enjoy the protection of custom, but if the lord denied the serf’s customary rights there was no redress, no appeal to an authority beyond that of the manor. Society conceptualized the slave and the serf in the same way: people outside the judicial system. A distinction between the two categories in

legal terms must depend solely on the rights accorded to each by custom, and once again this provides not a clear dividing line but a continuum. In Christian Europe slaves could marry; even in Rome they could have a peculium, property treated as their own. There isnoclear _ point at which we can say that a group of people have too many customary rights to be called slaves and must therefore be called serfs.!4 The more logical basis for the classification of some people as slaves and some as serfs seems to be economic: the relation of the dependent to the lord as regards the land rather than as regards legal rights. I do not mean that the serf is bound to the land whereas the slave is bound to the land’s lord: this is a legal, not an economic, distinction and a misleading one at that, because the relationship between unfree tenure and unfree status (discussed below} is much more complicated than that. The real economic distinction between what we call “slaves” and what we call “serfs” is the degree of directness of exploitation, and the legal differ-

ences spring from this distinction. | Slavery is not an economic system, not a means of organization of labor. It is a means of compelling people to labor, but that labor may be

IO SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY organized in any fashion. When Marxists speak of a “slave mode of production” they mean plantation-type units of exploitation with the workers directly exploited rather than possessing the means of production themselves as would tenants. Slave labor may be particularly suita-

ble to this mode of production, but slaves can and have been used in many other economic functions besides plantation agriculture.!5 Serfdom, on the other hand, can be seen as a means of organization of

unfree labor, in which the worker himself, not the lord, provides subsistence for his family. Of course, most labor is organized in this way; sertdom is distinguished by the taint of unfreedom attached to that labor. The status of the serf as unfree, in law and in social relations of dependence, is what compels the serf to work to provide an economic surplus to the lord. If we use serf in this sense, to denote people in a particular economic position, we must recognize that this is a modern, not a medieval, category, and be careful not to imply that all people we thus categorize were subject to the same legal disabilities. Not all manorial laborers who provided their own subsistence were serfs, because not all were unfree, and to use the term serf for any manorial laborer, to apply it to a socioeconomic class or to any workers under a “feudal mode of production,” without considering legal status, is to ignore the impor-

tance of the taint of servitude with which medieval culture imbued

these people.!6 |

The point here is not to distinguish serfs from free peasants—that

issue is treated below!’—but to distinguish serfdom from slavery. Slaves’ subsistence is provided directly by the owner and all their prod-

uct taken by the owner; serfs’ subsistence comes from the land they hold and the owner appropriates their surplus product in the form of money or labor rent. Inevitably this means that the master’s control over serfs will be less direct than over slaves. Gradually that control may

erode and be limited by custom. Those supporting themselves from their own plots of land have, de facto, more independence than those directly exploited, more control over their families and over their daily routine, and they are also more likely to mix with people of different legal status but similar economic position than are slaves who work the

lord’s demesne and are fed and housed by the lord. This distinction between slaves and serfs owes something to Marx’s distinction between the slave and feudal modes of production, but it can be abstracted from

, the concept “mode of production” and applied to the individual rather than the society. !8 Serfdom is primarily a designation of unfree status, distinguished from another such designation, slavery, by a specific means of organiz-

ing labor. This definition does not require a reclassification of what scholars have traditionally called “slavery” and “serfdom,” but merely provides a logical basis for the traditional classification, one that per-

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY Il mits us to distinguish between groups to which the sources tend to apply the same terms. This distinction is useful even if medieval people would not have recognized it. The economic component of slavery—direct exploitation—complements a legal definition of a slave as a rightless person and a sociological

definition of the slave as an outsider. Legal changes may lag behind economic and social developments, so that workers who no longer work the demesne in gangs but have been settled on their own plots of land and pay rent still have the same legal condition as those who work the

demesne in gangs. Ways of thinking about these people may change more slowly than the actual situation, or the intangible “unfreedom” may stay with them permanently, unconnected to economic position. The serf may be forever equated with the slave in conceptualizations of the social structure that classify people as either free or unfree; whether one categorizes the two groups differently depends entirely upon what features one examines. A definition of slavery useful for determining who in medieval Europe should be called a slave might include the following:

1. The slave lacks all or most of the rights accorded to others in the particular society (or accorded to others of the same age and sex, since free women and children may also lack the rights of free men). 2. The slave is an outsider who does not belong in a kin group or

the community. 3. The slave labors under the direct control of the owner or the owner’s representative. 4. Contemporaries identify slaves as a distinct status group, the lowest in the society. Where contemporaries distinguish be-

slaves. : tween slaves and another group (for example, bound debtors}, we should respect that distinction and not consider bound debtors as

These criteria are designed to include those social institutions in medieval Europe that we generally think of as slavery, and they include the Scandinavian case. This does not make the argument circular, for the purpose here is not to prove that these institutions are in fact “slavery.” They are “slavery” if we choose to define them as such, and the purpose of the definition is to provide a consistent basis for doing so, to clarify the principles on which our commonly applied categories are based. Any categorized group, whether the category denotes dependent labor, unfree social status, or natal alienation, is created by the society that creates the category. A slave in one society is different from a slave in another because the culture has constructed slavery differently. In applying modern categories we too are constructing the slave; we are

I2 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY doing so for purposes of comparison and discussion rather than for exploitation or cultural hegemony, but we must be careful to recognize that it is still our construction and that any similarities we note between institutions we term “slavery” must arise from the sources themselves and not be assumed from the similarity in label. A SKETCH OF SLAVERY IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE

As background to the discussion of Scandinavia, the rest of this chapter will discuss specific instances and types of servitude in the later Roman

empire, the Carolingian realm and its successor states, and medieval England, tracing patterns that are relevant to the general issues of servitude and freedom. This section outlines the extent of slavery (as opposed to the more general servitude} elsewhere in medieval Europe. In Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade, William D. Phil-

lips, Jr. provides a much more detailed overview, particularly on the later medieval period in mediterranean Europe but with good coverage for the earlier period as well. Tacitus’s references to slavery in his Germania have led to the view that slavery was an institution of great antiquity among all Germanic peoples, including the Scandinavians, and that the systems of slavery in all these tribes had common roots. This view requires the unwarranted assumption that the Germanic tribes formed a social and cultural unit in the first century A.D. Tacitus’s description of Germanic society includes classes—slaves, freedmen, free men, and nobles—that also appear in Germanic law codes.!9 He generalized on the basis of information about a few tribes, and he idealized the Germans to make a point about the decadence of Rome. Tacitus’s description, if valid at all, must

be taken to apply to his own time only and to tribes of which he had specific knowledge. What struck Tacitus about slavery among the Germans was not the division of society into clearly defined classes but rather the position of the slaves: Their other slaves are not used in our manner, with particu-

lar duties in a household; each of them controls his own house and home.” The slaves he describes more closely resemble the servi casati, hutted slaves, of the later empire than the domestic slavery or the villa slavery with which he was familiar.2° This does not mean that they were rent-paying tenants, merely that they lived under their own roofs. They may have been recent captives rather than an indigenous subordinate class; what Tacitus may have noticed here is an instance of one tribe enslaving another. Judged by its presence in the Germanic law codes, slavery was an important feature among all of the Germanic tribes that swept into the Roman Empire in the third through fifth centuries A.D. The various

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 13 Germanic law codes include several different classes of unfree: aldii as well as slaves in the Lombard laws, servi rustici and servi idonei in the Visigothic laws, originarii in the Edict of Theodoric, and so forth. We do not know much more about the various sorts of dependents than their names; they differ mainly in the amount of compensation due for injuries against them. The different categories of servitude may reflect a difference in origin, depending on whether they were part of a subjugated rural population or individually captured people uprooted from their communities and treated as chattels.2! The Germanic tribes may

simply have taken over the slaves as they took over the lands of the Romans they displaced, though it is not clear whether most of the indig-

enous population at that time fell into the category of servi or coloni (originally free tenants).22 The social structure of the Germanic tribes at the time they entered

the empire is not clear because the main sources, the law codes, were

not written down until after the tribes were well settled within the

empire or former empire (in the case of the Franks, Lombards, Visigoths, Alemanni, Bavarians, Burgundians, and Anglo-Saxons} or conquered by the Carolingians (in the case of the Saxons, Thuringians, and Frisians).

Not only do the written laws date from long after the period of settlement, but they also draw very heavily upon Roman law. One cannot

read backward from the leges barbarorum to primitive Germanic custom. The degree of Roman legal influence varies among the various codes and from subject to subject, but the law of slavery at least in all the pre-Carolingian law codes was heavily affected.23 Because of the problems of evidence we do not know much about the actual social or economic status of the people the laws refer to as servi.

We may say that the agrarian economy included both slaves and indirectly exploited unfree dependent labor, but we cannot assign relative numbers to the two groups or determine to what extent the dominant culture distinguished between them in its conceptualization of society.

The monumental work of Charles Verlinden, for the early Middle Ages, concentrates on the law codes; Verlinden does make use of other evidence when it exists (for example, Lombard notarial documents}, but he has not been able to give any numbers or much social context. Similarly, works on the Visigoths include slaves in their picture of society but have

only the law codes and church councils as evidence.24 Estimates, for example, that the slave population in Lombard Italy was larger than the free population there are merely educated guesses.25 One other type of source enriches somewhat the picture of slavery in early medieval Europe in general and Merovingian Gaul in particular: the saint’s life. The saint who frees enslaved captives is acommon motif and may owe more to hagiographical convention than to actual occurrence, but the stories of saints who freed slaves and other prisoners—

14 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY and the stories of saints who themselves were slaves—do indicate that slavery was considered a normal feature of society.26 The slaves who appear in these tales, however, are not common field hands but domestic slaves or well-born people who have come down in life. Hagiography does not provide a picture of slavery as an economic force, nor does it make any point about the social structure as it affected the typical slave. Later in the Middle Ages the evidence for several types of slavehold-

ing improves somewhat. Large-scale agricultural slavery depended sometimes on a steady supply of imported slaves, sometimes on a hereditary class whose origins lay at least partly in conquest and subjugation of the rural population. Slaves tended to be of foreign origin, often distin-

guished from the masters not only by nationality but also by religion. Differences developed between urban domestic slavery and rural agricultural slavery. During the course of the Middle Ages, at varying times and rates in various parts of Europe, agricultural slavery tended to shift into serfdom, agricultural workers becoming less dependent economically and then perhaps legally. In places with a continuing supply of slaves, especially towns active in the slave trade, chattel slavery remained a vital institution. For Italy, notarial documents from the Lombard period and occasion-

al references throughout the Middle Ages testify to the existence of slavery. While rural slavery shifted toward serfdom, the Italian towns imported slaves as part of their active commerce in the high Middle Ages. Amalfi traded with the Arabs; Venice had to agree not to trade in

Christian slaves but was active in the enslavement of Slavs on the

Dalmatian coast. In Sicily, which had long been under Muslim control, slaves still composed 13 percent of the population in the fifteenth century. Greeks and baptized Arabs were enslaved along with Slavs, Tatars, and Muslims. Domestic slavery was common in all the Italian towns.27 Slavery remained important in the Iberian peninsula after the age of the Visigoths. Muslim Spain was more highly urbanized and commercially advanced than the rest of Europe and made great use of domestic and industrial slavery within the towns.28 The status of rural labor is less clear, but probably the bulk of the population should be considered serfs. Umayyad Spain and much of the rest of the Muslim world looked

not south but north for its slaves in the eighth and ninth centuries. Trade routes ran from Bohemia through Bavaria and Alemannia to Ven-

ice, or across Carolingian Francia, from the Elbe to Koblenz and the Moselle to Verdun, then to Lyon, Arles, and Spain. A ninth-century Arabic account reports that Jews were involved in the trade in Western Europe. The slave trade may have been significant in the development of medieval commerce and the rise of emporia like Dorestad; in return for

silk, spices, precious metals, or other luxuries the medieval west presumably gave the Islamic world slaves, furs, honey, and wax, though

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY I§ none of these survive in the archeological record. Royal capitularies and

decrees of church councils were concerned only that Jews not hold Christian slaves; they did not object to the trade in non-Christians. Carolingian charters granted Jewish traders the right to transport nonChristian, probably Slavic, slaves to Muslim Spain.29

Not only commerce brought slaves to Spain; the progress of the reconquest provided opportunities for each side to enslave members of the other religion. While most of the inhabitants of conquered areas, both in the initial Muslim conquest and in the Christian reconquest, fell into the category of “subject populations,” as did the earlier sub-Visigothic population, there were plenty of captives from battles or raids

who became domestic slaves. Wills and other documents freeing or transferring Muslim slaves show that this enslavement occurred on both sides.3° Even after the end of the reconquista, a vigorous commerce

kept large numbers of slaves flowing in, especially to Aragon and Catalonia, from all over the Mediterranean. Slave labor played a role in agriculture, especially on Majorca and the Balearics.3!

Until the opening of the trade from Africa most of the slaves in Castile and Portugal were native Muslims or North Africans, rather than people imported through trade with the eastern Mediterranean. Spanish Muslims had earlier imported slaves from sub-Saharan Africa, and black slaves were known in Christian Spain at least as far back as the thirteenth century. By the middle of the fifteenth century Africans

came into the Iberian peninsula not, as before, via middlemen in the North African towns but directly from West Africa. At first Portuguese traders took most of these blacks to Sicily or the Canary Islands, and eventually most of the trade went to the New World, but by the midsixteenth century, black slaves and freedmen made up as much as 10 percent of the population in some regions of Portugal.32

Common to all patterns of slavery in the high and late medieval Mediterranean world was the enslavement of those who were “other” — Muslims, Greeks, Slavs, Africans. Most systems of slavery seem to have involved acquisition of slaves through raiding of foreign populations, often racially or religiously different from the raiders. In times of territorial conquest, like the Migration Period when many Germanic tribes

settled within the borders of the empire or like the Muslim conquest and Christian reconquest of Spain, the conquerors enslaved military captives and perhaps even subjugated whole native populations. Penal or debt slavery played a subsidiary role to capture, either as a by-product

of war or for strictly commercial purposes, in replenishing the slave supply. As discussed in chapter 2, the acquisition of slaves for Scandinavia did not always follow this pattern: slaves were not necessarily ethnically or religiously different from slaveholders. But the culture of the slaveholders created.an image of the slaves that set them apart, their

16 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY whole moral character tainted by the fact of enslavement if not by slave ancestry. FROM SLAVERY TO THE COLONATE IN LATE ROMAN ITALY

A closer look at a few examples, documented from sources other than law codes so that they provide more than just a normative picture, leads us to some general patterns in the ending of slavery, the shift to serfdom, and the complex relationship between servitude and freedom. The examples come from Italy, France, Germany, and England, regions which unlike Scandinavia are in the mainstream of medieval history as it is studied in the English-speaking countries. The discussion here and in the following sections sketches the role of slavery and its decline in these societies, along with the rise of other forms of unfreedom and the ways in which the cultures defined and constructed servitude. We begin before the Middle Ages, with the case of slavery in Italy under the late Roman Empire. Slavery in ancient Rome took several different forms. Urban slaves appear frequently in Latin literature, and much of the Roman law of slavery applies mainly to them: they, more than rural slaves, would be involved in business transactions and the like. Slaves also worked in the mines. During the period of the republic, Roman society conceived of itself as divided into citizens and slaves. There were of course great economic and status differences among citizens, but the central categor-

ization within the society was the polarity between slaves and free people.33 In general, only slaves worked for others; it was demeaning, slavish for free people to do so. Free smallholders might support themselves but did not have a surplus to market; enterprises larger than a single family unit used slaves, and anyone who acquired a surplus did so by exploiting slaves.34 For present purposes, we are mainly considering rural agricultural slavery in Italy. Slaves were not necessarily more significant in agriculture than they were in industry or domestic service, but as in all preindustrial societies agriculture was by far the largest economic sector, and it is relevant here since rural life continued into the Middle Ages as urban life did not.

Agricultural organization in the Roman dominions varied from province to province, but while small farmers formed a greater proportion of the agricultural population in some places than in others, the villa (estate) worked by slaves in gangs was the characteristic form of exploitation in Italy.35 Many of the slaves thus employed under the

republic and early empire were foreign captives. Rome’s imperial achievements created both the supply of and the demand for slaves: the

spoils of war brought in the supply of slaves and also promoted the growth of the city of Rome, creating a market for agricultural goods that

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 17 subsistence farmers could not meet. Though even in Italy slaves never formed the majority of the rural population, they were the vast majority of workers on large estates. In the first century B.C. slaves made up 35— 40 percent of Italy’s population.%¢

By the end of the second century A.D., and especially in the third century, the use of slaves on these large estates was dropping drastically. The age of major conquests bringing in slaves in huge numbers was over, and some scholars have suggested a decrease in supply as the reason for the decline in agricultural slavery.3” Others argue that the end of major

conquests did not have much effect, because the external slave trade continued and in any case slave breeding, for which there is evidence from the first century A.D., could meet the demand.38 It is possible that having to breed slaves simply drove the cost of slaveholding up to the point where it was no longer profitable: if slaves were only single men the master would have to support only the actual workers and therefore be able to retain more surplus, whereas to make slaves self-reproducing would require better (and therefore costlier) treatment and the support of unproductive people.3? The end of large-scale importing of conquered peoples may then have caused the decline in slavery not because this was the only source of slaves but because making slaves self-reproducing drove up the costs of slaveholding. Slavery cannot have been “too costly” in an absolute sense, however; if it became unprofitable, this can only have been because it was too costly relative to some other source of labor.49 Given the society’s need for agricultural production, if there were no alternative to slave labor, landlords would have had to use it no

matter what the cost. If relative costs changed (or, if we agree with Finley that Roman landowners were not in a position to calculate rela-

tive costs, if the relative desirability of slavery changed], it was not mainly because of a change in the supply of slaves but because of an increase in the availability of free labor. There had always been free rural laborers in Roman Italy who owned the land they worked. There were also free tenants, coloni, who rented the land in what was originally a contract between parties with equal standing at law.*! From the late second or third century on, more free peasants seem to have become tenants, and the tenants seem to have fallen into a progressively worse position in relation to their landlords. The reasons were not purely economic but also had to do with a change in the way the social structure was conceptualized. As Roman government became more authoritarian and depended less on citizen participation, as the army and bureaucracy became professional and the majority of the free population lost any role, no longer were all Roman citizens treated the same way in law and in people’s conceptions of society. No longer did the Romans see their society as composed of citizens and slaves; within the citizen class there were now honestiores and humili-

18 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY ores, and the latter had fewer rights and protections. The way was open for the landlord to exploit and bind the free peasant without the latter’s being able to do much about it.42 This naturally entered into the landlords’ determination of the relative desirability of slave and free labor. Many landlords divided up their large, directly exploited estates among coloni.43

Coloni originally had no obligations other than the payment of rent;

they could move wherever they wished and had no other legal disabilities. As the use of coloni spread, however, landowners began to exert more and more control over the colonate. In the western portion of

the empire, the landowner often did not divide up the entire estate among tenants but retained demesne farms and required the coloni to contribute labor services on them.*4 From the time of Diocletian in the third century, the coloni were being tied to their land; an edict of Constantine in 332 expressed this legislatively. Though still considered free they could not leave their holdings, nor could the landowner eject them. They enjoyed a hereditary right to the soil to which they were bound. This adscription did not turn the coloni into slaves—the sources rarely equate the two groups— but it derogated from their personal freedom.*5 The landowners clearly gained from binding the coloni to the soil, and they imposed the bond in practice before public law decreed it, but the state, which wanted to assure the collection of taxes, gained too. The coloni were only one of the groups whose mobility and choice of occupation was restricted as a result of the fiscal reforms of Diocletian.*¢ The position of the lower classes among the free became degraded both for economic reasons (having to do especially with taxation) and because of new ways of conceptualizing the social structure. As the slave-free dichotomy was eroded by lowering the status of the humblest free people, slavery was no longer necessary either economically as a way of forcing people to work or conceptually as a contrast to citizens with full rights. The growth of the colonate entailed a change in the status of those slaves who remained. As the use of coloni became more widespread in the third and fourth centuries, many slaves were domiciled or hutted (casati}, given their own houses. Servi casati were legally slaves and they had more obligations toward the landowner than did coloni, but to the extent that hutted slaves had landholdings of their own and time to work them for their own subsistence, the two groups were in approximately the same economic position. Despite differences in the degree of unfreedom between the two groups, we could call them both “serfs.”47 Originally the landlord had exploited the labor of the servus casatus rather than extracting rent as with the colonus, but both groups became subject to both sorts of obligation with differences only in the proportion of each due. As some

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 19 scholars see it, the new status of the bound colonate resulted from the simultaneous improvement of the slaves’ lot and degradation of the peasantry.*8 By the end of the fourth century in Italy tenancy had replaced large-

scale exploitation as the main form of agricultural organization, and slavery was no longer the main means of compelling labor. It did not wither away completely: slaves still staffed households and workshops, both in towns and in the countryside, and indeed some coloni may have had slaves. Wars against the barbarians contributed to the supply, but most slaves were either employed in individual households or else hutted. Those who appear in the sources as servi are legally still in the same position as gang-slaves of the early empire, though their economic situation is quite different. Even if we call them serfs, we must recognize that they were still categorized as unfree. VARIETIES OF SERVITUDE AND FREEDOM IN THE CAROLINGIAN REALMS

Roman Gaul did not make as much use of slave labor as Roman Italy, but it too had its slaves and coloni. Both groups survived to some degree

under the Franks. The Merovingian villae, some descended directly from the Gallo-Roman but more newly established, exploited large landed property by the use of both coloni and servi casati. The former probably outnumbered the latter, who had heavier service obligations, but both groups worked the lord’s demesne as well as their own holdings. Prebendal slaves, receiving their daily rations from the master, also provided demesne labor. In some areas the growth of these large estates came at the expense of small proprietors. In other places the Franks, although they did not bring a radical change in economic organization, seem to have established villages of small proprietors, as seems also to have happened in formerly Roman but now German areas like Alemannia and Bavaria.*9 Some of these small proprietors may also have had slaves in their households.

The extant documents from Merovingian landholding shed little light on what proportion of the servi were hutted, on their way to becoming what we might call serfs, and what proportion were directly exploited as slaves. There are examples of both.S° Any conclusions as to the economic significance of slavery—as opposed to what was becoming serfdom—in the Merovingian period must wait for a better knowl-

edge of the structure and the typicality of the villa, information which will have to come from archeology or onomastics. The documents from the Carolingian period indicate the existence of both domiciled and undomiciled slaves. The most useful type of document is the polyptych or estate inventory. The best-known and

20 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY most complete comes from the abbey of St.-Germain des Prés, located in the Ile de France. This inventory, probably drawn up between 809 and 829, gives a list of all the mansi and their tenants for each villa the abbey owned, including their legal status and the dues they owed. The mansus was supposed to be a holding sufficient to support one family, like the German hufe or English hide, but in practice mansi varied greatly in size and many had more than one family living on them. The polyptych classifies each mansus as servile, lidile (from litus), or free.5! The servile mansi tend to be smaller and to owe more dues, but the classification of the mansus does not necessarily correspond to the status of the people who hold it. If originally the mansus took its status

from the people domiciled on it, the link seems to have been broken before the time of the polyptych.52 Other polyptychs, like that of Staffelsee in Bavaria, also show the existence of servile mansi with

heavy obligations.53 , The polyptychs are not typical of all agricultural labor in the

Carolingian world. They represent only the greatest ecclesiastical landholders, and they list only tenants who owed regular dues, thus omitting independent peasants or those who performed irregular wage labor. Evi-

dence from the register of the abbey of Priim shows that free tenants there, holders of mansi, themselves had slaves in their households; in many documents these latter slaves do not show up because they themselves stand in no relationship to the landlord.*4 St.-Germain des Prés in particular, because of the good documentation, is often used as a type for the classic Carolingian villa, but even this

model polyptych reveals the breakup of the mansus. In one area the abbey owned no villae but only scattered mansi. Some of these mansi (mansi indominicati or demesne) were worked by prebendal slaves rather than coloni. The “classic villa,” with its balance between tenant and demesne land, was not the universal rule even for the estates of this

monastery. The capitulary De Villis, on the other hand, although it presents an idealized picture, seems to be discussing the “classic” villa: it mentions only a few prebendal slaves, who worked in the house rather

than the fields, and speaks rather of domiciled servi who performed heavy labor on the demesne.55 Despite the evidence of the capitulary, intended for Aquitaine, the “classic villa” model is not the usual pattern outside the Ile de France. Polyptychs from other regions show a wide

variety of villa structures, with higher percentages of nondomiciled slaves than St.-Germain des Prés.5¢

The polyptych of St.-Germain des Prés still provides the greatest amount of detail, revealing a breakdown of the distinction between free and unfree tenants. Servi could hold free mansi, although more often coloni or liti held servile mansi.5’ The distinctions in personal status did not make a great difference to the peasants themselves as intermar-

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 21 riage between people of different groups was common.*® Differences in personal status may in a very loose way have related to amount of land held or amount of dues owed, but all groups owed the same types of dues in varying amounts. The servus was in the same economic niche as the

litus or colonus; his obligations might be greater in quantity but they were Similar in quality. A legal distinction still existed, and the servus could be called upon at any time for work while the free man owed only fixed dues, but their economic and probably their social positions were not very different, and it makes sense that their legal position, and the way society categorized them generally, would become assimilated. In the polyptych of St.-Germain des Prés, there are servi that spend all their time working demesne manses who can be considered slaves even if hutted. The abbey exploits their labor directly; they have not gone far down the road to serfdom. But the process of amalgamation of the unfree into the same socioeconomic group, if not legal category, as the free tenants was under way.

The decline of large-scale demesne slavery and the shift toward serfdom in the Carolingian era can hardly be attributed to a lack of supply of slaves.59 Charlemagne resettled large numbers of Saxons and others within the boundaries of his empire, increasing the pool of available labor. Traders transported slaves across the Carolingian regions to Muslim Spain, and though there is no evidence for these slaves having been sold along the way, the supply was there if there had been a de-

mand. Landlords must have found indirect exploitation more advantageous, for reasons of profit or convenience. The availability of free coloni, exploited without direct supervision, may have led to the manumission or domiciling of slaves. The ending of slavery as a juridical status, even the lightening of the burdens of servitude, lagged behind the ending of demesne slavery as a means of organization of labor. If the availability and exploitability of free labor was what led to the

decline of demesne slavery, we must ask why the coloni were in a position to be so exploited, and whether they were losing their free status and sinking into serfdom as the slaves were being domiciled. One school of thought has viewed the coloni as originally fully free people who gave up their free status, becoming legally dependent if not legally

unfree in an absolute sense, in return for land. This view holds that Germanic society from the Migration Period on consisted mainly of free

peasant warriors, Gemeinfreie. Recent scholarly thought has suggested that most of the free peasants of the Merovingian and Carolingian period were not Gemeinfreie whose freedom came from a tribal heritage of independence; rather, they received freedom as a gift from the king or other patron when they settled new land and thus remained under substantial obligations to him. Konigsfreie, those freed by and still dependent on the king, were

22 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY settled in particular areas as military colonists, perhaps beginning with the Frankish invasion of Gaul.6! Other “free” people stood in a similar dependent relationship to nobles or ecclesiastical institutions. The only people free from such dependence and obligations, the only people who correspond to Tacitus’s image of the free Germanic warrior, were the nobility, whose obligations to the king were of a different sort.62 This theory of colonists, perhaps the lower echelons of the Frankish armies, given land and freedom by the king would explain the dependent status of the coloni who appear settled on the free mansi in the polyptych of St.-Germain des Prés. As military service became more and more the province of the nobility, the colonists lost their direct connection with the king. The king could transfer them and their obligations, along with

the land they held, into the hands of the nobility or the Church. The dispute over the Gemeinfreie and KOnigsfreie theories goes to the very nature of freedom. Many who have written on the subject do not seem to notice that the term free can mean many different things to the same people simultaneously. All agree that there were some Franks whom we may (slightly anachronistically) call the nobility, who were free as far back as sources permit us to go, whose freedom did not come as a special grant from the king (although he might grant them special liberties). Those who want to assert that the freedom of the KG6nigsfreie was fundamentally different from the freedom of the nobility encounter the objection that the sources do not distinguish between different types of freedom; the laws of the Franks and their subject peoples classify people into free (ingenui or liberi}, servi, and liti (an intermediate status that clearly did not include the coloni). Some would argue that because there was a class of nobles above the “free” people, only the former were

fully free and the liberi were half-free, but the use of the term liber implies that in terms of conceptual categories this group was considered the opposite of slaves, even though in practical terms its specific freedoms might be circumscribed.* This does not have to mean that all free people were in the same socioeconomic group. Economic dependence can coexist with legal freedom if we conceive of the latter not as inde-

pendence, mobility, and choice in any practical sense but merely a means of categorization imposed by the society. Free dependent peasants, coloni, need originally have been neither independent peasant warriors who lost their economic independence nor unfree warriors granted freedom in return for colonizing land and providing military service and payments to the fisc. It may not be possible to specify exactly when they became juridically free and when they became legally and economically dependent, but it is not necessary to

do so, for the two are not mutually exclusive. If the Franks conceptualized a social structure in which people were either free or unfree, this did not mean that in practice freedom had to be absolute. People

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 23 classified as free could be bound by ties of personal obligation to a lord without its derogating from their freedom. Modern scholars like Karl Bos! may classify such people as “half-free” on the grounds that they had too many obligations and bonds to be fully free, but their own culture

did not see it that way; it viewed freedom and servitude as a dichotomy.°> If there was a middle stage between the free person and the servus, it too was unfree. That medieval society viewed freedom and unfreedom as a dichotomy does not mean that there was not at the same time, and overlapping with the polarized way of viewing things, a spectrum of statuses depending on the specific freedoms or obligations of specific groups. But only

when bonds become classified as servile does dependence imply unfreedom in the absolute sense. It is all a matter of how the society defined and categorized its social groupings. In the Carolingian world, different terminology than that used to describe absolute personal status was used to describe relations of dependence; the two were different systems of classification that overlapped but were not synonymous, and “free” people appeared in many roles.® We may call the servi casati of the Carolingian period “serfs” or at least recognize that they were on their way from slavery to serfdom. The

coloni, though in much the same economic situation and similarly bound by ties of personal dependence to a lord or an abbey, were not serfs

because they were not unfree. The situation changed a good deal in the

high Middle Ages, but the point to be drawn from a study of the Carolingian picture is that freedom and unfreedom are matters of categorization, of labeling by the society, and not of economic role or weight of personal obligations. Though different legal groups in the same economic situation may gradually lose their legal distinction, the difference in categories tends to remain long after practical social differentiation begins to erode, indicating that cultural labeling leaves an

enduring mark.®’ | PROBLEMS OF PERSONAL STATUS IN HIGH MEDIEVAL EUROPE

The social and legal status of the rural population developed differently in the two halves of the former Carolingian empire. A consideration of some of the varieties of servitude in France and Germany from the tenth

through the thirteenth centuries further reveals the disjunction between legal categories (and the conception of society that they symbolize and reflect) and practical socioeconomic status that we have already observed in the Carolingian period. Status is multivalent, so it is entirely possible for a person to have been a prosperous farmer, respected in his community, subject to only a few light obligations as a sign of

servitude, and yet categorized by the society as unfree. The taint of

24 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY servility might have little effect in everyday life but it still remained powerful as a basis for classification. Peasants themselves might not pay

it much attention (although the many who purchased their freedom seem to have cared a good deal}, but the culturally dominant groups who constructed the categories did.°8 Slavery in France was on the decline in the Carolingian age, but not unfreedom: the slaves did not die out, nor did they gain their freedom, they were assimilated into a group of people whom we may call serfs, who enjoyed more economic independence than slaves but were subject to legal disabilities classified as servile. Bloch’s view that the legal sta-

tus of free peasants declined as the economic status of slaves rose and that a majority of the French population in the high Middle Ages consisted of serfs is no longer generally accepted. Historians have inclined toward Léo Verriest’s argument that all those who appear as serfs in high

medieval sources are the descendants of Carolingian domiciled slaves and that most of the rural dependent population—often called vilani, but there were many other terms too—was legally free. Verriest suggested that the three obligations Bloch cited as identifying features of serfdom—chevage, mainmorte, and formariage—were signs not of servility but of dependence on a lord.©? The mere existence of such a dispute between two eminent scholars indicates that the practical social difference between a serf and a free dependent was not great. The dispute

once again hangs on the question of categorization and classification: there is no doubt that the majority of peasants were economically and legally dependent, subject to obligations towards their lords; the issue is whether these obligations made them unfree. The classification of obligations as servile or not seems to have varied from region to region.”° The nature of a tenant’s obligations often depended on the status of the land he held rather than on his personal status. Already in the polyptychs of the Carolingian age we see that there was no connection between the status of the peasant and the tenure he held. Free and unfree tenants who held the same sort of land owed the same charges. We may well ask whether the difference between free and unfree had any meaning at all by the twelfth century or whether it was just a label devoid of content. The main differences scholars have identified consist not in the type or amount of payments owed, but in jurisdiction and mobility. Though there were regional variations, in general the lord did not have as complete jurisdiction over the vilanus as he did over the serf. The vilanus could leave the lordship while the serf, though bound to the lord and not the soil, could not.”! By the thirteenth century, though serfdom had disappeared in some French regions, in others the two groups of serfs and free tenants were becoming indistinguishable. Servility of person, as opposed to servility of tenure, was a hereditary taint, but lords attempted to have charges

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 25 that were originally seigneurial, connected with land tenure, recognized as servile or connected with personal status, pushing those who owed

them into the category of serfs.72 An individual peasant’s economic position did not dictate his legal position, nor vice versa, but the economic condition of the peasantry as a whole dictated the legal position of the peasantry as a whole, in the sense that those who owned land were

in a position to make the rules under which that land was held. In Champagne, for example, documents before the twelfth century distinguish between free and unfree tenants, but after that time they refer to them all as “hommes.”73 Landlords, disregarding personal status under public law, made the conditions of tenure constitutive of personal status. The shifting of more of the peasantry in some regions into the category of “unfree” came at a time when demographic expansion had begun to lead to overpopulation and pressure on available resources. At such a time the populace was in a worse position to resist legal restrictions than at a time when land was more available and labor less abundant. Increased freedom offered to peasants in situations where labor was scarce—for example, the charters of liberties offered to new communities on newly reclaimed land—supports the notion that unfreedom was largely a legal category lords applied whenever they could get away with it.74

The status of serf in France, from the individual’s point of view, was a

matter of juridical, not economic, unfreedom. Bloch and most other scholars following him stress that the serf’s unfreedom was very differ-

ent from that of the slave of classical or Frankish times. Though its practical effects were different, the categorization, the juridical status, and the taint of unfreedom remained the same. We do not know whether serfs felt the same way about their status as slaves did, or whether they even considered the issue, but a lord would have conceived of an unfree serf in much the same way as an unfree slave. As discussed above, local

custom determined the exact obligations a serf owed to his lord, whereas the obligations of a slave were in theory unlimited, but the customary obligations might include tailles or corvées at the lord’s will.

In any case the serf’s customary rights were still enforceable only in the lord’s court, so as with a slave his treatment could be entirely up to the lord. The serf is often thought of as tied to the land, as opposed to the slave who was tied to the person of the master, but in fact not only was the serf’s bond hereditary and personal, but documents also often speak

of the serf as the property of the master. One term used for the serf, homme de corps, implies ownership of the person by the master, not rights over him by virtue of the land he worked. Even when someone’s obligations did stem originally from his servile tenure, the bond was

still a personal one to the master rather than to the land. The tenure

26 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY might determine the serf’s and the lord’s respective rights, but those rights included the lord’s rights over the body and goods of the serf, not just over his relation to the land.75 The biggest difference between the serf in high medieval France and the slave in Roman Italy and Frankish Gaul lay in the nearness of the relation among juridical, social, and economic status. In ancient Rome legal status was intimately correlated with the other two. Masters often

exercised their property rights over slaves, buying and selling them, though medieval landlords do seem to have had the right to sell their serfs they exercised it infrequently except when the serf was alienated along with the land.”6 Roman slaves, unlike free agricultural laborers, lived and worked in gangs. In Italy before the third century it was not simply that, out of a group of agricultural workers of similar economic function, some happened to be labeled servile; a Roman slave’s life was different from that of a free person. By the Carolingian period, some of the servile agricultural laborers were domiciled on their own holdings, and the obligations they owed were related more to the status of the

holding than to that of the individual. Their social and economic, though not juridical, position was similar to that of many free people. In the Carolingian period some prebendal slavery still remained, and here it can be said that the slaves’ legal condition was closely correlated with their economic function: on both measures they were under the direct control of the master. By the high Middle Ages the prebendal slavery had fallen away and there was little relation between the economic and the legal status of individual peasants. The serf was still juridically unfree as had been the slave, but the group of juridically unfree did not correspond with a particular socioeconomic group. Peasants may have been an economic class but serfs were not. Juridical freedom may have entailed freedom from certain obligations, but it did not mean freedom from lordship or economic control. Whether one follows Bloch or Verriest and decides that a very large or

a very small proportion of the medieval peasants were serfs, one must agree that the practical distinction between serfs and other peasants was not great. They all owed seigneurial dues, special charges in addition to fixed rents. They intermarried; they sometimes moved from one class to

another depending on the type of tenure they held.’’ Falling on the wrong side of the free-unfree dichotomy did not necessarily mean that a peasant owed different obligations or had fewer specific freedoms than one who fell on the other side of that line. The distinction between free and unfree was important not in practical but in conceptual terms, and we are not in a position to determine what the taint of unfreedom meant to those who felt it.

In France in the high Middle Ages the law tended to simplify the question of personal status to a question of freedom or unfreedom,

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 27 despite the fact that different people in different regions or even on different manors had different bundles of rights and obligations. The law

recognized only the two categories.”8 In Germany the situation was much more complicated in law, and as in France legal status bore a tenuous relation to practice. Many categories survived for a longer time

in Germany than in France and varied more from region to region.”? Even in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, when the groups tended to merge, there seem to have been two major categories of unfree people, those who were tied to the land (hérige), who originated in the domiciled

slaves and the coloni of the Carolingian period, and those who were personally bound to the master (Jeibeigene}, who derived from the homines proprii (prebendal slaves). Another major group, who became less free in the twelfth century than before, consisted of censuales, those who had put themselves under the protection of a religious establishment.89

In the ninth through twelfth centuries in much of Germany, servi proprii composed the household or demesne work force. German lords,

slower than French to become rentiers, continued to exploit their demesnes themselves and so retained prebendal dependents. Some of these, servi quotidiani, were clearly domiciled with small cottages and plots of land of their own, although they owed very heavy labor services.

One could translate servus here as “slave,” because the agriculture on these estates was based on the direct exploitation of these unfree dependents rather than on money or labor rents, although with domiciling and a gradual move toward a looser dependence these servi too were heading toward serfdom. During the twelfth century in many areas the demesne

was divided up, and the former servi proprii now owed rent instead of labor dues, but this change in economic role did not change their position as juridically unfree. Indeed, as the demesne system broke down and former prebendal slaves became tenants, their servile bond some-

times tightened rather than loosened: they were still personally bound |

not to the land but to their lord.8! Germany exhibited wide variations in personal legal status of peasants and others not only within particular regions but also from one region to another. In northern Germany, for example, the Sachsenspiegel reveals a significant group of peasants in the thirteenth century divided into various categories with different obligations but clearly free. The eastward movement and the immigration of free communities of Hollanders and Flemings may have promoted peasant freedom in Saxony and Thuringia.82 Some of the legal classes that one can identify in particular regions of

Germany are very difficult to classify as free or unfree. One can only determine what particular bundles of rights and obligations they had and whether medieval lawyers or others considered those rights and

28 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY burdens enough to put them into one abstract category or the other. Even the term servus can be misleading: one Bavarian text of the tenth century refers to “two servi, one free and the other a servus, both of their wives ancillae.’’83 Clearly the word was being used both in a general sense of “one who serves” and a specific, juridical sense. The Carolingian distinction between free and servile mansi carrying different

levels of dues persisted in Germany, as did the distinction between seigneurial ties, due to tenure, and personal ties, due to personal unfreedom, but the distinction may have been only formal.84

The Bavarian barschalk provides one example of a status on the borderline between the abstract legal categories of free and unfree, though clearly both legally and economically dependent. The term schalk, servant, was, like knecht, ambiguous in its relation to freedom. The barschalk was considered free at some periods and unfree at others; the change does not have anything to do with a change in the dues owed

or the rights of the barschalk in relation to the landowner but was merely a difference in categorization.85 The barschalk had some of the rights of a free man, and documents exist in which he freely enters into contracts with landowners; charters sometimes contrast him and some-

times equate him with servi. The barschalk evidences the fact that categorization has nothing to do with economic status and may not be consistent between different medieval notaries.

The ministeriales, whom English writers sometimes call “serfknights,” lend further support to the notion that unfreedom was an abstract juridical label without very much relation to social or economic status. Their legal status was clearly unfree. Appearing in the sources in the twelfth century, they served as officials or administrators of various sorts, mostly knights serving kings or great lords, receiving fiefs in return for their service. Their economic and social situation was a good deal better than that of unfree peasants, but they may have been more tightly bound in personal dependence and degree of control over their

lives, they carried the taint of servility, and they could be treated as property.8° The unusual case of the ministeriales raises the issue of whether all bonds of dependence in feudal society implied unfreedom. The German nobility, and that of other countries, may have come into existence as a class through service to the king.8” A vassal put himself under the protection of his lord when he swore fealty and received a fief in return for services. The Latin term for putting oneself into such a relationship is se

commendare, the same phrase used when free people put themselves under the lordship of churches and became censuales. Many other terms in the various vernaculars show the connections between servile and feudal ties. Someone’s “man” could be his slave or his vassal; a knecht was a servant but the English equivalent became a Knight; a skalk was a

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 29 servant but a mareskalk became a high official; vassus was originally a servant but a vassal was a noble. Though the nobles owed services and were bound to the emperor, king, or each other by ties of dependence, the society considered the ties voluntary and classed these groups as free. The ministeriales, coming into the service of a king or lord at a time when the feudal nobility was already established, retained a servile taint long after their social status was high and their political importance great. Because of their special status the ministeriales were more closely bound to their lords than free vassals who might hold land from several different lords and who had their own dynastic interests to pursue. This made the ministeriales an important tool in imperial policy, though at this higher level the ministeriales were generally categorized as free, albeit not as free as the hereditary nobility.88 No one in medieval Germany was absolutely free in the sense of independence from legal ties and obligations, but many were classified as free. Most peasants had various sorts of economic and legal bonds to the churches or lords who owned the land they worked, so that there was a wide array of legal statuses among people in the same economic position. Of the rights and obligations that each group had in different combination, some were labeled “servile” and classified the person as unfree in a sense that simply being dependent did not. Subjection to servile obligations that made one unfree might lead, by analogy with the slave in Roman law, to an assertion of complete control by the master.®? Even if a group’s rights and obligations remained the same over a period of time, the way society classified the group as free or unfree might change. Because freedom has so many meanings, a modern scholar who wishes to define any group of medieval peasants as unfree can find grounds to do so: they had to pay not only rents but also fines at marriage or death, they could not leave the land they held, and so on. Precisely because the term has so many meanings, any dichotomization must be arbitrary: those free in one sense may be unfree in another. The medieval classification of a large number of groups into “free” and “unfree” is just as arbitrary as a modern one. It nevertheless reveals that for medieval society, the distinction was an important one to make. SLAVERY, SERFDOM, AND FREEDOM IN ENGLAND

Britain did not have the same legacy of Roman slavery as did Gaul—or if

it did we cannot trace its continuity into Anglo-Saxon times. But England still knew both slavery and serfdom and adopted a Latin legal terminology that owed much to Roman systems of classification. England provides a fruitful field for pursuing some of the issues discussed for France and Germany: as regards slavery, because of the data Domes-

30 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY day Book provides for the whole country, and as regards serfdom, because unlike France and Germany it developed a common law in the high Middle Ages. Though local custom still determined the serf’s specific obligations, common law had a good deal to do with the nature of servitude in England, and it provides a useful example of the construction of categories to be kept in mind when we turn to Scandinavia. Slavery existed in Britain before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, who may have enslaved many of the original British inhabitants of the lands

they invaded. The word wealh, with the original meaning of “Celt” or

“Welsh,” came by the ninth century to have a distinct meaning of “slave.”90 A number of sources from Anglo-Saxon England refer to the slave trade, and references to slave status appear in the law codes and in literature, but it is hard to determine from these the economic significance of slave labor.?! By the eleventh century, Domesday Book permits an estimate of the number of slaves in England. Domesday Book, the great English survey compiled in 1086, includes

slaves (servi] in lists of appurtenances to manors. The servus of the eleventh century was a demesne laborer: Domesday enumerates villani,

bordarii, cotarii, and others in connection with the land they hold as tenants, but the entries about servi usually come in connection with the demesne plows, and there is a high correlation between manors with a large number of demesne plows and those with a large number of servi.?2 There is no question that slave is the appropriate translation for servus

here, and that the various Old English legal terms (esne, beow, and others) should also be translated as “slave.”93 The Domesday inquisitors used many different categories and were probably not consistent from

county to county in the way they translated a particular Anglo-Saxon term into Latin. This inconsistency may reflect both a variation in the range of statuses between different counties in England and a confusion among Normans as to what the various status terms actually meant, due to unclarities in Anglo-Saxon practice as well as the unfamiliarity of the culture. Nevertheless it is clear that villani, bordarii, cotarii, and the other groups of tenants listed in the various counties were quite distinct

from the servi.94 The other groups cannot be lumped together in the category of serf. They owed obligations because they held land over which someone else had proprietary rights or personal or territorial lordship, not because they were the property of the lord or personally

unfree.

Domesday Book recorded the state of landholdings both as they had been in the year 1066 and as they were in 1086 when the survey was conducted. At the time of the Norman conquest, just over 9 percent of the entire population had consisted of slaves. The percentage of slaves was much higher in the more heavily manorialized west—the highest

counties were Gloucestershire with 24.5 percent and Cornwall with

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 31 21.3 percent—which may have been more manorialized simply because of the availability of slaves in these more recently conquered areas. In just the twenty years from 1066 to 1086 the number declined sharply, particularly in certain counties.95 The generally accepted view, based

mainly on Domesday but corroborated by other sources, has it that slavery largely disappeared in England in the two generations or so after

the conquest. Scholars have proposed various reasons for the decline of slavery. F. W. Maitland suggested that when the Normans replaced the AngloSaxon system of criminal justice, in which fines for offenses depended on personal status, with capital punishment, there was no longer any reason to distinguish between the various personal statuses.9© The Norman judicial system might also have meant that there were no longer as many penal slaves as there had been in the past, but this suggestion begs

the questions of why the Normans did not retain the custom of penal servitude, if indeed it had been a significant source of slaves, and why they did not exercise the conqueror’s prerogative of enslaving at least some of the conquered. The Normans clearly did not exploit the supply of slaves they could have had.9”’ Churchmen who preached against the slave trade may have straitened somewhat the supply from abroad, but

they did not oppose slavery as such. Indeed, between 1066 and 1086

the number of slaves on ecclesiastical estates decreased less than on lay estates, possibly because churchmen could not alienate church property.?8 David Pelteret argues that slavery was already declining even before

the arrival of the Normans. Slavery and freedom in the Anglo-Saxon laws, as elsewhere, were absolutes: free people belonged to tribes and kin groups and slaves did not. In the course of the tenth century, however, as the secular aristocracy and the Church accumulated power and land, the typical free peasant began to lose some freedoms, to become bound to the land he worked. The peasants were still free in the sense of a free-unfree dichotomy—as Pelteret puts it, free vis-a-vis the tribe— but landlords now had the opportunity to impose new ties of dependence on them. Now that they had free but bound tenants they realized that they could domicile and free their slaves and still exploit them, without having to support them or supervise them from day to day.%9 Whether or not this process was already under way in the late Saxon period, this account certainly seems to describe what went on after the arrival of the Normans. Demesne slavery in England probably came to an end because it was not as profitable as domiciling the slaves and working the demesne by means of labor dues from free and unfree tenants. Norman landlords may have divided the demesne among tenants because they were not interested in providing the supervision necessary for demesne agriculture. They had their main interests elsewhere and

32 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY used their English manors as a source of cash income. During the twelfth century more of the demesne seems to have been farmed out, whether because landlords found small units more efficient or because of political anarchy that made it difficult for landlords to administer their land.1°° When the demesne was split up, the slave plowmen be-

came domiciled plowmen who occupied extremely small holdings carved out from the demesne. They were called bovarii, a job description rather than a status term.!°! Juridical freedom did not necessarily

accompany domiciling. In the late Saxon period testamentary manumissions seem to imply that it generally did. We do not have manumissions by the Normans; perhaps, not particularly interested in the Anglo-

Saxon legal system, they simply ignored the juridical status of newly domiciled tenants. If slavery ended by slaves becoming serfs, as in the late Roman empire and Carolingian France, no manumission would be involved. Former slaves, domiciled but owing heavy labor services, did not make up the whole agricultural population. As Paul Vinogradoff put it, “the Conquest had cast free and unfree peasantry together into the one mould of villainage.”’192 Recent scholarship has questioned the gradual nature of the merging of former servi and free villani into a class of serfs,

unfree villani. The free villanus was not sinking into serfdom at the same time the servus was rising into it. Rather, the legal disabilities of the villein did not develop into unfreedom until the end of the twelfth or

beginning of the thirteenth century. Before the late twelfth century villanus was not a strict legal category denoting unfreedom but merely a

term commonly used for any peasant who did not own his own land. The legal enserfment of the villein occurred during the years 1180— 1220, as lords and lawyers successfully equated the performance of villein services with servile status. !9 In both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman periods, all peasant tenants had obligations to their lord by reason of the holding but not necessarily by a personal bond. The lord had an interest in preventing them from leaving the land and a legal right to reclaim them, but this did not mean they were unfree; there was no universal right among free people to leave the land at will.!°4 Twelfth-century surveys indicate that the villein was not personally unfree, though a villein holding might be subject to heavier services than one held “freely” (libere). Rodney Hilton has concluded from his study of the extant references to villani before 1180 that “all references to unfreedom are confined to those whom we may suppose to be the descendants of slaves.’””105 The equation of villanus and serf began toward the end of the twelfth century. In the legal treatise known as Glanville (ca. 1187), the use of the

action of naifty to claim that someone is a villein and unfree appears to be a recent phenomenon.!°% The fact that villeins were subject to cer-

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 33 tain labor services began to be treated as a sign of generalized unfreedom. The freedom of a liber tenens of the twelfth century had consisted in the absence of these obligations, but this had not, until the end of the century, meant that someone subject to them was unfree in an abstract personal sense. !07 The reclassification of the villein as unfree, in Paul Hyams’s view, is an unintentional by-product of the emergence of the common law during the period 1175—1225. The rise of the writ of novel disseisin allowed

anyone who claimed to have been ejected from a holding to bring the case before a royal rather than a seigneurial court. The purpose may have

been to give tenants who had been dispossessed by their lords a right to | redress, which they might not have in the lord’s court, rather than to settle disputes between two would-be tenants.!08 Those who drafted the

writ had to choose some point at which to draw a line between those who would and those who would not be allowed access to the royal courts in this manner. They drew it in terms of free tenure. The writ demands that the defendant show cause why he has disseised the plaintiff of his free tenement. The defendant could answer by claiming that the tenement was not free. An exception of villein tenure could defeat

any claim to land. The new writ required a stricter demarcation of villein and free tenure than had previously been necessary. If those holding in villeinage were denied access to royal courts, villeinage had to be a strictly defined and identifiable legal status where before it had

been much more loosely defined.1°9 Customary tenants were now classified as villeins and unfree. The obligation to pay certain charges,

which had formerly been a sign of lordship rather than of servility, became a determinant of villein status.1!° While agreeing with Hyams that the villanus did not gradually sink into serfdom but rather suffered from a relatively sudden reclassification, others have proposed different reasons why the reclassification. occurred when it did. Because twelfth-century inflation eroded the value of money payments, lords needed to make greater demands for labor dues upon the peasantry, and legal unfreedom for the villein could have been a way of extracting this labor.!!! Hilton stresses class as a factor in the establishment of juridical unfreedom for the mass of the peasantry. Landowners wished to exert control over their tenants in defiance of customary rights and had both the physical force and the legislative influence to do so. It was no accident that the legal system developed so as to exclude most of the peasantry, regardless of the original intent behind the writs.1!!2 The legal unfreedom of the villeins probably did not make much difference in their economic status or even in social status. Frequent marriages between free people and villeins indicate that the stigma of villeinage was not so great that it divided the peasantry socially. All

34 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY tenants, even those who were not peasants, owed some sort of dues or aids, all were under lordship. The unfree owed more, and more onerous, dues, but the difference in practice as opposed to law between free and

unfree peasants may have been quantitative rather than qualitative. Nominally free peasants had more legal rights, such as access to the courts, but they would be so unlikely to be able to afford to pursue a lawsuit and so unlikely to win against a powerful lord as to be not much

better off than the unfree in that regard.!!3 In fact, John Hatcher has recently suggested that many villeins may have been better off econom-

ically than free people because custom isolated them from market forces. People might be willing to accept heavy burdens in order to pay rents fixed by custom rather than by the market. Villein holdings were not divisible and thus tended to remain about the same size, while free holdings varied greatly in size as some were divided among sons. The prospect of obtaining land, even if villein land, may have encouraged free people to enter into mixed marriages even though there was a risk that their children would be considered unfree.!!4 Villeinage, of course, did bring with it its disadvantages, which adhered to the person and not just to the tenure. The villein was bound not to the land like the Roman colonus but to the land’s lord by a hereditary bond.!!5 We do not know exactly what the unfreedom of a villein entailed in practice because we lack evidence about how the common law actually operated. Most of what the great scholars on the subject—especially Maitland and Vinogradoff, upon whom all others have relied—wrote on the subject was based on the legal treatise entitled De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae and commonly known as Bracton because of its long-standing but now doubtful attribution to Sir Henry de Bracton.1!16 Bracton, however, may not be a good representative of English law of the thirteenth century: it borrows heavily from Roman law and reflects the views of a small circle of lawyers, views which were not necessarily followed in practice.!!7 As Hilton warns, “historians risk falling into the trap dug for the peasants by the lawyers, for most of our evidence about freedom and serfdom depends on evidence which is a by-product of legal or administrative process.”!18 Bracton tends to equate the villein with the servus of Roman law, who was unequivocally a slave. The imposition of Roman law categories may have had the effect of lowering the status of the villein, but we do not know whether the courts followed Bracton’s dicta. Scholars have long recognized that Bracton followed Roman law principles, but traditionally this did not lead them to doubt the relation of the treatise to the law as practiced.!!9 The use of the Roman category servus in Bracton, though, may owe more to the education of the treatise’s authors than to

actual court practice. Hyams has shown that court cases only partly confirm Bracton’s denial of any rights to the villein, that is, the place-

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 35 ment of the villein in the same legal position as the Roman slave.}2° Cases do support the theory that the villein was a chattel, to the extent that he could be sold or otherwise alienated; usually his land was sold with him, but the land was an appendage to him rather than his being an appendage to the land. But, though in theory the villein could own no chattels, he was treated in practice as their owner; sometimes he could sue for them against parties other than his lord. The villein could not leave the land without the lord’s permission, not because there was a hereditary bond between him and the land but because the lord had control over his actions; however, when some did leave the lord could not compel their return. Villeins, unlike free tenants, could not in theory alienate the land they held, but within the local community it might be treated as their land. The villein in theory had no heir, but in practice the lord did not often interfere with his disposition of property, as long as someone paid the entry fines.!21 Bracton’s insistence on the Roman law maxim that “all men are either free or slaves” does not accord with its statement that the villein had legal rights and could make a claim in court against anyone except his master. Cases do indicate that villeins were excluded from court on the grounds of their personal status even if their lord was not a party to the case. From some examples it would appear that the villein was deprived of legal personality much as the Roman slave had been—suits had to be brought by or against the lord rather than the villein himself— but in other instances the law did protect the villein’s rights. English villeins had some rights even against their lords in matters of personal injury. !22

The problem of the status of the English villein in the thirteenth century points up two distinctions that have major implications for the study of unfreedom elsewhere, including Scandinavia—the first between law and practice, the second between law and custom. English

serfs were clearly different from Roman slaves in their economic posi- , tion as tenants and in the way society treated them. They were members of the village community. The fact that so many cases disputed whether

someone was villein or free indicates that there may not have been much social distinction between the two groups of peasants. The cases also show that Bracton’s systematized and Romanized villeinage could differ significantly from the way the law actually operated. Yet if we read only Bracton we might well conclude that in social and juridical

status English villeins and Roman slaves were identical. For Scandinavia there is simply no case evidence available to shed light on social status and the application of legal principles, only normative laws. The Scandinavian laws also drew on Roman law, perhaps not as heavily as Bracton (see appendix}, and a similar process of assimilation of a loosely

defined native class to Roman categories could have taken place. The

36 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY example of Bracton points out the danger of drawing conclusions about practical social relations from normative evidence.

The distinction between public law and custom has great significance for the difference between slaves and serfs. That difference is often seen as one of the specificity of obligations. The master’s rights over the slave are absolute; the law may place a few limitations on what a master may do toa slave in the way of physical injury, for example, but they are exceptions. The serf, on the other hand, has specific dues to pay

and services to perform, and the lord has reciprocal obligations; the lord’s dominion is absolute in theory and the services are exacted at his will, but in fact they are governed by custom that in the local community has the force of law.!23 Unless the serf has access to the legal system to enforce the custom, however, slavery and serfdom can be considered identical in the eyes of the public law. English law did deny the villein that access. If the lord exacted more than his customary dues, only his own court could stop him legally. The pressure of public opinion or the threat of revolt from the peasant community might well serve as a brake on claims to more than customary dues, yet these factors need not be restricted to cases

where there was a formal set of manorial customs; they could have operated in any instance in which a master tried to get more out of his peasants or slaves than the community was willing to stand for. THE END OF SLAVERY AND THE MEANING OF FREEDOM

In the examples of Roman Italy, Carolingian France, and Anglo-Saxon England, the end of slavery as a means of forcing labor came not because of a decline in the supply of slaves but rather because of a switch toanew means of agricultural organization. Demesne or prebendal slaves were domiciled or replaced by tenants because the landlords found such an arrangement of indirect exploitation more advantageous. This econom-

ic change did not alter the servile taint on the slaves, or the way the society and its legal system categorized them. Domiciled slaves, coloni, serfs, and free tenants filled the same eco-

nomic niche even though their juridical status differed. The former slaves, now serfs, might gradually shift into another legal category over several generations, or the taint of servility lose much of its practical meaning as they became de facto independent, but these examples show that the descendants of slaves were for centuries considered unfree in a way that other people in an equally dependent economic position were not. All medieval peasants who were not allodialists were in some sense dependent, but that dependence could be strictly economic and did not have to carry with it the lord’s jurisdiction, the obligation to grind one’s grain at the lord’s mill, or charges symbolic of servitude.

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 37 Medieval scribes did not have in mind the distinctions between slaves, serfs, and dependents that we attempt to draw today. Terminological confusion reflects the fact that service and servitude tended to merge in people’s minds, and categories were loosely applied to people

who may, from a strictly legal point of view, not have belonged to them.!24 A medieval speaker or writer of Latin would not have seen the

word servus as having two separate and distinct meanings; he or she would probably have recognized differences in the status of various groups of unfree people but seen them as subdivisions of the general category of servitude or unfreedom. Laws that had once referred to slaves now applied to those we call serfs, because they shared the taint of servitude. !25

We cannot consider the nature of servitude without considering the nature of freedom. When one group of people is said to be free or to havea

greater degree of freedom than another, we must ask, “Freedom from what? Freedom to do what?”!26 But the term freedom in the Middle Ages was not always used to mean the lack of specific obligations or restrictions; people sometimes used it in an absolute sense. If we take freedom as the absence of certain obligations or the presence of certain rights, in this sense it was always relative, as everyone was free in some ways and dependent in others. In the strictest sense of the term Liber it properly applied only to the nobility, and even they were dependents of the king or emperor. Indeed, to be free in the sense of specific freedoms one had to be somehow dependent; specific rights or freedoms had to be granted by a protector. !27 Freedom could also be understood as the opposite of servitude, the quality of being a servus, and in this sense it could be absolute. Peasants could be subject to many obligations and still fall on the free side of the

dichotomy, which was a matter of how society classified them. An economic dependent will always be personally unfree in the sense that his economic position limits his decisions and actions, either directly or because he cannot risk offending the lord or other economic superior. But limitation on action and juridical unfreedom are not the same thing, although landlords have an interest in making them so and given the right political and economic circumstances may succeed. The example of free tenants in Scandinavia (discussed in chapters 3 and 5} shows that one need not be legally unfree, under a lord’s jurisdiction or subject to manorial obligations, to be at the bottom of the pyramid of production in medieval society. As with the distinction between slave and serf, the distinction between two kinds of freedom, as an absolute category and as the absence of specific obligations, is modern and not medieval. The dichotomy between freedom and unfreedom, however, is a medieval construct, if not one that reflected actual social relations. Freedom and servitude as

38 SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY abstract qualities predicated of people of various social classes may have meant little in a practical sense, but the existence of the abstract catego-

ries is important to an understanding of the meaning of slavery. What we from a twentieth-century perspective see as two types of freedom often overlapped. Slavery or serfdom could be merely the lowest level on a status continuum in which each group had different sorts of rights and obligations, and yet at the same time be marked by an abstract quality of servility that the slaves or serfs could never escape no matter how many concrete freedoms they had. However little resemblance they may bear to practice, legal distinctions are still important. They show the categories society was trying to impose; they show that personal status had a conceptual position apart from economic function. The variety of legal statuses and the complex

interrelationships of personal and economic dependence for most of Europe in the Middle Ages certainly justify viewing freedom as a relative concept but should not blind us to the existence of the absolute freeservile polarization that lurked behind and subtly informed the specific

freedoms of each class. The rights that lords had over their tenants of different categories in medieval Europe varied, and sometimes it was not clear whether a given collection of rights and obligations put the tenant in the category of free or unfree. The difficulty of drawing a line has led historians to adopt terms like half-free, unfree freedom, serf nobility. A spectrum of personal statuses is a more appropriate descrip-

tion of actual social relations than a slave-free dichotomy, but that dichotomy nonetheless existed in the minds of medieval writers. The choice of place on the spectrum—or spectra—to draw a line between free and unfree might be arbitrary, but the line was drawn. The identification of two abstract categories of free and unfree, existing at the same time as many degrees of specific and relative freedoms and unfreedoms, is not an anachronistic projection of modern ideas into the Middle Ages. Despite the fact that everyone was dependent in some

way, an absolute classification of “unfree” could mean not just an annoying label but a real social stigma. Medieval writers, particularly

lawyers, made the distinction, although the confusion in medieval sources shows that the picture was not as clear as the lawyers tried to make it. The question of unfree status might lie dormant in daily village life, but it could have drastic consequences for the peasant who lived unchallenged as free for years and then found that he had no right to seek a legal remedy when evicted from his land. Much of the vagueness about

status is not because we do not have enough sources or do not adequately understand the sources but simply because status was vague. In medieval societies where the economic organization was not based on slave labor, the link between personal status and economic status tended to be tenuous and the distinction between various person-

SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY 39 al statuses to be based on intangible factors, culturally constructed categories rather than economic position. For Scandinavia these intangible factors, the cultural construction of unfreedom, are crucial to understanding the role slavery played in the society. Since in terms of the conceptual categories “freedom” and “unfreedom” the slave and serf are similarly unfree, analogies from serfdom as well as slavery elsewhere in Europe can be helpful in understanding the nature of categorization and status in Scandinavia. If we ignored legal status and cultural categorization and studied only changes in manorial structure and modes of exploitation, we would miss the relationship of legal status and cultural attitudes to economic and social change. Legal categories were exceedingly important for the way medieval society constructed itself, more so than economic function or degrees of wealth or prosperity. As Aron [A. Gurevich puts it, referring to differences between groups on the upper as well as the lower end of the social scale: All social categories were first and foremost legal categories.

The medieval mind did not recognize the de facto status of an

individual or of a group of individuals if this had not been juridically identified and defined. It is not so much a question of class differences as such, as of estate indices which determine the individual's social position. A man’s value depends primarily not on his belongings but on the rights to which he is entitled.128

Slaves may not have been any worse off than free people—not that medieval slaveholders were particularly enlightened or generous, but the lives of many or most medieval peasants were nasty, brutish, and short, and unfreedom may not have made much of a difference. But the slave or serf still fell into the servile category. The slaves themselves may have cared more how much they had to eat than how the society

classified them, but since we cannot recover the slaves’ world view we , can only attempt to understand how society saw them. And as we have seen for several medieval societies, and shall see for Scandinavia, the conceptual distinction between free and unfree was central to the society’s self-definition.

The Identity of the Slave in Scandinavia

Part of the definition of slavery in chapter 1 stated that the slave is always in some sense an “other” to those who dominate the society. The

medieval historian cannot help adopting this viewpoint because the sources do not allow us to see medieval culture through the eyes of anyone outside the small group who left records. This does not mean that we must accept the dominant culture’s view as an accurate representation of the reality of its age. We can examine the way in which the cultural elites constructed their world, as reflected in the various kinds of texts that have survived; from this we can make inferences about the world views of other groups and about what material reality was like. We must always remember that the sources we have to work with are artifacts but not mirrors of the society and culture that produced them (see the appendix for a discussion of some considerations in interpreting particular kinds of texts).

A slave system requires a supply of slaves, and the source of that supply will affect the way that culture constructs slavery. There are many different ways in which slaves are “others” or outsiders. Masters may locate the slaves’ otherness in their different ethnicity, their lack of

membership in the dominant race, people, or nation; in their moral qualities, perceived slavish behavior or lack of courage or virility, partic-

ularly for slaves captured in war; or in their birth to other slaves in a society that puts a premium on genealogy or hereditary status. The otherness may also be located in the tasks the slaves perform, if particular kinds of work are considered appropriate only for slaves, or in the slave’s legal disabilities or lack of legal rights. Particular duties or legal disabilities are assigned to the slave because of his or her enslavement,

but contemporaries may see the causal relationship the other way around, particular kinds of work or particular legal disabilities giving rise to particular moral or personal qualities perceived as justifying enslavement. This chapter deals with the identity of the slaves in two senses: where they actually came from, and how the culture constructed an identity for them as slaves. 40

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 4I THE TERMINOLOGY OF SLAVERY

By any definition, including those discussed in chapter 1, the institution called breldom in Scandinavian sources is slavery and the person called a thrall is a slave.! Of course, it is the way the thralls appear in law and saga that makes it clear to us that our term slave is applicable to them; it could be that the laws about them were written as they were because the redactors thought it appropriate to identify the thrall with the Roman servus and apply the same sorts of laws (see chapter 4). The influence of Christianity and Latin learning upon Scandinavian culture could have

transformed the conception of the thrall.2 We do not know anything about the status of the thrall before the time when the sources were written; since all the sources make thralls slaves, we must conclude that they were so by the time under discussion here. The sources also use other terms for slavery, none of them unambiguous (even the word thrall can appear in a figurative or pejorative sense referring to someone who is not actually a slave}. Many of the terms are used interchangeably, and the meaning in each case depends on the context.3 When the sources are in Latin, we must ask what vernacular terms the writer had in mind. Danish and Swedish diplomatic material uses Latin until the fourteenth century, while in Norway and Iceland most of this material is in the vernacular. Even in Denmark and Sweden law codes were written in the vernacular. When people made a will or agreed to sell land or granted a privilege they probably did so in their native tongue; translation by a clerk to the nearest Latin equivalent might not

convey the exact meaning they intended. One cannot assume that a given Latin term like curia, colonus, or servus meant exactly what it would mean in an English or Continental context. One way of determining which terms in Latin and Old Norse meant the same thing is to look at direct translations. One of the extant law codes, that of Skane, exists in a Latin paraphrase (see appendix). Surviv-

ing vernacular Bibles from Scandinavia, like the Old Swedish paraphrase of the Pentateuch from the beginning of the fourteenth century or the Norwegian Bible paraphrase Stj6rn from the same period, provide

another opportunity to see what terms were considered equivalent by comparing the terms used with those in the Vulgate.4 Thrall—Olc prell, and variants in the other Old Norse languages— is the most common term for “slave” in the law codes and in the sagas. The thrall is the one bought, sold, manumitted, and compensated for with payment to the master instead of the kin. The etymology of the word provides little information about the origins of slavery or possible connotations. It has few cognates in other Germanic languages: the English thrall (OE prel, ME thrawl) is derived from the Norse, though

42 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA the OHG drigil is cognate. The word seems to derive from a PON * brahilaR, PGmce *prdahila or *breghila, “run” (giving also Go. bragjan),

derived ultimately from PIE *trek-, “run,” ’pull,” “draw.” The original connotations of thrall—servant or messenger—were presumably those of work rather than of status. The Old Swedish paraphrase of the Pentateuch often uses thrz/ to translate the Latin servus, though in other places it translates servus and

ancilla as thiznisto swen and thigznista qwinna (serving man and woman], even when they are commodified by being given as gifts. It sometimes renders servus as man, though this occurs where the word seems to refer to a retainer. Where it seems clear that the Latin servus refers to slaves rather than servants, in legal provisions for buying and selling Hebrew and foreign slaves and freeing them in the sabbatical year, the Old Swedish Pentateuch uses the terms threl] and amboot. In one passage where mercenarius (hired man), servus, and ancilla appear in the same sentence, it uses thizniste swen to translate mercenarius. The West Norse version, Stj6rn, uses a similar mix of terms to translate servus, though pre/] is more common here than in the Swedish.° While Latin servus in the Bible has various Old Norse translations, depending on the context, in Latin sources written in Scandinavia it usually seems to be a translation of thrall and to mean slave. Andreas Suneson used it to mean slave throughout his Latin paraphrase of the laws of Skane. When Innocent III made a pun about how servi who had committed a crime should not be exempted from a trip to Rome for absolution, since servi should be absolved by the servus servorum, the men to whom he referred were clearly slaves. He also called them mancipii.’ Though servus in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries elsewhere in Europe may be translated as serf (see chapter 1), it did not have this meaning in Scandinavia. Testamentary manumission of Scandinavian servi indicates their unfree status, but no documents refer to servi

in the context of land tenure. When servus did not have the specific meaning of slave, it had the more general one of servant, but in any case did not mean sertf.

There was no group in medieval Scandinavia who could be called

serfs; the lJandbo or leiglending, called a colonus in Latin, was juridically free, not under his landlord’s jurisdiction although he had contractual obligations to him.® The term is best rendered into English as tenant, although it means a tenant of a specific sort. Landbo or colonus is not often found in direct opposition with thrall or servus. The former are terms of economic status and the latter terms of legal status. Often connected with colonus is villicus, translated in the vernacular as

bryte or some variant. This word could be rendered into English as steward. By the thirteenth century it generally seems to refer to some

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 43 sort of royal official, but in some of the earlier law codes it refers to a slave who supervises the master’s household.? Ambatt and its variations usually mean female slave; ambatt is the female equivalent of thrall. It is sometimes used of women who are concubines but not necessarily slaves, but its use there seems to be derogatory rather than denotative (see chapter 3). The Latin equivalent is ancilla, which, when it appears in Scandinavian law codes or wills, is usually the female equivalent of servus, meaning slave.!° Like thrall, ambdtt and another word for a female slave, Olc py, have no etymological connotations of legal status, ethnic origin or captivity. Olc py is cognate with OE peow, “slave,” and Go pius/piwi, “servant, female servant,” going back to a PIE *pihu- “hurried”; ambdtt is either cognate with or derived from Celt ambactus, a slave or dependent, with

connotations of “one who serves” and with Ger Amt as its modern

relative.!! Both these terms appear in other Germanic languages in the masculine but in Old Norse only as feminines. Perhaps the Old Norse words are not cognates but rather borrowings into Old Norse or proto— Old Norse from foreign languages. It may be that at some linguistically formative period most of those enslaved in wars or raids were women and their own word for slave was adopted into Old Norse as a feminine. Male slaves, for whom the various forms of thrall were used, would have been not captives but their descendants. One word in the vocabulary of Scandinavian slavery, OS ann6épogher, OD anngpogher (Olc adnaudigr, but the word is much less common than in East Norse}, does have an etymology that sheds some light on what the culture saw as the distinctive feature of slavery. The word comes from some relative of the Old Icelandic adnauOd, “oppression,” and

though it denotes slave the connotation is that the person has been enslaved or forced to labor.!2 The term occurs frequently in the Swedish and Danish provincial law codes of the thirteenth and early fourteenth

centuries. By this time it may have lost its root meaning and come to be synonymous in connotation as well as denotation with thrall, but it does provide a hint that at some stage the distinguishing characteristic of slaves was their powerlessness and domination by force rather than their ethnicity or their function as servants. It is surprising that in one instance the OS Pentateuch should use anncedogha to translate famula, since famulus and famula generally seem not to mean slave. !3 In wills from Denmark and Sweden, if servi or

ancillae receive anything it is their freedom, while famuli or famulae receive gifts—clothing or horses—and famuli sometimes serve as witnesses. A famulus could be a member of a bishop’s familia; a famulus also appears in municipal law codes as a representative who carries on his master’s business.!4 The term seems to have a generalized meaning

44 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA of servant rather than the specific meaning M. M. Postan has suggested for twelfth- and thirteenth-century England.15 Swen (Olc sveinn) seems to mean “servant” in general, either free or unfree. It appears in the OS Pentateuch to translate servus, when servus refers to a respected manager who does not appear to be bought or sold. 16 In a few instances swen clearly refers to a slave: Archbishop Absalon of

Lund manumitted his bathsuen, Eskil, in his will.!” A legoswen, on the other hand, is clearly a hired man; the OS Pentateuch uses this word to translate mercenarius.18 There are many other words whose main meaning is that of service and not specifically slave status. Hjon or hion appears in many of the

law codes to mean members of the household, either slaves or free servants, but legohjon clearly means a hired servant. Huskona, too, appears in the Danish laws referring to an unfree woman, but does not always imply unfreedom. Two other words often found in Icelandic sagas sometimes refer to men who are also called “thralls”: man and huskarl. Someone’s man is usually a slave, but not always; a huskarl or retainer is usually but not always a free man. No one can be identified as slave or free solely because he is labeled with one of these terms.!9 The Norwegian laws also use the term mansmaor (man’s man). By its etymology this need not mean a slave, but in no known example does it clearly indicate a nonslave.2° The etymological denotation is that of possession rather than of work or ethnicity. Some of the Swedish provincial law codes—those of the Svear provinces, dating from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries— often use the term ofrzls (unfree) instead of a specific word for slave. This may indicate a growing emphasis on freedom, a notion that it was the normal state, but it more likely represents the gradual dissolution of the simple slave-free dichotomy. A term for slave may no longer have covered all the unfree. This shift in terminology and its meaning for the society is discussed in chapter 5. An analysis of when these laws use unfree and when they use thrall is appropriate here, however, since we are dealing now with the connotations of specific terms. The Uppland law and the S6dermanland law have only a few references to slavery, several of which occur in new ameliorative legislation possibly inspired by the Church (see chapter 5). The Dalarna law has hardly any; the Vastmanland law has more, only some of which are taken from the Uppland law. The Vastmanland law uses thrall in cases where it does not follow the Uppland law but sets different levels of compensation for slaves and free people.2! The Uppland and S6dermanland laws use thrall in instances where it can only refer to slaves, such as

sale as a chattel, but in the ameliorating legislation, which may be assumed to be new in 1296, unfree may have a wider meaning.22 Besides

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 45 the provision on the selling of a Christian slave the other instance in which the Uppland law uses thrall instead of unfree is in the law providing for the torture of a slave who attacks his master.23 This law applies

to anyone who kills his rightful lord, and it mentions specifically a householder’s or steward’s hired or slave man or woman. It could be that the general rubric unfree would have covered more than just the slave;

perhaps it would not have been clear exactly whom it included, so the law named the specific groups. Even if unfree did not have any meaning beyond slave and was mere-

ly asynonym for thrall, the fact that, rather than the term thrall, which might be thought of as a status having an existence of its own, a word was used that was nothing but the negative of free represents a break from the other laws. While the main feature of a slave’s status, as Norwegians or Icelanders perceived it, might have been his lack of freedom,

he was also a member of a particular group, thralls, not just someone who did not have freedom. Slaves may have been a less clearly defined group in the society of the Svear laws, and freedom may have been thought of as a more tangible quality, the possession or nonpossession of which defined the person. A dichotomy between free and unfree is different from one between free and slave: the latter implies that slavery is

something in itself, not just a lack. One reason for the use of a broader term for slave in the Svear laws might have been the influence of Latin. The Latin word servus had a broad range of meaning, which could lead to a certain vagueness of legal status. A Swedish writer, seeing that the Latin word servus sometimes meant servant in general, might have doubted whether thrall was the proper translation for it and preferred unfree with its greater vagueness. A striking absence, in light of the vocabulary of unfreedom in other European tongues {including the word slave itself}, is the lack of ethnic terminology for Scandinavian slavery. The word sclavus, according to

Verlinden, took on the juridical meaning slave as well as the ethnic meaning Slav in Germany during the tenth and eleventh centuries. This

meaning fell out of use when the slave trade via Germany to Muslim Spain dropped off, but by the thirteenth century it became common in Italy, and by the fourteenth century in Spain.24 Yet the term does not appear in either Latin or vernacular documents up to the fourteenth century in Scandinavia, despite the presumed role of the Swedish Vikings in the trade in Slavic slaves to the Muslim world (see below). Nor does wealh, an Anglo-Saxon word for slave with the original meaning of Celt or Welsh, appear in Scandinavian languages, despite the presumed large-scale slave raiding by Norwegian Vikings in Ireland and Wales.25

46 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA SLAVE RAIDING AND SLAVE TRADING

Whether or not the Vikings engaged in large-scale slave trading in their day, they certainly have the image of slave traders in the eyes of modern scholars.26 The extent of this trade is very far from clear. Scandinavians spread through eastern as well as western Europe: to England, Scotland, Ireland, France, the Low Countries, Germany, the Baltic coast, and Rus-

sia. The nature of the contacts varied with the different regions; the Vikings, or Varangians as they were called in the east, may have taken captives in all these places, but we do not know whether this amounted to large-scale enslavement, and if so whether they used the slaves in the Scandinavian homeland or as trade goods. Most evidence for slavery in

the Viking Age refers to Scandinavians as slave traders but not as slaveholders in their own society. For the activity of Scandinavians in Slavic lands there exists both archeological and documentary evidence: the latter consists mainly of Arabic accounts that refer to the Rus’, whom most scholars have equated with Swedes. No one contests the archeological evidence for some Scandinavian presence, though scholars disagree on what degree of penetration and settlement it represents.2” The Swedes pushed south along the Dniepr to Kiev, the Black Sea, and Byzantium, or along the Volga to the lands of the Bulgars and the Khazars, dealing in furs, wax, amber, and slaves.28 Even if one does not accept that the term Rus’ in Arabic sources

refers to Swedes, a trail of numismatic evidence leading from the Near East through Russia to Gotland indicates this was an important trade route. The vast numbers of dirhams found in Scandinavia, mostly Gotland, are not proof of trade in any particular commodity, but scholars have often posited a slave trade to explain the hoards.2° Such an explana-

tion implies that Swedes were selling Slavic slaves to the Muslims and bringing home their profits. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, who served as ambassador from the Caliph at Baghdad to the Bulgars of the Volga in 921—22, wrote a detailed report on

the slave-trading activity of one of the bands of Rus’ trading along the Volga.3° According to Ibn Fadlan’s description, the Rus’ were selling only female slaves: a Rus’ merchant would prostrate himself before his wooden idols and ask for help in selling his wares, saying, “Oh, my Lord,

I have come from a far country and have with me so many girls and so many sable furs.” The Rus’ did have male slaves of their own, for Ibn Fadlan discusses the differences in the treatment of the ill depending on whether they were slaves or free men.?! Ibn Fadlan’s stress on female slaves may be not an accurate reflection of Viking slave trading patterns but rather a product of his voyeurism.?2

Ibn Rusta, also writing about the Rus’, reports that “they treat their slaves well” and that when they defeat another tribe “they take their

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 47 women captive and make them [the men] into slaves.”33 Other sources

referring to Slavic slaves in Islamic lands and the importance of the Scandinavians in the acquisition of these slaves do not stress female slaves in particular. In the ninth century an Arabic writer, al-Djahiz, noted that the majority of white eunuchs in Iraq were Slavs.34 If Swedish merchants carried on a large-scale trade in Slavic slaves, they probably brought some home as well, though there is no evidence at all for Slavs as slaves in Sweden in the Viking Age.35 Whether or not they restricted their raiding to women would have a bearing on the types of slaves they imported and the role of those slaves in their society. Women slaves alone would assimilate more quickly than a slave com-

munity of both sexes. Certainly it is unlikely that Viking traders brought Slavs into Sweden in large enough numbers to form the basis of the agrarian economy, the substratum of laborers whose surplus product allowed free men the leisure to adventure abroad. If Swedish society during the Viking Age was in fact based on slavery, slave raids cannot have been the only source of slaves. There may have been a native class of hereditary slaves whose origins go back to a time for which there are

no sources, but any suggestions that the entire society was based on slavery must be strictly speculative. We have some shaky evidence for Swedish slave-trading activities abroad in the Viking Age, but not for slaveholding at that period. Danish Vikings enslaved many captives from Germany, France, and

England. Saints Willibrord, Anskar, and Rimbert, according to their biographers, all ransomed boys from the Danes. Frankish chroniclers refer to slave raids by the Vikings.36 Danish Vikings also took each other, and Norwegians, captive. The skald Valgard described a raid by Harald Har6dra0i and Sveinn Ulfsson, future kings of Norway and Den-

mark respectively, on Sjzlland and Fyn, in which many women were enslaved, and according to Snorri Sturlusson the Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason was captured and enslaved as a young boy by Vikings (pre- , sumably Danish) based in Estonia.37 If the account is true presumably not all the slaves sold at that market were captured Norsemen but many were Estonians, and the buyers need not all have been Danes. There is little evidence that the Danes in the Viking Age used slaves to work their lands at home. The slaves seized in raids may have been mainly sold abroad. A much later reference to slave raiding, in the early thirteenth-cen-

tury laws of Skane, envisions that people from free families would be captured as slaves, presumably within the region governed by the Skane law: “If a freeborn man comes into slavery, because he is captured and afterward sold, and he is killed, then his relatives and nearest kinsmen have the right to take full compensation for him and give to the master who owned him as much of the compensation as the dead man cost him

48 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA when he bought him.”38 Whether a survival of earlier nonwritten law, a

reflection of late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century practices, or a compiler’s idea of what the rule ought to be, the law implies that free men of Skane might become slaves of other residents of Skane who bought them from foreign raiders. Other evidence points to the enslavement, probably by violence, of free people in the twelfth century. The will of Archbishop Absalon of Lund, who died in 1201, freed “Christian the cook who, unjustly captured, was in slavery.”39 Similar unjust en-

slavement appears in the story of the abbot William of 4belholt who lived in the second half of the twelfth century: his thirteenth-century biographer reported that his enemies planned to sell him to the Slavs.4° Adam of Bremen observed that Danish pirates did not hesitate to sell each other into slavery.*! In the post-Viking period the Danes and Swedes would at least have had access to slaves from across the Baltic. The chronicle of Henry of Livonia, from the early thirteenth century, reports numerous instances of the Letts, Livs, Lithuanians, and Estonians fighting each other and

enslaving the women and children of the victims’ tribes.42 Many of these slaves could well have found their way into the hands of the Danes who were at that time occupying part of Estonia. According to Henry, the German crusaders too took women captives. Captives are not neces-

sarily the same as slaves, but there is no indication that any of these people were being held for ransom, and the men who might have ransomed them had been killed. One of Henry’s fellow priests had been enslaved as a boy and then freed by Bishop Meinhard and educated in a monastery.*3 If the Teutonic Knights captured and used Slavic and Baltic slaves it would be surprising if the Danes did not do the same.

Swedish expansion, farther to the north, may also have involved enslaving the colonized. In a will of 1310, Asmund Lang freed a slave named or referred to as Karelus; Clara Nevéus suggests that he may have been a Karelian.44 A treaty of 1323 between Magnus Eriksson and the Novgorodian Grand Prince Yuri Danilovich, setting the border between

Sweden and Novgorod in what is now Finland, recognized slavery. Slaves, debtors, and criminals who fled from one party to the other were

to be returned. This treaty may indicate the presence of slaves among Swedes in Finland and probably the enslavement of Finns.*5 Slaves taken in Magnus’s campaigns may have been brought back to Sweden.*6 It is in texts referring to Vikings from the West Norse region that the clearest indications appear of slave raiding as a source of slaves for the

Scandinavian lands themselves. Once again numerous reports from Britain and Ireland lament the depredations of the Northmen: “Many were the blooming, lively women; and the modest, mild, comely maidens; and the gentle, well brought up youths, and the intelligent, valiant

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 49 champions, whom they carried off into oppression and bondage over the broad green sea.” The Norwegian slave trader was an important enough

figure to appear in the twelfth-century tale of Tristan as the one who lures the young prince from home. Icelandic literature also provides numerous references to raiding in Ireland as a source for slaves.4’ Norwegian Vikings made slave raids not only against the Irish and Scots (who are often called Irish in Norse sources} but also against Norse settlers in Ireland or the Scottish Isles or even in Norway itself. Arneid,

daughter of Asbjorn, Jarl in the Hebrides, was captured and enslaved when a Viking fleet attacked her father’s homestead. Freystein the Fair, a slave of Porstein uxafot (Oxfoot), had been captured as a child in a raid on his parents’ home in Norway. The story of Rognvald, in a fourteenthcentury manuscript, indicates that a child without a guardian might be

wrongly enslaved by someone who wanted to seize his inheritance.48 Most of the slaves to whom the Icelandic literature refers, however, are Irish (or Scottish) by ancestry, not just Norse settled in Ireland or Scotland. Modern population geneticists have established that the population of Iceland, which has not undergone any substantial immigration since the tenth century, today contains a substantial Celtic component, some

studies even suggesting that the Celtic element was in the majority.4? Even if these data are reliable, a high Celtic element in the population does not necessarily imply a high number of Celtic slaves. Many of the early settlers of Iceland came not direct from Norway but from Ireland, the Orkneys, Shetlands, Hebrides and Faroes and Caithness, where they had intermarried with as well as enslaved the native population.5° Most or all Icelanders may have carried enough Celtic genes that even slaves of pure Celtic ancestry would not be physically distinguishable trom the free population. Many of the free settlers themselves are described as Irish, not merely “from Ireland,” even when they have Scandinavian names. Others are the sons of Norsemen and Irish or Scottish women.>! These free Irish settlers and freed Irish slaves provide a possible explana-

tion for the high Celtic proportion in the population. The Celtic influx could have come at the time of settlement rather than from a continuing importation of Celtic slaves. Slave trading was a major commercial activity of the Viking Age and

later. Vikings not only sold slaves to the eastern Islamic countries but possibly traded captives taken in Britain and Ireland to Muslim Spain as well.52 There were no doubt some slave markets within Scandinavia itself. Irish slaves certainly found their way to the western part of Scandinavia, and since the Danish and Swedish Vikings had traded in slaves it is likely that some of these foreign slaves did find their way to the eastern part of Scandinavia too. It is not possible to conclude from this

50 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA | that Viking Age Scandinavia depended upon a slave economy, but it is | possible to see why Scandinavians came to think of all slaves as for-

eigners or outsiders. . HEREDITARY AND DEBT SLAVERY

By the time the main body of extant sources—literary and legal—was .

written down, Scandinavia does not seem to have had a continuing : supply of foreign slaves, except perhaps for some sporadic acquisition of | captives. To the extent that slavery survived beyond the Viking Age into |

the later eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, and even fourteenth centuries | (see chapter 5 for its decline), it must have relied to a great extent on inherited slave status and possibly other forms of internal recruitment; the hereditary slaves need not only have been the descendants of Viking captives but could also have descended from an indigenous enslaved

agricultural population. ,

Icelandic literature views slavery, and the moral character associated with it, as hereditary. In the story of Ogmund dytt, for example, Ogmund’s father is a freedman and his mother a kinswoman of the well-known Icelander Viga-Glum. Not only does Ogmund come of good family on his mother’s side, but he is also Gluim’s foster son as well as a

kinsman. His father was freed long before Ogmund’s birth, so he has never lived in slavery, yet the taint of slavery lingers for Qgmund: when Glam wishes to accuse him of cowardice, he says that Ogmund proves

the validity of the proverb, “The unfree kindred often is lacking in courage.”53 The phrase indicates that medieval Icelanders classified slaves as a single group, whom they imagined as a kindred, distinguished genealogically from the rest of society despite the fact that the unfree in reality did not come from a particular ethnic group. The law codes of all the Scandinavian countries envision a hereditary slavery. Not all of them state explicitly that the child of two slaves is aslave, but the discussions of the status of the child of a mixed (slavefree) union assume that if both parents are unfree the child will be too. In Sweden, the law of Ostergotland makes this explicit: if slaves of two different masters marry, the husband’s owner gets two-thirds of their property and children and the wife’s owner one-third. In the case of a

mixed marriage the children are free although the owner of the slave parent might have a right to some of the free parent’s property.°4 In discussing the status of children of a mixed marriage all four Svear laws use the same phrase as the Osterg6tland law, “let the children go to the better half.”’55

None of these Svear law codes explicitly discusses the status of the child of two slaves, except the Uppland law, in a very problematic pas-

sage: “If an unfree man takes an unfree woman, betroths her and is

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 51 wedded to her and begets a child with her, that child is [not] free.’’56 Whether the word not appears obviously makes a great deal of difference. All five of the extant fourteenth-century manuscripts do indeed say “that child is free,” but a printed edition from 1607, based on a now-

lost manuscript that is thought to be closer to the original than any of the extant manuscripts, has “a ofrelst were” (“is not free”).57 If one assumes that the variant reading is a copyist’s error, the principle of lectio difficilior would require the acceptance of the reading “that child is free.” Given that the law recognizes slavery and has to specify that in the case of a mixed marriage the child follows the better half, it is hard to imagine a scribe changing the reading to “that child is free” because the

opposite made no sense to him. It is more likely that the phrase “that child is free” made no sense to some scribes, who altered it. This seems

to have happened in a sixteenth-century copy from one of the extant medieval manuscripts, where the scribe has inserted eij (not) before freelst.58 On the other hand, if the error was accidental it is more likely to have involved omitting a word than inserting one. The difference in the texts may be due not to an alteration, intention-

al or not, by a copyist on his own but to a deliberate change by the redactors of the law or their successors. If the law when first issued was

meant to read “that child is free,” the following statement, that the offspring of a mixed marriage were free, would be meaningless; the law could just have stated that any child of a legal marriage was free. This makes it likely that the reading “that child is free” is a later alteration

and that the original reading was that the child of two unfree people inherited their unfreedom.‘? The original statement, that the child of two slaves is a slave, is unique in the Scandinavian laws and seems unnecessary. The key may lie in the phrase “is betrothed and wedded to

her.” The law may originally have been intended to reassure slaveowners that they would not lose their rights to their slaves’ children if

they allowed the slaves to enter a legal, Christian marriage.©° ,

The somewhat earlier Danish laws do not explicitly discuss the status of the children of two slaves; they simply assume that those children are slaves. Where they discuss the children of a mixed marriage they

adhere to the Roman law rule that the child follows the status of the mother.®! The Norwegian and Icelandic laws do not make explicit rules

about the offspring of mixed marriages, let alone the offspring of two slaves, although both the Frostabing law and Grdgds imply that the child of a free mother and a slave father is free.° Although the implication of the Icelandic and Norwegian laws, like those of eastern Scandinavia, is that the children of two slaves are slaves themselves, there is some evidence that heredity was not considered as

major a source of slaves there as in Denmark and Sweden. Both Norwegian and Swedish laws refer to slave children being reared in the

52 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA : owner’s household.®3 Unlike the Swedish laws, which in dividing the ; children of the slaves of two different masters assume that it is to one’s advantage to have the children, the Norwegian laws treat possession of ; one’s slaves’ children as an unwelcome obligation.®4 This could be because the Norwegian laws are earlier and go back to a period when it was easier to obtain adult slaves than rear slave children. A Frostaping law provision on the exposure of slave children does not refer to a master exposing the children, but it punishes a slave if he exposes his children

of his own accord, implying that it would be normal for him to do so at : his master’s command.® Many scholars have suggested that exposure of slave children was common in Iceland, particularly in light of the fact that neither law nor saga makes much reference to them.® Exposure of .

children was one of the two pagan practices specifically allowed to

continue at the time of the adoption of Christianity in Iceland in the year 1000, but saga evidence is not adequate to determine how wide- | spread the practice was.°’ There are anumber of instances in the sagas of :

the exposure of children, but the sagas imply disapproval of these inci- | dents. Exposed children in the sagas are sometimes placed where they |

will be found by kindly people, a common folk-tale motif that one may | not take as accurate reporting on Icelandic society. The exposed child is usually illegitimate, the child of an unmarried woman of good family or : of the concubine of a free married man. There are no literary examples of

a child of two slaves being exposed, though such an event probably would not have been significant to the saga authors. Arni Palsson, among others, has suggested that the vast majority of slave children in Iceland were exposed at birth, because it was not economical to bring them up.°8 The supply of adult working slaves who

were economically productive would have been replenished through raids and purchase. The interest in ownership of children in the Swedish laws, which date from a later period, might be due to a decreased supply of slaves from overseas. There is no evidence for large-scale infanticide in Iceland, but it is a possibility. The literature cannot be taken as proof one way or the other.

The presence of an indigenous (or at least assimilated) slavery is more marked in the laws of Denmark and Sweden than in those of Norway and Iceland. Emancipation procedures in the Danish and Swedish codes imply that many slaves would be expected to have free relatives, so presumably they were neither recent captives nor a completely distinct class. The laws of Vastergotland allowed a man to buy out of slavery another man’s slave to whom he was related. The laws of OstergOtland similarly provided for freeing one’s relatives from slavery, as did those of Skane, and Andreas Suneson’s paraphrase makes it clear that a free man might have relatives who were born into slavery, not just captured.°%? These laws could indicate the enslavement of formerly free

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 53 men within their own province, since they are still within reach of their kinsmen. One cannot assume that these relatively late laws represent a survival of old laws for the benefit of raid victims. They might rather

reflect the results of Christian influence. By the thirteenth century in Sweden, free people and slaves could marry (see chapter 4], andin sucha case a slave might well have free relatives. None of the provincial law codes provides for the redemption of a slave by kinsmen from another province or kingdom. The laws of Norway make explicit distinctions between native and foreign-born slaves, implying that both were present. The Frostabing law provides a penalty of flogging for a native slave who tries to escape, but castration for a foreign-born slave. A foreign-born slave could be tortured if charged with a crime; the law gives no corresponding rule for a native slave. Under the Gulaping law, a native slave could be beheaded for theft, a foreign slave, male or female, merely flogged. A native female

slave or freedwoman who stole would lose an ear for the first offense. The Gulapbing church law also punished a foreign, but not a native, slave for working on Sunday. Native slaves only could be used in payment for

the redemption of odal land.7°

The native slaves to whom the various law codes refer could be the descendants of captured foreigners or of formerly free native people who fell into slavery through debt or crime. The latter does not seem a very likely explanation, because the law codes from all four countries make clear distinctions between debtors and other slaves. Still, it is entirely possible that the categories occasionally got blurred, that things were more fluid than the laws make them appear, and that a long period of time or several generations of debt would lead one to be thought of as a permanent slave. Penal slavery is common in continental Germanic as

well as Roman law, and it seems to be considered permanent; debt

slavery appears much less frequently and is not the same as true slavery.’!

Several Swedish laws refer to debt or penal servitude. One Swedish | law code, that of Ostergétland, prohibits debt slavery, though in another

provision it explicitly acknowledges the existence of the practice by providing compensation for the killing of a debt slave. The other laws that mention debt slavery (Upplandslagen and S6dermannalagen) do so only to prohibit it.72 The Ostergétland law also provides for slavery as a punishment for theft, possibly limited in term according to the amount stolen. The Uppland law provides penal slavery, clearly temporary, in cases where a convicted criminal cannot pay his fine. The law of Gotland, in its provisions on manumission, implies that all slavery was for a

fixed term, which may have been for debt. The law of Vastergétland implies that thieves might be condemned to penal servitude, serving not the person from whom they stole but the king.”3

54 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA | The Swedish laws on debt slavery do not imply that people were enslaved by force when they could not pay their debts but rather that they would voluntarily become slaves in return for payment of their debts. This “voluntary” debt slavery might have applied to relatively poor people convicted of offenses who could not pay the compensation. It might have its roots in a practice akin to commendation, where someone who did not have any land or could not pay his debts put himself in the service of someone wealthier. There did exist another status, that of flatféring, by which people gave up their property and certain rights in return for support but apparently did not work and did not become unfree.”4 The difference between a debt slave and a flatf6ring, in practice, probably came down to the fact that the latter was under the protection of his or her kin, whereas the former might be in less friendly hands. The Danish laws do not mention debt slavery at all. They do provide for the status of flatf6ring.”5 A charter of Valdemar I, from circa 1177,

shows that debt slavery was practiced outside the law. The charter, protecting some church liberties in the province of Halland, adds at the end a command to two men to release a woman whom they were apparently holding in slavery because of debts her brothers owed.’ The Skane and Sjzlland laws also provide for penal slavery in cases of theft. The thief became a slave of the king but did not lose all his rights as a free man. He could not be sold to another owner and might keep some rights to his property, but he did lose the right to a free man’s compensation.’”’ The will of Archbishop Absalon includes clauses freeing several peo-

ple not born in slavery but rather enslaved. Besides Christianus the cook, mentioned above, there were two women “whom Nicholas the stablemaster took from freedom into slavery,” and a woman who was “taken in” (acceptam). It seems likely that these women were enslaved either for debt or theft, unless they were simply forcibly enslaved without a legal pretext.”78 Perhaps those who could not pay their debts commonly resorted to some form of voluntary slavery, and an attempt to make this involuntary explains Valdemar’s reaction to the actions of Bare and Otti, the two men who were keeping a woman falsely enslaved for debt. Several laws from Norway and Iceland imply the existence of debt slavery, although the Frostaping law does not mention it. Under the Gulabing law, a debtor who could not pay had to go into slavery, though his kinsmen had the option of paying his debt and taking him as their dependent. A father could put his child into slavery for a debt of up to three marks. He could not by law mortgage more of his child’s future

than that amount, though one may question the strict application of such a limit in practice. A debt slave still retained some rights of a free

man. He, or his heirs, were to be compensated for his wounding or killing. He was entitled to full compensation, not that of a slave, though

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 55 the master could take that portion of the compensation that would be due him for the death or wounding of a slave. The debtor could not be sold abroad or at a public sale.’”? Icelandic law did not so carefully describe the rights of debt slaves, but it did recognize their existence by providing that if they were killed their relatives could receive compensation, paying off the debt.8° The redactor of Grdgds did not see the status of debt slave in Iceland as just a sort of commendation, a means of

providing protection and maintenance for the indigent in return for services, as the detailed laws separately providing for such support show.8!

The Norwegian and Icelandic laws make clear the distinction between the slave and the debtor. Unlike the Swedish laws they use a different term for the debtor, not brel] but rather skulldarmaor or l6gsculldar maor. The debt slaves’ retention of their compensation and inheritance rights and the prohibition against selling debtors in “heathen lands” where they might not be able to get free once their term was

up show their distinction from real slaves. Though the laws clearly differentiate the debtor from the slave, however, practice may have blurred the distinction, with debt slaves being treated as full slaves. The Sagas treat as slaves people who were not born into that status and who may have been debtors, like Skidi in Svarfdcela saga, who “was known as |a slave] not because he was such by kin or nature.”82 The distinction in the law, of course, postdates the importing of large numbers of foreign slaves in the Viking Age. It is impossible to say whether the status of the debtor was different from that of the slave in earlier times, if indeed it is possible to speak of debt in a premonetary economy.

Under Icelandic law a man could also be enslaved for theft. This

servitude, which included confiscation of property, seems to have been permanent.83 Norwegian law provided penal servitude not for theft but for a variety of other offenses. Since these include witchcraft and sexual transgressions, the Church may have had a hand in drafting these laws. Under the Gulaping law, a woman became the king’s slave if she slept with a slave. She had an option of redeeming herself by paying a fine.

The other provisions for penal slavery did not provide the option of redemption once the person had been enslaved, and the provision here is

probably merely a roundabout way of saying that she would be either fined or enslaved if she could not pay the fine, as was the case for witches under the Eidsivaping law. Under the Frostaping law a nun was enslaved for sleeping with a man.®4

There are other potential means of enslavement besides foreign raids, trade, debt, and punishment. Unwanted children could be sold into slavery; there could be internal raids or kidnapping; those who held power could simply have denied those at the bottom of the economic pyramid any legal rights and gradually turned them into slaves by law

56 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA : rather than by conquest. Perhaps we should phrase the question in : terms not of where the slaves came from but of how people became slaves under the law. The issue then comes down to the power to make | and enforce the laws and to grant or deny legal rights. In effect, anyone | becomes a slave when someone else can make the law classify him or | her as such. From the evidence we have it seems that most of those who : were so Classified became slaves by capture, birth, or debt, but the evi- ;

dence is part of the social construction built by the slaveholders who

needed to justify the institution. That justification came largely through labeling slaves as inferior by birth, whether for reasons of race or of character; but the labels need not accurately reflect the reality of how people became slaves. THE IMAGE OF THE SLAVE

Ethnic Background | The means of acquiring slaves can say a good deal about their ethnic background and the reasons society viewed them as other. As it is impossible to say what proportion of the slave population came from raids or from penal servitude, it is also impossible to tell what proportion of slaves came from what ethnic group. The stereotypical slave was small and dark and therefore of a different ethnic background from the tall, ruddy Norse; there is evidence, however, that the reality did not bear out this stereotype. As discussed above, even if slaves in Iceland had a high proportion of Celtic genes, free people did too. The stereotype of the

slave as ethnically different was part of the social construction that made the slave an other. The Danish and Swedish laws do not make any explicit distinctions between native and foreign slaves and do not in any way imply ethnic differences. There is not as much literary material from the East Norse as from the West Norse region to supplement the laws and give a fuller idea of racial attitudes about slaves, but one source provides some help. Saxo Grammaticus, writing at the beginning of the thirteenth century, hints in several instances that a slave is physically distinguishable from a free person, not on ethnic grounds but because social class is reflected physically. In one story he recounts, two Swedish princes are forced by their evil stepmother to become shepherds, royal slaves. Svanhvita, the daughter of the Danish king, comes upon them and when one of the two, Regner, identifies himself as a slave, she replies: The shimmering glow of your eyes pronounces you the progeny of kings, not of slaves. Your form reveals your race, just as in your glittering look nature’s beauty shines out. Your sharp sight

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 57 displays the splendour of your birth and there is no indication of

humble origin when the handsomeness which graces you is a manifest token of your nobility. The outward keenness of your glances betrays a bright quality within, while your visage testifies

your true family, for in your gleaming countenance may be observed the magnificence of your ancestors; no unworthy begetter could have shed on you such a gracious, aristocratic appearance. The glory of your blood bathes your brow with a kindred glory, and the mirror of your face reflects your innate rank.85 Even if Saxo means Svanhvita to speak words of love and not of social commentary, it tells us something of his attitude to slaves that he has her connect beauty with nobility of birth and ugliness with slave ancestry rather than with character traits. A case of the reverse effect, the identification of slave ancestry in a person of high social status, occurs when Amleth, prince of Denmark, visits the court of the king of England. Amleth, whose feigned madness contains a good deal of method, notes among other criticisms of the dinner just served that the king “had the eyes of a slave” and the queen “displayed three mannerisms of a maidservant.” The king subsequently discovers that his mother had committed adultery with a slave, and that his wife’s mother “had been captured and reduced to slavery.’’86 These passages manifest Saxo’s extreme class pride rather than reflecting any real physical distinguishability of slaves. Throughout the Gesta Danorum Saxo extols those of noble blood at the expense of the base-born. He expresses great admiration for the hero Starkather, who, though dying, “preferred the torture of his agonizing wounds before the ministrations of those in low walks of life.” Starkather rejects aid from a bailiff (praeco), from aman who had married a female slave (ancilla), and

from a female slave herself. He tells them he considers it “utterly degrading” to accept their aid. Saxo comments: “What a great man we must now judge Starkather!”8? Given Saxo’s view of the importance of social status, one cannot infer anything from his tales of identifying slaves from their looks. The English queen, daughter of a woman captured and enslaved, is revealed as a slave by her manner—her blood may have been tainted by her mother’s enslavement, but this is reflected in her behavior, not in her features. Saxo nowhere explicitly refers to slaves as foreigners. It is the social fact of enslavement that led Saxo to attribute what he saw as degrading characteristics to slaves. While Saxo depicted the slave in the eastern part of Scandinavia as a

degraded and ignoble person but not necessarily of a different nationality than the Danes, the image of the slave in Iceland and Norway was that of a foreigner. Most references in Icelandic literature to the nationalities of slaves call them Irish. Sometimes the sagas include Irish

58 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA , slaves because they add an exotic element. In Laxdcela saga, the beauti- 2 ful woman whom Hoskuld Dala-Kolsson purchases for three times the : normal price turns out to be Melkorka, the daughter of King Myrkjartan

(Muircheartach) of Ireland. The romantic motif of the kidnapped prin- | cess and her son who returns to his grandfather’s country with tokens of

his ancestry served a literary function that may have led the author to | include it regardless of its historical accuracy. Icelanders of Celtic and |

slave descent might have wanted to envision themselves as of royal | origin.®8

Several Irish slaves play major roles in other Icelandic sagas. In Njals saga, Gunnar’s wife Hallgero uses the Irish slave Melkolf, who already has a bad reputation, to steal food from his former master’s household for her. In the story of the dreams of Porstein, son of Sidu-Hall, an Irish slave named Gilli kills his master who has castrated him.8? The sagas depict these slaves as generally nasty sorts; their Irishness may be part of this negative image. Even when they do not play a particular role in the

story and are only mentioned in passing, slaves or freedmen are often given an Irish origin or Irish names. Landndmabok lists many Irish freedmen, most of whom came to Iceland with Norse settlers from the Isles. Landnadmabok reports that their masters freed them and gave them land and that the places they settled were named after them. The compilers of Landnamabok probably included these accounts to explain place-names.?° That slaves in Iceland were perceived as being mainly Irish does not necessarily mean that they were ethnically different trom the dominant class. The presence and assimilation of free people of Celtic ancestry would have made the slaves of Irish ancestry not very distinct from the free population. This is probably less true for Norway than for Iceland, since fewer free people had ancestors who had spent time in Celtic lands

and intermarried with non-Norse, yet both Norwegian codes contain provisions implying that slaves would not as a rule be immediately distinguishable from free people. The Frostaping law considers the case of a corpse of which no one knows the status, and the Gulabing law sets free a slave who has lived as a free man for twenty years without arousing complaint.?! These laws, of course, do not imply that there were no foreign slaves, but they do envision that slaves would not automatically

be distinguishable from free people by their physical characteristics. Where specific provisions about foreign-born slaves do appear in the Norwegian laws, the penalties are not always harsher for foreign slaves;

the differences may derive from practical reasons rather than ethnic prejudice. The castration penalty for a foreign-born slave in the Frostabing law could be an attempt to control and quell, not merely punish, the unruly. Foreign-born slaves might be more likely than native ones to flee, because not having grown up as slaves they might be less used to

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 59 the state of slavery or to heavy work or they might be given less attractive tasks. On the other hand, while native-born slaves would have no home to escape to, they would have a greater chance of passing as free

men in a different part of the country than would foreigners. In the Gulabing law, the more severe penalty for theft by a native than by a foreign-born slave could stem from the consideration that a master was not responsible for the training of a foreign-born slave and thus should not have to suffer by losing such a valuable piece of property.?2 Though the distinction in the laws between native and foreign slaves was not an ethnic one, and though at least in Iceland a large proportion of both the slave and the free population had some Celtic genes, the stereotype persisted that the slave was distinguishable physically, not just by manner, from the free person. The stereotype is at issue in two legends, the stories of Geirmund Heljarskin and of the god Rig, both of which survive in Icelandic versions. The story of Geirmund Heljarskin (Hell-skin; the goddess Hel was supposed to be black-skinned}, which appears in both Landnadmabok and Sturlunga saga, is set in the time of Harald Fairhair, king of Norway in the late ninth and early tenth century. Ljéfvina, the daughter of the king of Bjarmaland (Permia), has been taken captive by King Hjgr, who marries her. She is clearly not a slave or concubine but his queen. The queen gives birth to twin sons, but they are so dark and ugly that she is ashamed. At the same time one of her slaves bears a child, Leif, who is fair and even noble in appearance. The queen forces the slave to trade children with her and brings up the princely-looking Leif as her own, not telling her husband what she has done. One day, however, Leif reveals his physical cowardice: he is playing with a gold ring in the king’s hall; the other two boys take the ring from him and he cries as they mock him. The skald Bragi, present in the hall, tells the queen that he can tell the lads’ true nature by their behavior, that Leif is the son of Lodhott the slave and not of Hjgr and his queen. The queen is forced to admit what she has done.?3 The moral of the story lies in the fallibility of the slave stereotype. Slavishness in the tale is certainly determined by heredity but is expressed only in ignobility of character, not in physical appearance. The queen thinks that noble appearance as well as character should mark noble birth, but the tale proves her wrong. The story does not describe her own appearance, but it is strange that as a Permian she would have exactly the same idea of noble beauty as the Scandinavian stereotype. It is never made explicit that the dark skin of the queen’s two sons makes them look foreign and therefore slavish, but it is clear that they do not measure up to the ideal of princely beauty. Yet their noble birth shines through. According to the story, Geirmund, one of the two dark-skinned sons, grew up to bea great Viking and one of the most prominent settlers

60 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA of Iceland. At least by the thirteenth century, when the extant versions of the story were written down, and probably much earlier, stories circulated in Iceland making the point that despite the stereotype one cannot tell a slave by his looks. The point would no doubt have appealed to many Icelanders of Celtic descent, but the story still indicates that the stereotype existed. Rigspula: A Legend of Origins

Making nearly the opposite point—that looks, rather than innate character, reveal social class—is the poem Rigspula (the Lay of Rig). Rigs pula, though classed as an Eddic poem, does not appear in the Codex Regius, the manuscript containing what is usually called the Elder Edda.

It appears only in Ormsbok, a manuscript of Snorri’s Prose Edda from the mid-fourteenth century, in fragmentary form.%4 In the poem, a god called Rig visits three households in order of increasing prosperity, sleeping with the wife and fathering a son in each household. The third son, Jarl (earl), marries and fathers the nobility and royalty; the second son, Karl (man, farmer, yeoman}, marries and fathers the race of free men. Przl (slave), the oldest son, has children with a woman named Pir (female slave}, without the benefit of a wedding. Rigs pula’s description of Pre] and his family is frequently quoted; it reveals more about the Nordic view of the slave than about the actual identity of slaves. Karl is ruddy and Jarl fair; Prel’s main identifying

characteristic, his dark skin or hair (hgrundsvartan or horvi svartan depending on the emendation) marks his caste. Preldid grow —_ and he throve well,

there was wrinkled hide upon his hands,

crippled knuckles, ae

thick fingers, a foul face, abent back and long heels. He soon did more to try his strength, doing his tasks, tying up bast; he carried home brush the bitter day long. To his farmstead a wanderer came; her arms were sunburnt and her soles dirty; her nose was crooked, she was called Pir. The names of the couple’s children describe their appearance (Totrughypla, clothed in rags) or their work (Fiésnir, byre-man)}, or they are simply derogatory epithets (Fulnir, stinking). The sons “built fences, // herded the swine / and spread manure, // tended the goats / and dug up turf.”95

Rigspula may reveal how Icelanders envisioned the slave’s life and

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 61 duties and the contempt in which the ruling classes held him, but the real interest of this poem lies in its tripartite class division and the physical description of the slave. The god’s paternity of the three sons could mean that the poet saw slavery as divinely ordained with the slave

class as genetically inferior, or it could mean that the poet wished to point out the essential brotherhood—or at least half-brotherhood—of all classes of human beings.%6 Przl’s dark skin is often taken to mean that the poet intended him as a foreigner, perhaps a Celt, but it is probably just meant to convey his unattractiveness or his manual labor under the sun. Przl] probably stands for “a fixed, distinctive class of remote native ancestry,” his physical characteristics the attribution by the elite of all ugliness to the underclass.” The main obstacle to an understanding of what Rigspula reveals about social class is the uncertainty of its date and place of origin. Some scholars have taken Rigspbula as an expression of a primitive Germanic social structure that had remained basically unchanged since Tacitus.98 The social structure depicted in the poem is not exactly tripartite, for it includes not only the three social classes but also a king, Jarl’s youngest son Kon the Young (Konr ungr, from which, the poet implies, the word konungr, king, derives).29 The poem does not reflect Icelandic social

structure at any period: Iceland never had a king, nor did it have a hereditary aristocracy, although it did come to be dominated by a few great clans. Scholars have attempted to date Rigspula based on its language and its parallels in other sources. It has been dated anywhere from the ninth through thirteenth centuries.!°° Einar Olafur Sveinsson dates it to the tenth century, suggesting that it was composed by a skald who had visited Ireland and who borrowed the Jarl/Karl distinction from the English tradition (eorl/ceor!). He discusses its archaic language, the parallels to the Eddic Havamal in the education of Kon, the poem’s relation

to the Hyndluljd0 and Voluspa (which rank among the earliest known | Icelandic poetry), and its irregular fornyrdislag meter. He also points out that Snorri Sturluson and the author of Skjgldunga saga, which probably dates from about 1200, both knew the poem, because the Skjgldunga saga and Snorri’s Ynglinga saga use the names Rig and Danp.!°! However, the archaisms in language could be deliberate. The literary parallels do not necessarily mean that Rigspula influenced the other works.

The influence could have gone the other way, or two contemporary works could have drawn on the same oral traditions. !©2

By social rather than linguistic criteria, Rigsbula is probably thirteenth-century. The poem does not reflect Icelandic social structure at all, nor does it reflect the social structure in Norway much before the thirteenth century. A poem is more likely to depict a social class that is no longer significant, as was the case with slaves in the thirteenth cen-

62 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA tury, than one that is not yet significant, as with nobility in the ninth. Norway did have kings, and in fact some scholars have connected the poem with the development of a royal ideology in the thirteenth century.!°3 But a noble class, as distinct from free men as free men were from slaves, probably was not an important factor in Norwegian society during the Viking Age. The class of jarls was not socially distinct from that of the most prosperous b6nder—yeoman farmers—in the tenth and eleventh centuries.!°4 The activities of Jarl and his sons as described in the poem do not include Viking raids or adventures as one might expect if the poem dated from the ninth or tenth century.!% The idea of all men as brothers, sons of one divine father, is a Christian conception, though it may be a pagan one as well. It appears in a twelfth-century Icelandic

homily, so a twelfth- or thirteenth-century Icelander could certainly have gotten the idea from a Christian context. There are European parallels as well, in stories of the different races of men descended from the

sons of Noah. 1!06 ,

Even if we could firmly date the poem in its known form to the thirteenth century, this would not settle the question of what if any Scandinavian society it reflects. It could be a late version of a very old

myth, or it could be a purely thirteenth-century composition. Some argue that it is not Scandinavian at all in its conception, but rather Irish. While the proposed Irish origin of some elements in the poem, like the god sleeping with the wife in each household he visits, may be somewhat tenuous, the amount of personal physical description in Rigspbula is quite unusual for Norse poetry.!°7 The name Rig is clearly derived

from Irish ri, king, and no god or king by that name is known in any Scandinavian source except Rigsbula, Ynglinga saga, and Skjgldunga saga,.108

The presence of Irish elements in Rigsbula could mean that the legend is basically Irish in origin, but the lack of any very close parallels

from Irish literature means that such an attribution must be purely speculative. There are no parallel tales in Germanic literature from which one could argue a primitive Germanic origin. The Irish elements could indicate an origin within a Norse community in Ireland or Scot-

land. The poet need not just have retold an Irish tale but could have incorporated Irish elements into a story from Norse oral tradition or of his own composition. The lay could have been composed in Norway

or Iceland any time after the late tenth century and still have drawn on Irish elements, for Irish culture had by then had the opportunity to influence Norse culture through Scandinavian exposure to Irish courts, 199

The use in Rigspula of thirteenth-century social divisions and of Irish words and motifs casts doubt on the roots of the poem in an early Scandinavian oral tradition. So many features must be late or imported

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 63 that it is impossible to say that the core is traditional. Rigsbula cannot be used to demonstrate a primitive Germanic or Viking conception of slavery. Nor can it reflect Icelandic or Norwegian social reality at the time the poem was written in its present form, because slavery no longer

existed in Iceland and Norway by the thirteenth century. Rigs pula reflects not the way Norwegians or Icelanders viewed slav-

ery at any particular point in history, but rather a thirteenth-century view of the origins of social classes that includes a class no longer significant. The poem asserts the brotherhood of men of all classes, but also stresses clear hereditary lines of demarcation between classes. The view of the slave as ugly, dirty, and menial does not reflect the attitudes of actual slaveholders to actual slaves but rather presents a figure of low status with whom Karl, the free farmer, contrasts. Free peasants, threat-

ened by the increasing power of large landholders in the thirteenth century, would prefer to be contrasted with those who did manual labor,

and thus depicted as free, prosperous, and attractive. Karl is ruddyskinned, with lively eyes; his wife, Snoer (daughter-in-law), has keys dangling from her belt; their children have names like Halr (man), Dren-

gr (young man, warrior), Pegn (young man, warrior, vassal), Smidr (smith), Snot (woman, lady}, and Brior (bride).!19 The slave in the poem serves as a contrast to the honorable free farmer. The important point of the legend in Rigs pula for its audience is that

the nobleman is innately noble and the free man innately free. The slave’s innate slavishness is only a foil for the other two. The description of the slave emphasizes by contrast the free man’s role in bearing arms and managing the farm rather than doing the dirty work. The physical characteristics of the slave contrast with the healthy good looks of the ruddy free man. It is possible that they also reflect the physical appearance of the typical slave in the Viking Age, but too many other possible reasons for the description, as well as the probable chronological distance from the age of slavery and foreign influences on the tale, seriously , detract from the poem’s worth as evidence of a foreign ethnic origin for slaves as a class.

Stereotypes and Slavishness In Iceland and probably Norway, which shared a West Norse literary

culture, slaves were perceived as physically distinct from free men, though the tale of Geirmund Heljarskin shows that there was some recognition that looks were not everything. The stereotype could have arisen not from any actual difference but from a wish on the part of free people to distinguish themselves from slaves.!1! Slavery was connected with blood even though the outward signs of it were not innate characteristics but behavior or typical tasks.!12

64 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA Physical distinctiveness need not mean foreign origin. Dark coloring was not always seen as a sign of slavishness, but it was usually perceived

as unattractive. In Kormdks saga, Kormak has dark hair and people think him “black and ugly,” and in Féstbroedra saga a woman with black hair is not considered beautiful, but neither is she called foreign or slavish.!!13 The slave’s dark coloring in the literary sources may represent ugliness and lack of moral worth more than foreign origin.!!4 The stereotype of the slave presented in Icelandic literature had oth-

er elements besides the ugliness and degrading labor that appear in Rigspula. The cowardice Leif displays in the story of Geirmund Heljarskin turns up elsewhere also. Proverbs that appear in Icelandic litera-

ture show how the degraded image of the slave pervaded the culture even into the thirteenth century. The wisdom poetry of the Edda gives the advice that slaves are unreliable: “a self-willed slave” is included ina

list of things that one should never trust.!!5 Besides the proverb “the unfree kindred is often lacking in courage,” another states, “it is bad to have a slave as a special friend.”!!° In the sagas people quote these Sayings as ancient wisdom borne out by the situation at hand. That comments like these were current in Icelandic literature indicates that the idea of slavery carried with it all sorts of unfavorable connotations besides forced labor and lack of freedom. Even if slave in proverbs is used metaphorically to mean “no-good person in general,” rather than in a specific juridical sense, it is still significant that its use was so current. The “lack of freedom” connotation of slavery was certainly present and was responsible for the use of slavery as a political metaphor, for example by Saxo.!!” Even after slavery had ended the image of the slave could carry powerful messages. Cowardice was the most important element in the unfavorable image of the slave’s moral character. The slave could not participate in the warfare that was glorified as the highest calling of any freeborn man in the Viking Age. While Odin accepted warriors into Valhalla, slaves were claimed by Por.!!8 The most vivid image of slave cowardice comes not from a tale of Iceland but from one of the legendary sagas, the Icelandic

version of the Nibelung story. After the brothers Gunnar and Hogni have been defeated and captured, Gunnar refuses to tell Atli the whereabouts of the Niflung treasure until Atli presents him with the heart of Hogni. Instead of Hogni, Atli’s men kill the slave Hjalli, though Hogni says that he would rather die himself than listen to the slave’s shrieks. When they bring the heart to Gunnar, he knows it is Hjalli’s heart and not Hggni’s, because it is still trembling.!!9 In saga-age Iceland men displayed their bravery in private clashes of arms rather than full-scale battles between warring monarchs. No doubt the accusation that slaves were reluctant to fight has some truth to it,

though prudence rather than cowardice could have accounted for a

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 65 slave’s unwillingness to risk his neck when he personally had nothing to gain. With the prospect of being killed in following his master’s orders (as happens to Pérd the Coward in Gisla saga when he is mistaken for Gisli who has exchanged clothes with him},!2° with little hope of being avenged after his death, and with no hope of fame for his deeds—the reason often given for a lack of fear among the Norsemen—there is little

wonder the slave did not want to get involved in his master’s feuds. The image of the slave included not only inborn ugliness but also dirtiness. Slaves such as the tattered and infested Louse-Odd or the hunchbacked and stooping Kol are given the most demeaning appearances possible to go with their demeaned status. When the poet Kormak insults someone with the kenning “sooty slouch of seamy tatters, who spreads dung on homefields,” he is probably calling him a slave.!2! The slave was also depicted as incompetent and uncoordinated. !22 The stereotyped image of the slave as cowardly, ugly, and incompetent is not universal in the Icelandic sagas. Freystein the Fair in “Porsteins pattr uxaf6éts,” for example, is handsome and faithful, perhaps because he was born a free Norwegian. In Féstbroedra saga the slave Kolbak is “large and strong and fair in personal appearance,” and he does

not hesitate to commit an attack for which he will be outlawed. The slave Asgaut in Laxdcoela saga comes in for high praise: “He was a large and doughty man, and although he was called a slave, few might compare themselves to him, although they were free; and he knew well how

to serve his master.” Two slaves of Viga-Glim are killed when they shield him with their bodies in a battle.123 The exceptions to the general unfavorable image of the slave in Icelandic literature show that society was willing to give its approval to stories of slaves who behaved in ways their masters considered meritorious. Perhaps some slaves were depicted in this way because many Icelanders of the thirteenth century were descended from freed slaves and wanted to put their ancestors in a positive light.!24 While individual slaves might be admired, however, slave as a general term did not conjure up images of faithful service. The existence of graves where slaves were buried with their masters, presumably so that they could serve them in the next world (see chapter 3), would seem to indicate that faithful service was part of the slave’s

image. Yet despite these known graves, the literature reveals a contempt for slaves in stories of men who would rather die than be associated with slaves, who when about to be executed make a last request not to be led to death by slaves, or who cannot rest in their graves because they are humiliated at having slaves buried with them.!25 The purpose of these recorded incidents seems to have been to show the pride of the

free men involved rather than the low status of the slaves. That the literature viewed such extreme pride as an admirable attribute may

66 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA indicate a longing on the part of the writers for the old days when there was a group on whom one could look down in that way.

The names given to slaves in the sagas and Landnamabok only rarely betray a similar contempt for slaves. Some of the names are Irish; others, like Atli, Bjorn, and Pord, are names like those of free people; most slaves mentioned in the sagas, especially women, are not referred to by name at all. The names given to slaves in Rigs pula cannot be taken as anything but symbolic and mythical; they may be contemptuous but

real slaves were not known by such names. Some names that were particularly common among slaves in the literature, like Svart (black) or

Kol (coal), refer to the stereotypical slave appearance. These names, however, were not found only among slaves: Iceland was full of free Kolbeins, Kolskeggs, and Kols, and Svart was the name of a man of good family, the great-grandfather of Semund the Wise.!2° One of the slaves of Hjorleif, who took part in the revolt against him, was called Drafdrit (draf, dregs, husks, food refuse, giving English draff, and drit, dirt, excrement, giving English dirt). This was no doubt a derogatory nickname but not necessarily one given only to a slave: drit- appears as an element in several personal names of free men.!27 Slaves in the sagas might be more likely than free people to acquire or put up with derogatory nicknames,

but they could not be distinguished as a class by their names or nicknames, except perhaps that Irish names were more common among them than in the general population.!28 In Sweden the slaves whose names are known from wills have normal Swedish names.!29 Even after slavery no longer exists, thrall or ambdttarson (son of a slave woman] often appears in lists of insults for which compensation was required, showing the strength behind the contempt of slaves.!3° In the Gulaping law such an insult required full atonement.!3! The only comparable insults were to say a man had given birth to a child or had been used as a woman, or to call him by the name of any female animal or use any derogatory term generally applied only to women.!22 Fairly often in the sagas people insult others by calling them slaves, though when it is servants who are called slaves no one seems to get particularly upset about the insult.!33 To call someone a slave was included in lists

of punishable insults in most of the Danish and Swedish laws, even those of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Some of these provisions imply not just a word spoken in insult but an attempt to have the person legally regarded as a slave. 134 Even during and after the decline of slavery

the term slave seems to have retained much of its opprobrium, although

the laws cannot necessarily be taken as truly indicative of the worst slanders; surely the Danes of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries could have thought of worse insults than “slave” or “chaff-back” (one who steals seed).

At the same time Icelandic literature was developing its negative

THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA 67 image of the slave, the word slave was appearing in a much more positive context, that of Christianity.!35 The Biblical examples cited above show that the same terms were used for slaves in the Bible as for slaves in Scandinavia. That Moses and the children of Israel were slaves in Egypt may have taken some of the stigma away from slavery. The King’s

Mirror, a didactic work of the thirteenth century, goes further than the Old Swedish pentateuch in calling Joseph in Egypt and Esther and Mordechai in Ahasuerus’s kingdom alien slaves, stressing how galling it was to Haman to see his honors given to an alien slave.!3° Even the king, it stressed, should realize that he is a slave before God, and in prayer one should refer to oneself as “thy slave begotten in sin by thy servant, the son of thy female slave.”!37 Other sources refer to nuns as God’s ambattar (female slaves). A book of homilies in Old Norse constantly refers to all men as slaves of God: “Thou, Lord, hast heard the prayer of Thy slave. ’138

The force of such language in prayer was that it used the lowest possible human status to stress humanity’s humility before God. It not only brought out the lowliness of the slave but also fostered the idea that humility was a good thing. It recognized the equality of all people before God; the text “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, but you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28] was preached in Iceland.!39 The equality of all people before God may not have been taken very seriously, however, when the Norwegian laws required the burial of slaves in a separate part of the churchyard. The contempt for slaves shown in Icelandic literature cannot neces-

sarily be extrapolated to all Scandinavian society at the time when slaves were held. When slaves play a significant role in an Icelandic saga

they are usually, though not always, depicted in a negative way. They are not reflections of slavery in actual life but literary characters created

by an author for the purpose of his story, but it is significant that the author picks slaves for his negative characters. Generally, however, the

slaves’ role in literature is not significant; they perform work, are sent , on errands, accompany their masters on trips, but they are not named and do not really exist as characters. The fact that people in sagas constantly express contempt of slaves or use “slave” as a figurative term of opprobrium does not mean that such expressions were common in the

tenth century but rather that thirteenth-century writers, composing perhaps for an aristocratic audience, imagined them as having been so. The thirteenth-century Icelanders wrote or heard about some slaves who were objects of contempt and about others who behaved honorably and were freed, perhaps founding a family that lasted until their own day. The range of images that survives probably reflects fairly well the range of ways slaves were viewed and perhaps the ways they were treated. The majority of slaves probably fell in the middle and did not make

68 THE IDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA such a good story. Slaves were probably not as different from poor or powerless free people in appearance, in daily life, in courage, or in status as thirteenth-century glorifiers of the independent Icelandic free peasant would have liked to believe.

The Slave in the Scandinavian Economies

In any system of slavery the master controls the slave’s labor, but that labor can be part of any of a variety of economic systems. In “slave economies” slavery provides a significant proportion of the labor force in the main productive activity, in a plantation-type agricultural organization. Slavery also exists in other economies—in other types of agricultural organization (for example, individual farm households holding slaves] or in other types of labor, domestic or industrial. The existence of slavery does not depend upon a certain type of economy. Nor, as we saw in chapter 1, are slaves necessarily distinct in economic function from people of other legal statuses. An attempt to determine the place of slave labor in the Scandinavian economies necessarily involves a good deal of conjecture. The laws and sagas contain references to the slave’s economic function but little indication of how significant it was to the economy. Only for Denmark is there a chronological overlap between the law codes, which provide most of what we know of slavery, and landholding records that contain information about estate structure. Even for Denmark the landholding records contain no explicit references to slaves. We can attempt to infer the slave’s importance in the agrarian econo-

my from types of agricultural organization, assuming that some are more likely to be connected with slave labor than others. Sources for agricultural organization are almost, though not quite, as scarce as those dealing directly with slavery. The surviving land inventories represent only the holdings of the great monastic houses, the property of which might have been differently structured and managed than that of most landlords. Documents like land records were written for practical purposes like rent collection.! They may omit information that is not relevant to the practical purpose, so the fact that these sources are silent on slavery does not mean that the landlords involved did not hold slaves. For the Viking period there is archeological material for social and economic organization, but it too runs into the problem of representative-

ness. The evidence for village structure that has survived may not be typical of what once existed. With archeology the question also arises of 69

70 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES the proper dating of finds.2 Despite the difficulty of arriving at a clear picture of the Scandinavian agricultural organization, some inferences are still possible. The medieval Scandinavian countries cannot be called slave economies, since slavery seems to have operated largely on a household level. Where there was no demesne there can have been no demesne slavery. In Roman Italy, Carolingian France, and late Saxon England, a landowner would have extensive estates, part of which were exploited indirectly through rent-paying tenants, perhaps including domiciled slaves, and part of which were exploited directly by slave labor on the demesne. This pattern of large-scale farming may have held true on the larger estates in Denmark and to a lesser extent Sweden, but by the fourteenth century most evidence from Denmark and Sweden shows large estates

entirely divided up among tenants. Thus large estates often did not mean large-scale exploitation, and with agricultural land divided up into household-sized units, slavery must have operated on the household level. For the Viking Age the evidence is scantier, but large-scale exploitation of slaves does not seem to have been the rule then either. The division of large landholdings into small tenancies, without the retention of demesne by the landlord, certainly prevailed in Norway. There and in Iceland slavery seems to have been a household-level phenomenon. Not all individual farms, of course, were the same size, and some more prosperous individuals would have a number of slaves and hired hands working for them, but still on the level of a large family farm, not an estate. Owners either worked their own land with assistance or leased it out to individual tenants. They did not exploit it on a large scale. SLAVES AS WEALTH: SLAVE BURIAL AND HUMAN SACRIFICE

Slaves could function as a commodity and even as a currency, but the slave also served as wealth in the less functional and more symbolic sense of prestige and conspicuous consumption. There is both documentary and archeological evidence for human sacrifice in Viking Age Scandinavia, presumably sacrifice of slaves. The slave becomes a gravegood or an object in a votive deposit, and whatever religious functions these two categories of objects may serve there is no question that they also are a form of conspicuous consumption through the systematic destruction of wealth. Having a slave sacrificed and buried in one’s grave

could serve the same religious and the same social function as burial with grave-goods: on the one hand, assuring a supply of servants as well

as equipment in the afterlife; on the other hand, demonstrating the prestige of one’s family, who could afford to sacrifice such valuable objects.3

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 71 The Scandinavians sacrificed human beings to the pagan gods, according to contemporary accounts. Thietmar of Merseberg, in the eleventh century, described human sacrifices at Lejre on Sjzlland; Adam of Bremen, writing in the eleventh century, described people sacrificed by hanging at the temple at Old Uppsala; the Arabic writer Ibn Rusta, in the

tenth century, also described human sacrifices by hanging among the Rus’.4 Sacrifice by hanging may be connected to the god Odin, who in Eddic poetry suffers by hanging on a tree to learn wisdom.® There is

nothing to indicate that the victims in these public sacrifices were slaves; we may infer that they were, but they could as well have been criminals or, especially in a sacrifice to Odin, prisoners of war.® Germanic mythology depicts the sacrifice of slaves not as a general

offering to the gods but upon the death of the owner. The story of Brynhild’s death, in several Eddic poems, has eight male and five female slaves burned on the pyre with her. This tale is part of the Sigurd cycle, whose historical core {if any) goes back to Migration Period Europe, so we cannot take it as necessarily reflecting Scandinavian practice. There are no examples in the Icelandic family sagas of slaves being sacrificed at

their master’s death.’ There is one supposed eyewitness account of human sacrifice by Scandinavians on the Volga, Ibn Fadlan’s famous story of the Rus’ ship cremation in which a female slave is killed to accompany her master in the afterworld. When a chieftain dies his slaves are asked to volunteer to

die with him. Ibn Fadlan claimed to have witnessed such a burial; he describes in detail the sexual and other rituals the slave woman engaged in prior to her burial with her master, including the ritual of her killing.® Aside from the controversy over whether the Rus’ are in fact Scandina-

vians, there are other problems with this account: for example, Ibn Fadlan did not understand the Rus’ language and knew the meaning of the ritual only through an interpreter (or through his own imagination). Despite these problems, Ibn Fadlan’s account is interesting because of the relationship it implies between slave burial and suttee. One version of Ibn Fadlan’s account refers to the master as “husband” and to the slave as “wife” as well as “slave girl,” implying that it was her function

as woman and not as slave that was important.? The ritual in Ibn Fadlan’s example seems primarily concerned with providing the chief-

tain with a wife in the next world, rather than sacrifice to a deity or showing the chief’s power and prestige. Ibn Fadlan’s own interest in sex might have led him to put a disproportionate emphasis on the idea of a female companion in the afterlife as the significance of the ceremony.

One might even go so far as to doubt the validity of his account that there was such a ceremony; certainly his account is not solid enough evidence to bear the great weight of explanation scholars have placed upon it.

72 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES In the Eddic tale slaves were sacrificed with a woman, not a man, and the archeological material does not indicate that women were killed to

serve as concubines in the next life.!° Several excavated graves from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the British Isles may contain slaves who were sacrificed at their masters’ deaths, but the only basis for saying that they were slaves is the fact that they apparently died by violence and were buried in a grave with another person, plus the supposedly corroborative evidence of Ibn Fadlan’s account, which the excavators invariably cite. It is logical enough that only slaves would be available to be killed in such a fashion, but logic alone is not proof that these were slaves.1! That said, however, slave sacrifice seems by far the most plausible explanation for some of the double burials. The four finds in which the relation of the two bodies to each other is clearest come from Denmark. One comes from the cemetery at Lejre, a site on Sjzlland that was an important base for the Danish royal family. One of the twenty-two graves, dated to the middle of the tenth century, contained two men, one beheaded and buried in a normal position and

the other buried in a distorted position, as if he had been tied up. The double grave in the Stengade cemetery in Langeland, one of eighty-three Viking Age graves there, is similar. A young man is buried with an older man who seems to have been tied up and killed by violence. The third

group of presumed slave burials from Denmark comes from Draby in Sjzlland. There are twelve graves from the Viking Age, three of them double burials in which one of the bodies has been identified as that of a slave. And in a find from Gerdrup near Roskilde is a Viking Age grave where a man who died by hanging accompanies a richly supplied woman.!2 In a number of other burials from Denmark there appears to have been human sacrifice but the relationship of the victim to other bodies is not clear enough to indicate simultaneous burial. These people could

have been sacrificed for some reason other than to accompany a deceased master. !3 None of the slave burials identified from Denmark was a fabulously wealthy grave. The slave was probably the most valuable grave-good in

each of them. The Oseberg ship burial from ninth-century Norway, by contrast, is one of the richest graves surviving from the Viking Age despite the fact that it was robbed soon after its deposition and thus no jewelry remained to be excavated. The ship contained the bodies of two women: a younger one who has been identified as a queen on the basis of the richness of the grave-goods and an older one who may have been her slave.!4 A Swedish example of a double grave that might have included a slave comes from the large cemetery at the Viking town of Birka. There are several double graves each containing a man and a woman, but none

of the bodies is in a distorted position or beheaded, nor are the two corpses distinguishable in social status, so they are probably married

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 73 couples buried together. One grave, however, contains two women, one buried in a normal position, the other crouched on top of her. The first woman wore jewelry, the second had none. It is possible that the second woman was alive when placed in the grave; her position indicates signs of a struggle. This woman has been interpreted as a slave buried with her mistress.!5 Sacrificial burials have also been identified at several sites in Uppland.!° Several Viking sites in the British Isles contain possible slave burials. At Ballateare, Isle of Man, a woman was sacrificed in a grave with a man. There is really no way of determining whether the woman was the man’s wife or a slave, but it is clear that she was sacrificed.!”7 Another example, from the ninth century, comes from Rousay in the Orkneys. !8 These examples of possible slave burials do not make up a very high proportion of the known Viking graves in Scandinavia and the Norse colonies abroad. They do not indicate that the custom of slave sacrifice was widespread. Yet, if they are in fact slave sacrifices—and no other interpretation seems satisfactory—they show that some people in the Viking Age had religious beliefs or social customs that led them to kill slaves to bury with their departed relatives, and that an individual slave was expendable enough that they could afford to sacrifice him or her in this manner. One might expect a slave to be expendable to someone like the princess buried in the Oseberg ship, but that several Danish graves, which are not remarkable in any other way, contain sacrificed slaves may reveal something about slaveholding among average prosperous farmers, not apparently great chieftains, in Viking Age Denmark. SLAVES AS CONCUBINES

An important function of slave women seems to have been their role as concubines, bearers of their masters’ children or simply bed partners.!9 Some children born to these women may have been exposed, but the laws providing means for freeing such children and adopting them into the kindred indicate that many were not. In some cases, as in the Swedish laws where the child followed the parent of higher status, the children were automatically free. In other instances a formal acknowledgment proceeding was required and the child had restricted inheritance rights. The law of Ostergotland provided that the children of a slave woman

could not inherit, “but only the children of a legally married wife,” which seems to contradict the provision that a free man could marry a slave woman. Perhaps by “slave woman” here the law means “slave concubine.” In keeping with the idea that the children of a slave woman and a free man were free even if it was not a legal marriage, the law prohibited someone from keeping his own children in slavery.2°

74 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES There are a number of wills from Sweden freeing slave women with

their children, or just the children (see chapter 4). These may be the result of concubinage, the masters freeing their kin at their death. Still, under Swedish law, the child of one slave and one free parent was already free, so the fact that the child was not already considered free by

that rule indicates that the paternity was not previously acknowledged.?! In the law of Gotland we see a semantic shift taking place. The word for a son of a slave woman (pysun}, by the time the law code was written down, had taken on the meaning “son born out of wedlock.” Such a child could not inherit unless he could prove that he was of Gotlandic descent

on both sides for three generations.22 The fact that the general term derives from the term for the son of a slave woman hints that originally the great majority of those born out of wedlock would have been the children of slaves. The Danish laws made a distinction between free and unfree illegiti-

mate children, but neither had any rights at all unless their father wished to acknowledge (and free) them. The Skane law treated the child of a slave woman and a free man as just another slave unless the master

chose to free it. The laws of Jutland and Sjzlland provided that the children of a slave could not inherit, but the child of a slave concubine, freed by its father, may have been able to do so.23 Danish law in this respect was not as specific and probably did not go as far as Roman law, which did allow legitimation of one’s children by a slave woman.”4 The Norwegian laws acknowledged the existence of concubinage, while putting strict limits on what one could do for one’s son by a slave woman. The Gulabing law provided an elaborate mechanism for adopting any illegitimate son into the kindred so that he could inherit; a son born of a slave could be adopted in this way only if he had been freed before age fifteen. The father’s legitimate heirs had to consent to the adoption. Without such adoption a slave-born son could inherit a smaller amount, but only if he had been freed by the age of three. The amount that a father could give his slave-born son by inter vivos gift was also limited. The Frostabing law provisions are very similar, although the limits on the amount a slave-born child could be given were different.25 Some have argued that the slave concubine was of lower status than the free concubine not only because she lacked personal freedom but also because she was not a surrogate wife as the free concubine was. There is no evidence, however, that the free concubine was really any more of a wife. The status of these women was not reflected in different treatment of their children. The slave-born son is a separate category

from the hornungr (a child born out of wedlock where the parents’ relationship is open) and the hrisungr (a child born out of wedlock where

the parents’ relationship is secret). Yet these two types of illegitimate

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 75 child were set against the slave-born child only in the sense that they were labeled as separate categories; the end result in the law is that they

received exactly the same treatment. All could inherit if the father acknowledged paternity (and, in the case of the slave, freed his child}.26

None was entitled to anything if the father refused to acknowledge paternity. Icelandic law as it appears in Grdgas did not provide for a master to adopt into the kindred his child born of his slave.2” According to the literature the situation seems to have been much like that in Norway. An illegitimate child of either a slave woman or free concubine could be considered part of the kin but did not get a full share in the inheritance. The main difference between the children of a slave and the children of a

free concubine, in fact, seems to be that the children of a slave con-

cubine had no relatives on their mother’s side to provide support if , legitimately born half-siblings denied them their rights. Numerous Norwegian magnates and famous Icelanders of the settlement period had slave mothers.?8 In fact, it may have been because it was so common at an early period for men to have children by their slave

women that the term ambdtt came to have the general meaning of concubine or anyone with whom a man had children and to whom he

was not married.29 Sometimes literature depicts the father as contemptuous of his slave-born children, as with Earl Rognvald of Mere, who told his son Einar that he expected little of him because his mother’s kin were slave-born; Einar nevertheless went on to make himself Earl of the Orkneys.?° In two instances in Egils saga where there are

disputes over inheritance, claimants not only allege that their halfbrothers or half-sisters were born out of wedlock but imply or even state that their mothers were slaves because they were not legally married or had been carried off like captives.3! The implied equation of even a free

concubine with a slave points back to slavery as the origin of concubinage in Scandinavia.32

In some cases from the literature the family fully accepts the child born of aslave woman. In Droplaugarsona saga, Hjarrandi is involved in a battle on behalf of his father-in-law, Helgi Asbjarnarson. His opponent taunts him with the fact that his wife is not freeborn, but he replies, “If it

comes to that, they [Helgi’s legitimate and slave-born daughters] are both equally bound to Helgi.”33 In Laxdeela saga, Olaf Peacock is Hoskuld’s favorite son, though his mother isa slave. His legitimate sons

refuse to let Hoskuld give Olaf a share in the inheritance so he tricks them into letting him give Olaf more than the legal limit of twelve gras as a gift.34

In Laxdcela saga the favorite child, Olaf, is not the son of just any slave. His mother, purchased for her beauty and set up in a household of her own as Hgskuld’s concubine, turns out to be an Irish princess. Sim-

76 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES ilarly, the mothers of Hakon the Good and Earl Einar were not kitchenmaids to whom the master happened to take a fancy, but women established in households by their lovers. If a working slave woman had a child by her master, which undoubtedly happened often, the master’s

wife might well insist that it be exposed, as happens in Vatnsdcela saga.>> Concubines like Melkorka appear in the sagas because they are romantic figures, but probably many men who could not afford to buy or

keep a woman solely as a concubine still had sexual relations with slaves in their households, and the fate of these women and their children has gone unrecorded. AGRICULTURAL SLAVERY

There is so little direct evidence on slavery’s role in the agricultural economy of any Scandinavian country in the Middle Ages that one must infer it from the agrarian organization as a whole, which unfortunately

is not much clearer. Hardly any written material with any bearing on the economic situation exists from the Viking Age. The excavation of cemeteries and villages can reveal a good deal about the social and economic life of the period but it cannot say much about slavery. If one accepts the view that the typical free man was an independent landowning peasant, then where there is archeological evidence for large farms

that required a lot of labor the dependent laborers must have been slaves. But there are other possibilities, and we do not know that all free men were independent landowners.

Norway

For Norway little documentary evidence survives from even the early Middle Ages, let alone the Viking Age. Changes in settlement patterns from the Viking Age to the early Middle Ages provide a back-

ground to what we can glean from the early laws about the slave’s economic status.°° The little archeological evidence for the structure of Norwegian Viking Age settlements points to isolated farmsteads where the unit of agricultural production was not the estate but the household, perhaps an extended family household including servants or slaves.?7 If there were slaves they did not have separate quarters but lived as part of -

the master’s household. The typical pattern was one long dwellinghouse near some other buildings, rarely dwellings.3® At a few sites are structures that may have been subsidiary dwellings, but their purpose is not clear and in any case this is not the general pattern, although there may have been larger estates that have not been excavated.39 Most sites

from Norwegian settlements in the North Sea region also fail to give evidence of anything that could be slave dwellings, except at an early

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 77 ninth-century settlement at Jarlshof, Shetland, which had a small outbuilding that the excavator believes was living quarters for servants.4° In all these areas the archeological picture makes the household the unit of production.

Though ambiguities in dating complicate the picture, the main changes in settlement patterns at the end of the Viking Age and the beginning of the Middle Ages in Norway were an expansion of settlement begun in the Viking Age and continuing up to about 1300, a division of larger farms into smaller units and a division of former common land. This division cannot be dated exactly but certainly happened before 1350.41 The expansion of settlement has been studied mainly on the basis of place-names. Jorn Sandnes has estimated that the number of settlements grew by about 25—30 percent in the high Middle Ages, at least in the Trondheim region.42 Those farms cleared and established after the Viking Age tend to be smaller than those cleared earlier, in part because much of the best land was already taken and latecomers had to be content with smaller amounts but also because those doing the later clearing might not have been as prosperous and might have had fewer people to assist them.43 A few archeological sites illustrate the establishment of new smaller settlements.44 Ottar Ronneseth suggests that

an intensification of cultivation made it possible for one farm to be divided up and support a number of households; this does not necessarily mean that it supported a larger number of persons, because there

might have been a move to smaller households, perhaps with fewer slaves or other nonfamily workers.45 The new settlement patterns may have been the choice of the individual farmers, who decided to sell or rent out part of their land, or may have been imposed from above by a large landowner. Often when a farm was split, the fields were divided into many strips so that the territory of

the different bruk alternated and the land was worked in common. Sections of the former meadowland were enclosed in a fairly regular manner, perhaps implying the existence of an authority behind the movement, though Salvesen has suggested that the “regulated” divisions of land are much less regulated than in Denmark and that the division into strips might have been intended to guarantee everyone a piece of the best land, which was only found in small areas in this hilly region.*°

Determining landownership in the high Middle Ages requires reading backward from later sources. By the sixteenth century about 4 per-

cent of the land was in the hands of the Crown, the Church had 44 percent, and the nobility about 12 percent; the rest was in the hands of peasants. The distribution was probably similar in the first half of the fourteenth century.*” But the fact that nobles or ecclesiastical institutions owned large amounts of land does not mean that agriculture was

78 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES structured on a large scale. Large landholdings were parceled out into small tenant units. Sagas referring to the Viking Age are the only evidence from Norway

to suggest that there was large-scale cultivation at any time. Snorri Sturluson’s saga of St. Olaf describes how Olaf’s retainer Erling Skjalgsson kept a retinue of ninety freedmen and how his estate was worked by

thirty slaves, who were allowed to buy their own freedom.*8 Thirty slaves working the land implies quite a large farm by Norwegian standards. It may be that Snorri exaggerated numbers to make a dramatic impression of Erling’s riches or used a number of workers that would be appropriate for a large estate in his own time but not in Erling’s. Even if the account was accurate, Erling was not a typical landowner but one of the most prominent men in Norway. The mere fact that Snorri thought his farm organization worthy of mention, though his slaves play no later part in the story, points to its being unusual.49

If saga evidence is at all reliable for Viking Age Norway it would indicate that there were a few large estates like Erling’s and a number of fairly prosperous farmers with large farms and many helpers, whether slave or free, in the household. The pattern of estate structure for Norway that appears in the sagas is similar to that for Iceland and is more

likely to reflect the situation in Iceland at a later date than that in Norway in the tenth century. There is no evidence that great landowners in the Middle Ages used demesne-type agriculture, and large land accumulations as early as the Viking Age do not imply prebendal slave labor in that period.5° That there was no large-scale farming in medieval Norway, however, need not mean that there were no slaves. Even the average family farm may have had slaves. That farms were worked with labor besides that of the householders themselves is hinted by a law referring to a shortage of

labor and restricting who could go abroad.>! In fact, it was not only landowners who had slaves in their households: the law acknowledged that even tenants could have them.52 The Frostaping law contains a provision that has been taken as evidence that a typical farm of the twelfth century would have three slaves: if men put out another man’s eye, they must compensate for it by stock-

ing a farm for him with twelve cows, two horses, and three slaves. Sandnes has calculated that a farm with this quantity of livestock would amount to about twelve gresbol, slightly under the actual average size of sixteen. Assuming that these figures from the Frostapbing law represent the average farm, Sandnes has calculated that there were several thousand slaves in the Trondelag at the time of the codification of the law, and fifty to seventy-five thousand throughout Norway when slaveholding was at its peak.53 This section of the Frostabing law, however, can-

not necessarily be taken to represent the typical farm. It is meant as a

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 79 statement not about farm size but about punishment for a crime. It might be intended as a particularly harsh punishment, or it might be intended to provide more assistance than the average farmer would need because the victim of the crime was now handicapped. It could be that three workers were considered the normal amount of labor for a farm but that under normal conditions it would not be slave labor; in the case where an offender had to provide labor for his victim, the purchase of slaves would be more certain than the hiring of free men to ensure that the labor would continue to be provided. As a penalty for a crime the provision of slaves is extremely unusual, and it might have its roots ina particular case. Even if it does represent a deliberately legislated norm

for the punishment of this particular crime it need not represent the norm for the staff of a farm. Other provisions in the Frostaping law make it clear that the typical farmer was not expected to have slaves or indeed any other help. Where a certain amount is prescribed to be given in alms on Michaelmas Day,

the amount varies depending on whether the farmer works alone or keeps a helper. Similarly, in the selection of men to man the ships for the coastal defense, men who have no one at home working on the farm are

not to be required to serve unless absolutely necessary. This implies that the redactors expected there would be lone farmers, presumably slaveless. The Gulaping law also provides that in the levy for the coastal defense a cook should be provided from among those who own slaves, implying that some free farmers would be expected not to own any.54 Slaves appear as agricultural laborers in the laws, but in a context

that implies that they worked alongside their master. The Frostaping law provides a penalty for killing someone while he is “out in the meadow with his slaves.”55 A farm worked by such an individual with a few slaves as help was more typical than the large-scale slavery Snorri described on Erling’s estate. The laws referring or alluding to the jobs done by slaves give the impression that the slave was typically a member of the household, not a demesne laborer. Both the Gulaping and Frostaping laws, in their schedules of compensation for injuries to different types of slaves, refer to slave occupations. The Gulabing law allows double the normal compensation for intercourse with the “best female slave,” who could be either a seta (housemaid) or deigia (baker or dairymaid); sim-

ilarly the “best male slave” was a bryti (steward) or bionn (personal servant). The Frostabing law has the same categories. These privileged,

probably household, slaves were set above the presumed agricultural slaves, but this does not mean that the agricultural workers were not also members of the household; probably not many households would have these four elite slaves in addition to others. The Gulabing law passage provides that if someone has only one female slave she shall be valued as his best.5° Household slaves appear again in both law codes in

80 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES the context of accusations of theft. Under the Frostabing law, if stolen goods are found in a house, locked away, not only the farmer and his wife

but the male and female slaves who bear the keys are suspected. The bearing of keys was a standard symbol for a woman being in charge of her own household, so this law implies that slaves were given a good deal of responsibility even if they are not called bryti as in the Gulaping law.°’

The economy in Norway may have relied heavily on slaves at the household level, but it was not a slave economy. Slaves were reasonably

common in farm households; certainly the laws imply that they were not unusual. There were probably not three slaves per average household as has been suggested, but if slaveholding was not the rule neither was it the exception.

Iceland For Iceland the economic role of slavery need not be inferred from farm structure to the same extent as it must be for Norway, because literary sources supplement the evidence of archeology (although they have their own problems; see the appendix). The early settlers of Iceland, according to Landnamabok, brought as many as ten or more slaves apiece. Not all of these remained slaves. Landnadmabok reports that many were given their freedom at the time of the settlement (see chapter 5). Hjorleif, whose slaves revolted, provides an example of the dangers of holding too many slaves in a land where settlements are spaced far apart, though many of the settlers named in Landnadmab6ok had free dependents with them as well, so their slaves would not have outnumbered them.58 Geirmund Heljarskin had one of the largest retinues of any settler: the total number of slaves he had is not stated but he brought eighty freedmen. Geirmund claimed enough land for four estates (bu). One was run by his steward (drmadr), the other three by slaves, one of whom, Atli, had fourteen slaves under him.5? Four estates were not typical; Geirmund was an exceptionally rich man as well as something of a legendary figure. In any case his eighty freedmen were apparently more retainers than workers, and Aud’s twenty did not remain part of the patroness’ household but got holdings of their own. The Icelandic family sagas depict the typical Icelandic householder as having several slaves. The sagas rarely mention an exact number and the households usually include free dependents as well. Even in the wealthier households, the landowner is not depicted as a man of leisure who has a steward to run the farm and drive the slave gang while he lives on the surplus extracted. Rather, the sagas depict agriculture in Iceland as a household enterprise, where master, hired workers, and slaves all take part.©° Vigfis is out making charcoal with three slaves when he offers one of them his freedom for killing Snorri godi (priest or chieftain). Arnkel, though he is said to work his slaves very hard, works alongside

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES SI them bringing in the hay. In the saga of Viga-Glim (Killer-Glim}, Bard and his huskar] go together to fetch timber. In Njals saga, Gunnar works in the fields doing manual labor; this is apparently not in conflict with his presentation as a Viking hero. Even King Sigurd Syr, in Olafs saga, works in the fields with his men, an instance which may well be Snorri’s projection of an Icelandic situation.®! Where the sagas depict one man as owning more land than his house-

hold worked, he often seems to have tenants rather than a gang of demesne laborers, as with Blund-Ketil in Hcensa-Poris saga, but some farms seem to have been run on a larger scale. Porstein Cod-biter has

sixty free men in his household, implying a sizeable landholding, though many of them may have been more retainers than workers. Gudmund the Mighty has a hundred men in his household. Olvir in Ljésvetninga saga has eighteen slaves, a large number for a small farmer. The specific numbers have little meaning, but the implication is that

there was some quite large-scale landholding.62 Many householders with one largish farm seem not to have managed their estate themselves but had a verkstj6ri (foreman or overseer} to do it—not only Geirmund Heljarskin with his four estates in Landnadmabok, for example, but also Njal and Gunnar in Njdls saga, Ljotélf in Svarfdoela saga, and Steingrim in Reykdcela saga, who are depicted as prosperous farmers but not great landlords. Three of Geirmund’s four overseers, one of Njal’s two, and Ljotodlf’s one are slaves.® Most slaves in the sagas seem to be members of their masters’ house-

holds, not gang laborers, whether or not there is an overseer. The work they do seems typical of the tasks any farmer would do. Certain of the less desirable jobs, like dunging the fields, may have been reserved for slaves, but their tasks in haymaking, woodcutting, herding, and hauling are generally very similar to the tasks performed by free workers and even the masters. A late legendary saga romance refers to the preparation of food as a servile task, and another legendary tale connects the slave with swineherding; these tales are not to be taken as depictions of social reality, but they reveal what thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Icelanders imagined slavery had been like.64 Female slaves other than concubines in the sagas had tasks not too different from those of other household women: weaving and grinding grain.® The sagas do not mention women slaves nearly as often as men. This could reflect a smaller number of women slaves due to female infanticide or selective raiding or purchase, but more likely it merely reflects the storyteller’s choice of material appropriate to his genre: not much action in the sagas takes place within the home, and therefore women slaves are not very likely to appear in the background. When free women appear in the sagas it is most often as counselors or instigators to their husbands and sons, roles which saga authors would not be likely to attribute to slave women. Some slaves were not only members of the household but almost

82 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES members of the family. Female slaves served as nurses or foster mothers

as well as concubines. Freed male slaves who remained within the household as dependents also served as foster fathers to the children of the family.°® Slaves who appear in the sagas in a personal relation to their masters or mistresses most commonly are sent on secret errands or told to commit murders or other crimes. The frequency with which this motif occurs probably owes more to the requirements of plot than to the actual life of the slave, and it is not always a slave who fulfills this plot function.°” The sagas’ picture of slavery in Iceland cannot be taken as realistic. Even if the general background picture of social and economic institutions was not deliberately constructed to fit the tales it still may reflect

the authors’ own time or their preconceptions about an earlier time. Such features as household size and structure, even if not deliberately patterned after the thirteenth century, probably unconsciously depict a thirteenth-century situation. The author, in projecting backward in time the typical Icelandic farm, may simply have changed the free workers to slaves. The picture of the economic role of slavery in Iceland derived from the literature cannot be said to represent saga-age Iceland, but only the Iceland of the sagas. Still, archeological evidence from Iceland agrees

with the picture the literature gives: an agricultural system based on independent farms, where any slaves were part of the household. The geographical and topographical conditions in large part dictate this settlement pattern. Though the Viking Age farmsteads consisted of several buildings, they generally appear to have had only one dwelling, which suggests farming on a fairly small scale. Whatever free or unfree dependents lived on the farm would have shared a dwelling-house with the landowner and his family.°8 By the eleventh century the typical Icelandic farmhouse was split into two separate houses, built end to end, with smaller buildings at right angles to them, but there are still no traces of smaller dwelling-houses.°? There are some settlements with a slightly

different plan, with separate outbuildings. One recent excavation, at Hvitarholt, discovered three Viking Age hall houses, two barns, and five sunken huts, of the type that have been identified in Denmark as slave dwellings.”° (Though archeology indicates that slaves generally did not

have separate dwellings, there is at least one literary reference to a brelahus {slave house]: a tale preserved in a fourteenth-century Icelandic version of the saga of the Norwegian king Olaf Tryggvason has a wrongfully enslaved man burning down both his master’s hall and the “slave house.”}7!

Archeology has not revealed great changes in farm structure in the medieval period.’”2 Property tended to become concentrated in fewer hands in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but not to be worked as

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 83 great estate units. Earlier farms were divided up into smaller tenant holdings.’3 Slavery in Iceland, to the extent it lasted after the Viking Age, remained basically a household phenomenon.

Denmark VIKING AGE. For Denmark and Sweden it is much more difficult

than for Iceland and Norway to discuss the place of slavery in agricultural organization in the Viking Age, because there is no written evidence to complement the archeological settlement material. The law codes do not come until much later. If one may not legitimately extrapolate from thirteenth-century Icelandic literature to tenth-century society in Iceland, one may do so still less from the same literature to tenth-century society in Denmark or Sweden. As some measure of compensation, the archeological material for Denmark is much richer than elsewhere in revealing patterns of social and economic structure. Within Denmark there are major regional variations in settlement pat-

terns and hence in the role slaves might have played in the village economy. In Denmark, villages rather than isolated farmsteads seem to have dominated. Recent excavations of Viking Age villages in Jutland have

revealed two new types of village: one where all the farmsteads are approximately equal in size, and one with a manor house or chieftain’s residence of some sort. In both types each farmstead usually had secondary buildings besides the primary dwelling-house, some of which may have been dwellings. The sites of Seedding and Trabjerg, both in West

Jutland, represent the first type of village.”4 In general, this type of village indicates a society of farmers who were fairly equal in economic status, none of whom was engaged in farming on a larger-than-household scale (except perhaps at the very latest phase of the Trabjerg settlement). Any slaves they had would probably have been household mem-

bers living and working alongside their masters. The regular layout implies that the villages were planned, either by the villagers themselves or some higher authority; they did not grow up haphazardly. Other settlements from Jutland—particularly Vorbasse and Omgard— indicate the presence of social differentiation among the landowners and the existence of large-scale farming.’5 Each large-farm complex clearly was inhabited by a wealthy person or family with many dependents, possibly slaves, who were probably organized on a larger-thanhousehold scale. Large-scale farming and animal husbandry were responsible for the economic development of these sites, but they also seem to have acquired social or political importance in the larger society. L. C. Nielsen

argues that Omgard presents a case of a dynasty of wealthy farmers

84 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES growing into chieftains, possibly with a band of mounted retainers, a hird, centered on the site.”6 Runestones in various parts of Denmark attest the existence of local magnates who could have conducted largescale agriculture or at least owned a lot of land in the Viking Age. The increasing power of these magnates could be due to their role in international trade or in the incipient state. Such magnates’ farms seem to have developed at the very end of the Viking Age.’’ Not all the settlement remains from Jutland and the Danish islands

are either planned villages with equal-sized farms laid out around a central area, like Seedding and Trabjerg, or large farm complexes like Vorbasse and Omgard. More common are traces of small settlements, usually with one or two hall houses and a number of sunken huts that could have been slave or dependent dwellings or workshops.’8 The Viking Age settlement pattern in Skane is strikingly different

from that in Jutland and the islands: hardly any buildings other than sunken huts have been found. Several major excavations have turned up entire villages where the sunken huts seem to have been dwellings and where there were no traces at all of longhouses. Though in archeology as elsewhere it is always risky to found an argument on the silence of the sources, because so many factors can influence what turns up in a given excavation (in this case particularly later plowing, which can destroy traces of postholes}, the evidence from all the sites together is rather overwhelming. One site, Loddekopinge, may have been a seasonal trading village, where sunken huts were convenient because they could be given temporary superstructures. Several other sites with sunken huts, including the major excavations of Gardl6ésa, Valleberga, and Hagestad, seem to imply year-round habitation.7? A few sites in western Denmark as well have revealed sunken huts without associated longhouses.8° The sunken huts in eastern Denmark have been interpreted as slave dwellings. This interpretation is highly dubious, since we cannot be sure that they were dwellings at all. The sunken huts served a variety of functions and cannot all be put in the same category. Certainly they must have been fairly unpleasant to live in, because of their small size and the difficulty of heating them; Marta Str6mberg has suggested that slaves may have lived in them since no one else would be willing to do so in the cold season.®! Yet the settlements composed only of these sunken huts seem to be linked to foreign trade, and if indeed these were the only

dwellings on the sites, it is not likely that they were all occupied by slaves. The masters had to live somewhere. Analogy with sunken-hut settlements in Germany and England from the Migration Period, as well

as with earlier settlements in Skane containing both sunken huts and longhouses, would lead one to guess that the dwellings of the landowners in these settlements have simply not yet been found.82 Archeological material can reveal economic relationships between

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 85 landholders and dependents; it is harder to deduce sociocultural relationships and impossible to draw conclusions about juridical status from this material. Large-scale, demesne-type farming may imply some form of dependent labor, but not necessarily slavery. If we knew from other sources that slavery was a significant source of dependent labor, we might be safe in identifying dependents on the large-farm complexes of Jutland or the dwellers in the sunken huts of Skane as slaves, but we have no independent evidence of the importance of slavery in the economy and cannot assume that dependents living in an uncomfortable situation must have been slaves. Even an interpretation of the sunken huts

as the dwellings of prebendal workers of unknown status is not warranted. The inhabitants may have been laborers directly exploited by the master in a demesne-type system, but they were obviously domiciled and need not have been slaves.82 The difference in settlement patterns between eastern and western Denmark may be due not to differences in socioeconomic class struc-

tures but to the type of farming; Skane concentrated on agriculture rather than husbandry. Those living in the sunken huts could have been independent small farmers. It is possible that in eastern Denmark during the Viking Age slaves made up almost the entire population, perhaps with royal stewards to oversee them, but the evidence does not warrant this as a firm conclusion. It does seem clear enough that these structures were not the dwellings of very prosperous Viking farmers; it is likely that they were those of dependents, attached to some sort of estate or proto-estate.84 The archeological evidence shows a change in settlement patterns at

the end of the Viking Age and the beginning of the Middle Ages in Denmark. Regular layout, implying some sort of authority planning the settlement rather than organic growth, is known trom Viking Age villages and indeed much earlier, but the end of the Viking Age brought with it a major break in continuity, with villages becoming much more regular. Many early Viking Age sites were abandoned.85 The question is not why a shift in settlement occurred around the year 1000 but why the

settlements that were established around that time became permanent.86 New forms of land ownership could provide part of the answer. Where a village was under the ownership of one person, he might for administrative reasons want it to remain in one place; once it was laid out in measured, taxable units there was reason not to change.8” Anne Kristensen has suggested by analogy with military colonization of the English Danelaw that many settlers on newly cleared land in Viking Age Denmark were slaves, domiciled under the auspices of the king or large landowners (like the German KOnigsfreie), but the evidence even for the Danelaw is far from conclusive.88 Whatever the reasons behind the shift in settlement and establish-

86 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES ment of new regulated villages, large landowners had much to do with it. The runestones and the settlements like Omgard show that there was already a group of magnates or chieftains in the Viking Age. By the time

of written records in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, there were certainly several very large landholders in Denmark, both secular and ecclesiastical. Large landholdings do not necessarily mean largescale agriculture, nor do they imply slavery, but the information available on the structure of the Danish agricultural community in the Middle Ages makes it likely that slaves were involved. HIGH MIDDLE AGES. Inferring the role of slaves in agriculture in

high medieval Denmark requires a discussion of the documentary evidence for estate structure. Already from the late twelfth century documents indicate that the largest landowners in Denmark had huge estates. The prime example is Sune Ebbesen, the father of Archbishop Andreas Sunesen and head of the leading family in Sjzlland. The Hvide family were benefactors of the monastery at Sorg and owned about half of Sjzlland.89 To own this much land at the beginning of the thirteenth century the family must have begun to accumulate it long before. Sune Ebbesen was hardly a typical landholder, nor is much known about the organization of agriculture on the land he held, but he does indicate that by the thirteenth century in Denmark much of the land was no longer in the hands of small proprietors. According to the list for Falster, the only part of Denmark for which landowners are given in the so-called King

Valdemar’s Cadaster of the mid-thirteenth century, the king owned about a quarter of the land there, the great landowners had a quarter, and the Church and small landowners had the rest.9° Most landholdings for which records survive belonged to ecclesiastical institutions, which accumulated land through donations (as did the monastery of Sorg from the Hvide family) and perhaps also through small landholders putting themselves under the Church’s protection.?! By whatever means the great cathedrals and monasteries accumulated

their land, they managed to acquire whole villages: typically they owned some scattered lands over a wide territory, but the bulk of their possessions in the early thirteenth century seems to have been concen-

trated, a situation which probably goes back to the twelfth century. Even the lands of secular landowners seem to be fairly well concentrated.92 Concentrated landholding, particularly the holding of whole villages by a single person or institution, would make possible large-scale farm-

ing, and this seems to have been common in Denmark though tenant farming gradually replaced it beginning in the later thirteenth century. Some land held by the monasteries, particularly the Cistercians, consisted of granges, the Cistercians’ rule required them to work the land

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 87 themselves or at least to have it worked by lay brothers.93 For the most part, however, the unit involved in large-scale farming both in Denmark and in Sweden was not the grange but the curia.

The meaning of the term curia as it appears in documents from Denmark is disputed. Both this term and the term mansio, sometimes used interchangeably, seem to mean farm. In the later Middle Ages curia

meant curia principalis, the main farm and administrative center of a village, which was surrounded by tenant farms.°4 The term by then had

no relation to the organization of cultivation, only to the size of the farm.?> In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the curia seems to have been not a large farm in a village made up of tenants but a unit under a steward’s control, worked by people who held no land of their own or only very small plots, usually called inquilini or gardseder rather than coloni or landbor.®© Since evidence exists for only the largest landowners, such large-scale farming might be typical only of their estates. This type of agricultural organization, in which the workers provide labor on a large farm rather than rent from plots of their own, will here

be called large-farm, demesne-type or curia agriculture, rather than demesne agriculture, which carries connotations of the generally much larger demesnes of France or England. We encounter a problem in relating this system of agricultural organ-

ization to the institution of slavery, since none of the cartularies or inventories from which the evidence comes mentions slaves. Whether we conclude that slaves played a role in curia agriculture in Denmark depends on how far back in time we can trace sucha system. The earliest documents come from the early fourteenth century, and the situation

they reveal may be assumed to have held true in the late thirteenth century, but there is still a gap between them and the large-farm complexes of the eleventh century that have been excavated. If the system of

the large curia did exist in the twelfth and early thirteenth century, slaves might have performed the tasks that cottagers did later, particularly in Sjelland and Skane, where larger landholdings were concentrated and where the laws indicate that slavery may have been an important institution stillin the thirteenth century. The inquilini or cottagers of the late thirteenth and fourteenth century may have been the descendants of slaves. Some curiae of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries must have been worked by people who neither owned nor rented land and who did all their work on the demesne, since the documents do not list any rentpaying tenants connected with these curiae. These people were economically dependent on the steward in charge of the large farm, even if

they were domiciled and their juridical status was no longer that of slaves. Erik Ulsig suggests that such farming of curiae without attached tenant farms was much more widespread by 1300 than in 1200. If there

88 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES were not so many large curiae in the twelfth century, large-scale farming with slaves may never have existed in Denmark. But curiae do appear in

the sources during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and they may have included large-scale farms even though they also had coloniae connected with them.97 We do not know whether landholders other than the large monasteries or churches practiced large-scale farming, and there is no direct evidence for slaves’ participation in it, but we can conclude that at least some land was worked in larger-than-household units and that as long as slavery lasted slaves were involved in such agriculture. Still, there is no concrete evidence for the scale of slaveholding in Denmark.

There is no group of wills, as for Sweden, to provide information about either chronology of slaveholding or numbers of slaves. Nor do the laws provide much information on the organization of slave labor. The only extant will from Denmark with a manumission clause is that of Absalon, archbishop of Lund, who died in 1201.98 Although Absalon owned a lot of land, the slaves he freed were domestic rather than agri-

cultural servants. Similarly, the Danish laws refer only to domestic rather than agricultural tasks of slaves: the fine in the Sjzlland law for raping a slave woman is higher if she is a special slave who “neither grinds meal nor bakes,” implying that those are the duties of a normal slave woman. The law of Skane distinguishes between a normal slave woman and a setis ambut who, the Latin paraphrase explains, is exempt from servile tasks: she may be a personal servant of the mistress, or perhaps a household supervisor allowed to keep company with the mistress. The only job the laws mention for male slaves is that of matsvein (cook or cook’s helper) in the Jedung.9? The laws in general assume

that the slave is part of his owner’s household, but this need not have been the case for all slaves. Sweden

For Sweden the evidence for slavery in the high medieval period is

better than for the other countries: in addition to legal and literary sources, there are wills that give some notion of actual practice. However, the evidence concerning the Viking Age, even for settlement and agricultural patterns and especially for slavery itself, is much sparser for Sweden than for the other countries. There has been very little excavation of rural settlement sites from the Viking Age that could give an idea of community structure. !00

During the early Viking Age the typical settlement in the Malar area, where the most data survive, seems to have been the individual farm, with a population of ten to fifteen persons per unit at any given time.!°! If these ten to fifteen people composed one household, some could well have been slaves; nonetheless, given the size of the unit this

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 89 would be a household-based rather than slave-based agricultural system. Already in the Viking Age it seems there also existed a class of magnates in the area that owed its origin in part to control of the trade in iron. The regular territorial divisions that appear at that time point to a developed state power and royal administrators. Their authority

centered on estates that by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are known to have been in royal hands (identified by the place-name Husby}

and could have been so earlier. Runestones indicate that some people owned whole villages. These people could have had large farms worked by slave labor. 192

During the transition from the Viking Age to the early Middle Ages in Sweden more villages appeared, either through previous farms moving closer together or through the establishment of new farms. Some central authority, whether the Crown or local magnates, probably pro-

vided much of the impetus for internal colonization.!°3 In the Malar region, groups of small scattered farms began to appear around the estates that are dated to the Viking Age. The new farms seem to represent an internal colonization of the early Middle Ages, planned by the land-

lords or possibly royal stewards on the large farms. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries, perhaps earlier in the Malar region, saw the beginnings of external colonization as well, a movement into wooded areas and the founding of new villages. This too may have taken place under royal sponsorship, since the Crown was claiming the right to all the common land at this time.!% Royal initiative had an influence not only on the founding of villages but also on the layout of existing villages.!°5 From the eleventh century one can observe a reorganization of villages so that they were laid out in units corresponding to multiples of fiscal units. Such reorganization of villages was probably imposed from above, in many instances by one person or institution that controlled the whole village.!° In the docu-

ments that begin to appear in significant numbers in the thirteenth | century, and in registers from the fourteenth, not only were the various

ecclesiastical institutions major landholders, but their holdings included whole villages as well as isolated farms. If a church or abbey got an entire village as a donation, as was probably happening already by the beginning of the thirteenth century, some secular landowner must have owned the entire village previously, perhaps even as far back as the year 1000.!07 There are few records of secular landowning except when landlords gave land to the Church. The fact that individual people or institutions owned whole villages does not tell us much about the role of slaves in these villages unless we know how the landowners organized the exploitation of the land. If the owner divided it among rent-paying tenants, then any slaves would have

been members of these tenants’ households. Where an ecclesiastical institution owned part of a village, it might have tenants who lived and

go THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES worked side by side with the peasant proprietors in that village. Even if

it owned the entire village, it may not have retained any demesne. Swedish villages were small and holdings were not very concentrated, and many estates were composed of several separate villages with no demesne labor. !°8

There is evidence that at least some holdings of large ecclesiastical landowners were organized on a larger scale, that is, a piece of land larger than a single family’s holding was worked as a unit. The diplomas show

the existence of curiae or mansiones run by stewards (villici). Some of

these curiae had tenant farms associated with them. Others seem to have been demesne-type units. For example, in the 1302 register of Sko,

two-thirds of the land was composed of mansiones, and only a third consisted of rent-paying tenant holdings (coloniae). By 1489 the records of the same convent reveal that all its landholdings were divided among tenants. On the estates of the archbishop of Uppsala in 1344, two curiae were divided among coloni, half of another one was held by a villicus, two others were held in part by coloni, and there is no information about the organization of the others.!©° If we project the process of dividing larger holdings among tenants, visible in a comparison of the two registers from Sko, onto the situation on the Uppsala cathedral estates, we could conclude that the curiae there might earlier have been demesne

land held by stewards and worked by prebendal laborers. The tenant farms that appear in the earliest registers might be a thirteenth-century development from an earlier system where more land was worked in large farms. Such a projection is conjectural, however, as we do not know just how typical the organization of the Sko estates was. The land register from Fogd6, a copy of one dating from the thirteenth century, shows all the land divided among tenants.!!° Even if large-farm agriculture were widespread, it need not mean

that the workers on those farms were slaves. There were also hired laborers like those laboratores seu mercennarios for whom the arch-

bishop of Uppsala received a tax exemption in 1297.!!1 The records that survive come from only a few of the largest landholders, and none reveal

how prosperous individual farmers who owned more land than they themselves could work organized their land. Since none of the land registers mentions slaves, we cannot determine what their numbers might have been. The only documents that might provide figures from which we could determine the significance of slavery in Sweden are the testamentary manumissions, and there are not enough of these. The landholding records come from ecclesiastical institutions and the wills from individuals, and slaves may not have held the same position across the two groups. Nevertheless, a look at the testamentary manumissions gives a meager but concrete idea of slaveholding patterns.!!2 Twenty-nine wills

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES QI from Sweden contain manumission clauses. There were slaves in the provinces of Vastergétland, Ostergotland, Tioharad, S6dermanland, Uppland, Vastmanland, Narke, and possibly Varmland.!!3 As Clara Nevéus points out, the wills provide evidence for slaves in two provinces for which there are no surviving law codes. The lack of manumissions for Dalarna and Halsingland is not particularly significant because very few documents at all survive from these provinces for the period. The wills range in date from 1256 to 1310. For the years 1271—85 half of the extant wills include manumission clauses; for the rest of the period the percentages are smaller.114 The number of slaves identified and freed in each will varies from one to twelve, but seventeen of the wills free all the owner’s slaves without specifying the number. Two wills use the term mancipia for slaves belonging to particular landholdings, and two others name particular holdings on which slaves are found.!!5 Nevéus suggests that these slaves connected with landholdings in this way were domiciled slaves or fostrar.!16 The granting of “full freedom” in some of the wills might also imply that these people had already been partly free. “Full freedom,” however, is found in many of the wills where the slave is not connected with a particular piece of land; the phrase is probably a figure of speech. That there were several slaves on the holdings mentioned implies that these were probably larger farms, not individual tenancies (though they could, of course, have been families). It may be that the owners did not know the slaves’ names because the farms were run by stewards, rather than because the slaves were domiciled. There may

have been no point in listing the names of many slaves even if the testator knew them.!!7 The wills that do not give numbers or name individual slaves and that refer to several different properties of the same owner could point to large-scale farming. Some of the wills that state “all my slaves” without

naming them bequeath land in several different places, often several | curiae, implying that they may have owned a large number of slaves under stewards on different manors.!!8 The wills that free only a few named slaves may come from people with only one or two holdings, whose slaves were probably part of the household. Some larger landowners freed specific slaves (in one case, in addition to all unnamed slaves on particular pieces of land), who may have been household slaves whom the master or mistress knew.!!9 The wills reflect both household-level and probably demesne-type slavery, but the testators are not representative of Sweden’s entire free population. All the people who manumitted slaves in surviving wills were quite wealthy. Most people who did not make wills or whose wills were not preserved because they did not leave anything to the great

ecclesiastical institutions probably owned few if any slaves, who

92 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES worked within the household. The extant wills probably represent, at the lowest end, the lower nobility and not the peasant slaveowner.!29 Despite the number of wills from Sweden manumitting slaves, there are none that bequeath slaves to legatees. This probably meant slaves followed with the land or automatically went to the legal heirs.!2! The clauses bequeathing land with all its appurtenances except the slaves imply that if the clause had not been inserted slaves would have been among those appurtenances. The wills, together with the law codes, also give an idea of the kinds of work the slaves did, but they contribute little to our understanding of

their numerical importance in the economy. Wills connecting the slaves with particular landed holdings imply that they were agricultural workers.!22 The law of Ostergétland prohibited the freeing of a slave by his relatives during the spring or fall—important agricultural seasons—

unless they replaced him. The Uppland law shows slaves involved in woodcutting, perhaps for fuel or perhaps for forest clearance. They also appear as herdsmen and they might make purchases in the market for their masters.!23 Besides being concubines, official or unofficial, slave women might serve as midwives, and their normal duties as expressed

by the law of Vastergotland included milking cows and grinding flour.!24 The laws otherwise provide little information on the duties of the normal slave. SLAVES OF SPECIAL STATUS. The Swedish laws do distinguish two

types of slaves in special legal positions that relate in some way to special economic positions: the bryte and the fostre. The bryte also appears in charters and appears to be a steward in charge of someone else’s property, the equivalent of the villicus who appears in Latin docu-

ments. This role is not apparent on the basis of the laws alone, which merely allot the bryte more legal responsibility than other slaves and exact a higher compensation for his killing. The term bryte can also refer to the king’s stewards, powerful men who administered the crown estates. The law of Ostergétland provides high penalties for the killing of a king’s, earl’s, or lawman’s bryte, but the farmer’s bryte is compensated at three marks like a slave.!25 The bryte was equated with the bonde (peasant proprietor) in the amount of money levied for certain offenses and in the payment of tithes.!26 The diplomas show that not all villici were unfree. They appear as witnesses in documents, as legatees, even as testators.!27 The free villicus or bryte may have worked the land himself under a

contract with the landowner, paying a percentage rather than a fixed rent or acquiring certain rights to the land, or he may have managed an estate for a large landlord. Numerous diplomas record the bequest, sale, or grant of privileges for certain pieces of property “cum villicis et co-

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 93 lonis,” but it is not clear whether the steward stood in any particular relation to the tenants, whether his holdings were separate from theirs, nor whether he was free or unfree.!28 The law of Osterg6tland distinguishes between a bryte and a partner (bolax man), the basis for the difference, although they may well serve the same function, may be that

the bryte in this code is unfree. The law of Vastergotland seems to envision a bryte who is free but dependent, although he is sometimes equated with an unfree fostre: he seems to be in charge of the master’s household, not another estate, and sometimes owns slaves.!29 The distinction between the slave and free bryte is not just a chronological difference, with the slave bryte in the laws a survival from an earlier period: the will of Margaret Ragnvaldsdotter (before 1277), manumitting two bryter, clearly indicates slave stewards in Vastmanland at a time not too long before the redaction of the laws.130 The bryde or villicus who was in charge of the curia in Denmark is not the same as the unfree bryte in Swedish laws and wills. The bryder who appear in Danish diplomas of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries seem to be royal or episcopal administrators, not necessarily stewards on particular landholdings, and they were high enough in social status to be included in the Lund cathedral’s necrology. These may be the sort of stewards referred to on one or possibly two Viking Age runestones from Denmark, and they may have been similar to the villici in Sweden who appear as testators or witnesses to wills.!3! There is no trace of the unfree steward in the Danish laws, but there is a bryde in the laws who does not seem to be the deputy of a large landholder but rather a contrac-

tual partner, perhaps even living on the same farm as the landowner. This individual is much closer in economic if not in legal status to the unfree bryte in Sweden or Norway or the verkstjori of the Icelandic sagas.!32 The law of Skane refers to the bryde as someone who enters into a contractual relation with another man. The other could be a peasant, archbishop, or king. The bryde seems to have gotten a share of the property or to have been a partner of the owner. Valdemar’s Sjzlland law recognizes only the king’s bryde, a legal official rather than an estate steward, but Erik’s Sjzlland law refers to a bryde in some sort of partnership relation with his master, who does not have full control over the land he supervises. The law of Jutland does not recognize the bryde as a royal or episcopal official but only as a steward on land that might be that of a large landowner. A steward in a partnership relation with his master was allowed to serve on a certain kind of jury where a tenant was not. In many legal matters, he was dependent on the landowner, though the dependence was due to his economic position—in that he did not own the land he administered—and not to personal unfreedom.!33 Like the status of the bryte, the exact status of the Swedish fostre or home-born slave is unclear. The fostre appears in the Ostergotland law

04 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES and the female fostra in that of Vastergotland. In terms of penalties and compensation, the male or female fostre seems to be a particularly valuable slave but a slave nonetheless. The compensation is higher but not conceptually different from that for a slave; it is not wergeld any more than is compensation for a normal slave. While the penalty for killing

fostrar was more than for a normal slave, the penalty for wounding them, deliberately or accidentally, was the same, implying that the value of a home-born slave was actually not much different than that of any other slave and the killing of a fostre was compensated at a higher rate for some other reason than actual replacement cost.!34 The fact that the fostre did not forfeit his life if he killed a free man accidentally, as did a normal slave, implies a difference in legal status, but another provision shows that the real reason for the difference was economic status. The fostre seems to have been domiciled, in the economic position of a tenant, holding land of his own. A case with witnesses could be brought against a fostre in a matter of manslaughter, “because his farm shall be divided if he kills someone.” The same thing happened if a fostre was convicted and hanged for theft. In the case of murder the farm was apparently divided among the king, the owner, and the victim’s heir.135 Though the fostre was legally unfree, his status seems to have been changed somewhat by his enhanced economic position. He could marry a free woman and she would have a right to a share of his property.!3° Gosta Hasselberg suggests that the master’s rights

over him were more in the nature of inheritance rights than property rights. While it seems clear that the master inherited from the fostre, however, he could sell the right to do so, and selling that right was equated with selling the fostre.43” The wills freeing tostrar seem to imply that they were considered slaves, albeit of a special category. Of

the only two wills that distinguish between home-born and other slaves, one probably and the other possibly refer to slaves from Ostergotland.138

It is not only in the law of Ostergétland that the fostre appears to be a

domiciled slave. The law of Vastmanland, in its only provision about the fostre, implies that the master owned all the fostre’s possessions but that the fostre lived independently and there might be some dispute as to his status. Hasselberg suggests that the fostre may have cleared and settled on new land.!39 Still, they remained chattel slaves in their personal status. In the older redaction of the law of Vastergotland, the fostre or perhaps fostra (it is not clear whether male or female} seems to be a

slave household supervisor and is equated with the bryte. In the later redaction, a fostra who bears her master’s keys, a symbol of household authority, is compensated for at a higher rate than other slaves in cases of unlawful sexual intercourse.!4°

THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES 95 The fostre was a slave privileged because of his native status or because of his economic status. The latter is probably the more important reason, though the use of the term fostre implies the former. The transitional economic status of the domiciled slave is discussed in chapter 5.

The Legal Construction of the Slave

The lack of concrete evidence about the lives of slaves in medieval Scandinavia forces us to turn to normative sources for a description of the institution. The law codes date from a period when slavery is generally thought to have been obsolescent if not obsolete (see chapter 5}, so they do not just reflect the custom in effect in the region at the time they

were written. They may include some provisions or attitudes taken from customary law, but they are also heavily influenced by learned law (see appendix).

The laws tell us less about the actual experience of the slave than about the way the dominant culture defined the slave. The laws encode the attitudes of those dominant in the society, whether those attitudes shaped the laws or were themselves shaped by inherited legal relation-

ships. A law code may not represent the reality of slavery as slaves perceived it, but it represents the cultural and social importance of slavery to the masters. The legal status and social standing of the slave are not the same, but we can make inferences about the role of the slave in society based on the norms expressed in the laws by analyzing what factors might have led to the choice of a particular rule. Without assuming that the laws mirror reality, one may ask what real social issues led the redactors or issuing authorities to write the laws they did. Where laws are borrowed, they may be borrowed wholesale because the society has a need for legislation on a particular subject. In this case the individual provisions may reflect the concerns of the society from which the law is borrowed

rather than those of the borrowing society. And even when laws do reflect real concerns at the time they are first composed or borrowed, they may remain fixed as social conditions change. It is therefore not always safe to say that the law reflects conditions in the society that gives rise to it.! But the Scandinavian laws on slavery are not borrowed wholesale from Roman law or any other law—and even if they were, 96

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE 97 they would still be important as evidence for how society constructed the slave: legal status, legal categories, no matter whether indigenous or borrowed, cannot but affect how those acquainted with the law view the world. Law may create social reality where it does not reflect it. A comparison of the Scandinavian laws with Roman and early medi-

eval Continental law can help in identifying possible reasons behind certain provisions. Roman law did heavily influence parts of the Scandinavian law codes, particularly through the canon law, and it may have influenced provisions dealing with slavery. The differing degrees of foreign influence on the written laws, rather than regional or chronological differences between the Scandinavian countries, may explain some differences between their laws. We must also recognize foreign parallels and possible influence because a high degree of foreign influence may make the relation between law and social reality very tenuous. A provision deriving from a foreign written tradition may be adopted in the law because it seems an appropriate solution to problems at hand, but it may also be adopted as part of a mass of borrowed material without being directly relevant to the Scandinavian situation.2 Roman and early Germanic law are considered here both as examples of alternative ways of dealing with the same issues and as possible

sources for Scandinavian legal provisions, but this chapter does not propose to deal either with the law of slavery outside Scandinavia except as relevant to Scandinavian law, or with law as evidence for the actual

position of the slave in other European societies.2 The written leges barbarorum or Roman law could have had the same effect on Scandinavia regardless of whether they were actually used in practice or were merely scholarly exercises. The origin of provisions in the codifications of Roman law does not matter, because once codified they took on a life

of their own. Nor do specific methods of transmission matter here. Scandinavians did study at Bologna and other Continental centers of learning, and the canon law was well known in the north. If provisions in the Scandinavian law closely resemble those in Roman or Continental law, it is not necessary to demonstrate a manuscript tradition to infer that learned Scandinavians borrowed the material.4 Especially where legal parallels are not exact, the possibility exists that several societies chose, out of a limited number of alternatives, similar ways of solving particular problems. Still, the fact that many of the Continental codes, Roman law, and the Scandinavian laws even address the same problems speaks for some degree of influence in the formulation of the problems.

This chapter considers a number of ways in which these laws, by restricting the rights of slaves, by granting them certain rights, or simply by making assumptions about their role in society, created an identity and a social status for the slave.®

98 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE |

Sale and Purchase | THE SLAVE AS PROPERTY

|

The law codes make the slave a commodity not only through symbolic consumption of the type described in chapter 3 but also through their provisions on buying and selling slaves and by the procedure in case of injury to a slave. All Germanic law codes have systems of fines that offenders must pay to victims in cases ranging from minor injuries or insults to death. The compensation for harming a free person was called wergeld and is generally considered to have been an honor-price; it was not measured by the actual financial damage done. The compensation for a slave was usually not an honor-price but was at least in theory supposed to be his or her market value. In addition, the slave was

a commodity in that both Icelandic and Norwegian law permitted the use of slaves as currency in payment of certain debts.’ For Sweden and Denmark the only information we have on slave prices comes from the laws about compensation for injury to the slave. The price varies depending upon the type of slave and the province, but the standard price seems to be three marks.’ The price of a slave is much less than the wergeld for a free man, often forty marks. The fact that law codes of widely varying dates and places of origin give the same price does not mean that the price of slaves remained uniform and stable; the

laws could have maintained a standard price although market prices changed, and they probably copied from each other. Arbitration between the parties involved may often have modified in practice the amounts set in the law codes as compensation for killing or maiming someone’s slave. The Norwegian and Icelandic law codes do not set a fixed price for slaves; compensation depends on the slave’s actual value. The Icelandic sagas do contain some references to slave prices in the market. They do not depict merchants engaged solely in the slave trade; rather, merchants might sell a few slaves along with their other wares. In the story of Halld6r Snorrason, a man tells of his capture and sale as a slave for three marks of silver, considered a high price. Egils saga reports a particularly big and strong slave purchased for three marks of silver, twice as much as an ordinary slave.? Three marks of silver appears as a higher-than-normal price for a woman in Laxdcela saga. Hoskuld DalaKolsson visits the slave trader Gilli the Russian at a market in the Brenn Isles off what is now the Swedish coast. Gilli has anumber of women for sale for one mark of silver each, but the one Hoskuld wants costs three

marks. Yngvild the Beautiful in Svarfdcela saga is sold once for three hundred and once for six hundred pieces of silver (silver pennies).!° The prices for slaves according to laws and sagas seem significantly higher in eastern than in western Scandinavia, perhaps due to a differ-

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE 99 ence in the proximity of slave markets or the supply of slaves. It could be

that the marks referred to are different, a unit of weight in some instances and a number of pennies in another. It could be that slave prices really did change over time. The Icelandic literary sources come from the thirteenth century but write of a much earlier time when slaves may have been relatively abundant compared to the situation in thirteenthcentury Sweden and Denmark. We cannot make too much of the differences, given that the laws are only normative and the sagas are unreliable for matters like exact prices. Several law codes provide strict regulations for the sale and purchase of slaves, which implies that such transactions were common enough to

need regulation, whether or not the regulations were ever enforced. These provisions often accompany laws regulating the sale of animals. In Norwegian law, the seller had to warrant the slave against hidden defects.!! The Gotaland laws also required a warranty, and the law of Gotland allowed the buyer a trial period.!2 One word in the Old Norse vocabulary implies that purchase was the most common way of acquiring slaves. The word mansalsmaor, mansale man, appears in Icelandic literature as a synonym for slave. It also

occurs in Norwegian law: the prohibition on selling a debt-slave is phrased, “ef maor selr skulldar mann mansale” (“If a man sells a debtor

at a man-sale”).!3 That man-sale man is used interchangeably with slave indicates that sale was considered an important aspect of slavery, although the term may not have applied to all slaves and could even have been used to distinguish those who were not home-born. The laws all regulate the sale of slaves, treating them as any other piece of saleable property; they also are careful to prevent the sale, and

thus treatment as property, of anyone who is not a slave. Under the Gulaping law, someone who sold a debt slave or a free man had to pay his whole wergeld. The Frostabing law placed restrictions on slave sales by providing that slaves could not be sold “from the land.”!4 This provision

may have been meant to protect the home-bred slave from what would | in effect amount to exile, or it could have been an attempt to deal with a

manpower shortage. The Norwegian national law code of the 1260s, which contains very few references to slavery, still has strict penalties for the sale of a free man.1}5

The sagas envision that the sale of a free man into slavery would be

malicious rather than erroneous. In the story of Hrafn of Hritfjord, Hrafn has been paying too much attention to the daughter of his host, Ketil. Ketil tells a group of merchants that he has to sell a particularly troublesome slave who needs harsh treatment, and they make a bargain.

Ketil asks Hrafn to accompany him to the merchants’ ship; the merchants seize Hrafn, who later escapes and kills Ketil. In the story of Rognvald in Olaf Tryggvason’s saga, a man called Pérdlf offers to look

100 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE after a widow and tries to enslave her two sons. One lets Porélf enslave him; the other does not and Porolf sells him abroad.!6 The Danish laws contain no provisions on the purchase and sale of slaves or free people, although they do have provisions on the binding of free men.!7 Some Swedish laws, however, do provide penalties for selling a free man ora Christian. The law of Ostergétland, and an addition to the law of Vastergotland that is found in the manuscript Holm B58 but whose date is uncertain, require the payment of full wergeld for the sale of a free man. The law of Uppland provides the same penalty for the sale

of a free man and also prohibits the sale of a Christian slave: “If a Christian sells another Christian man, even if it is his slave, he who is sold shall be free because of the sale.”18 The juxtaposition of the sale of a free man with the sale of a Christian slave implies that while all free men were Christians, as was the case in Sweden by the time of these law codes, not all slaves were so. The pious rationale “because when Christ was sold, he freed all Christians” did not lead lawmakers so far as to prohibit the holding of Christian slaves or the purchase of Christians from non-Christians.!9 The reference to the sale of Christians was probably one of the new provisions added by the compilers of the Uppland law and copied by the other Svealand laws; the prohibition on selling a free man could be older.2° The testamentary manumissions from Sweden show that slaves were still bought and sold in the late thirteenth century, even in Uppland: one frees “all my slaves, purchased as well as home-born.”2! Compensation for Slaves Slaves could be bought and sold like any other chattels, but it is not that which turned them into commodities as much as the fact that as a general rule they had no wergeld. The main determinant of personal rights and status in Germanic law—leaving aside for the moment the question of status in the society outside the lawbooks—was the amount of compensation that had to be paid to the victim’s kin for the killing of a given individual. Compensation went to the victim in cases of injury less than death. The killer and his or her kin group were responsible for paying the sum. The amounts of compensation prescribed by law may rarely have been paid in practice, but the prescribed amounts indicate the theoretical value the society placed on different members. If we compare it with the wergeld system, the amount of compensation prescribed for slaves and the responsibilities they had for paying compensation can reveal how society viewed them. In Scandinavian law the compensation for a slave usually cannot be considered wergeld. The master must be compensated if the slave is killed or wounded, but the compensation represents the value of the slave rather than an honor-

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE IOI price. No fine is due the king or the district as for the killing of a free man; the laws do not see the killing of a slave as an offense against the community or the Crown, and only occasionally as an offense against the master’s honor. It was mainly an offense against property. In only a few instances did the law allot the slave a fixed wergeld of which he got to keep a portion, the majority going to the master. Under Norwegian law, the killer of a slave had to pay only the value of the slave; he might also have to pay a fine if he acted with malice, but this still did not amount to wergeld.22 The owner rather than any relative of a female slave had the right to compensation in case of anyone

having sexual intercourse with her. The amount of the compensation varied according to the status of both the owner and the slave. In the case of a debt-slave, her relatives could take the compensation if it was over

the amount of the debt.23 Under certain circumstances where the fine for breaking the peace in any way was higher than usual, a slave accom-

panying his master commanded higher compensation; the Gulaping law allowed the slave himself to keep one-twelfth of the compensation paid to his master.24 This law, along with an Icelandic one allowing a slave to keep part of the compensation, implies that the slave was allowed to own at least a limited amount of property. The payment to the slave, however, was only prescribed under special circumstances; normally the compensation for a slave went solely to the master and was considered equivalent to the slave’s value. The laws do not envision an honor component.

Icelandic law treated slaves as possessions of the master but also allowed them some amount of recognition as individuals under the law: they could keep a third of the compensation if they were injured. If the

slave were killed the killer, unless he was a member of the owner’s household, could be outlawed for three years in addition to paying the slave’s value. The owner could with impunity avenge on the spot the killing of his slave. If the slave were killed defending his master the law | prescribed full outlawry as for killing a free man.25 In the section of the laws called the “Ring List” (“Baugatal”), which discusses which relatives must pay and which relatives receive compensation in case of a killing, there is a paragraph on compensation to be received (or paid) by slaves. Apparently slaves were considered legal heirs and kinsmen for the purposes of atonement when one slave killed another.26 The inclusion of slaves as heirs and kinsmen to each other may be a scholarly invention for symmetry and completeness rather than a reflection of practice. There is no mention in the Ring List of any atonement paid to the heirs of a slave killed by a free man. Even though it allows the slave some compensation when injured, Icelandic law comes no nearer than Norwegian to having an honor-price or wergeld fora slave. Full outlawry is imposed for killing a slave defend-

IO2 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE ing his master because such a killing reflects on the master’s honor, not because the slave’s honor has increased. The compensation for a slave is clearly related to market price, not to honor. However, the fact that the

slave is allowed to share in the compensation when he is injured does imply that the law accords him a legal personality and a right to atonement, which is the basic notion underlying wergeld. The law of Skane mentions compensation for the killing of a slave. From the Latin paraphrase it is clear that the master would receive the money. The fine was higher, according to the Latin version only, if the master was present when the slave was injured, implying that the killing then constituted an offense to the honor of the master. In atoning for the killing of a slave, the killer did not have to make the oaths customary on the killing of a free man, “any more than for his other livestock if it were killed.”2” The law of Sjzlland provided compensation in case of killing, wounding, or having intercourse with a slave. Where the law

specified to whom the compensation went, it went to the master.28 Once again the payment for killing a slave was keyed in theory to the slave’s market value rather than to some more abstract concept of personal worth. The Swedish laws, too, provided for the compensation for killing a slave to go only to the master. Under the law of Vastergotland, the slave

was atoned for as a free man if killed under certain special circumstances where the peace might not be broken. The fine for wounding or having intercourse with a slave went to the master.29 In the Ostergot-

land law, the master received the compensation for the killing of his slave, whether by a free man or another slave. The amount of compensation for a slave was the value of the slave; it did not matter whether the killing was accidental or intentional. If the slave and a free man killed each other, the master got no compensation. If a free man denied killing

a slave or fostre (home-born slave} and could support his denial with twelve men’s oaths, the case could not be pursued further. Compensation for the fostre was set much higher than fora regular slave, but it still was not called an honor payment; the fostre was simply a more valuable

piece of property. For wounding a slave the law set standard amounts due to the master, up to the value of the slave if he were crippled. If a slave woman died in childbirth, the child’s father had to pay her value, presumably to her owner.?° The Svealand laws do not have so many provisions governing compensation for slaves. The provision in the Uppland law that slaves shall always be compensated for the same as free men is unique among the Scandinavian law codes. Probably an innovation by the redactors, it is not repeated in the other laws that draw on the Uppland law.?! The law of Vastmanland probably retains an older provision in its statement that the slave was compensated for with three and a half marks for killing,

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE 103 less for wounding. The laws about damage to slaves do not explicitly state that the compensation payments go to the master.32 S6dermannalagen does not have any general provisions at all on compensation for a slave. In one specific instance of accidental death it clearly sets a lower rate of compensation, but in killings at home a slave is compensated for as a free man.33 Except for the innovation of the Uppland law, the pre-

scribed payments do not seem to include an honor-price component, although they are not explicitly keyed to the slave’s value. The law of Gotland does explicitly provide a wergeld for the slave that is separate from his value, setting it at four and a half marks in coin (one mark of silver], compared to three marks of gold (twenty-four marks of silver) for a man of Gotland and ten marks of silver for anyone else.34 The slave’s wergeld seems to be less than the value of a slave, so it was probably due in addition to the value when the slave was killed. Nor is it clear in the provision about injury to slaves who got the compensation, although it is clear that there was no honor-price as there would be for a free man.35

The Scandinavian laws mostly provide for the master to receive compensation for the slave according to his or her value, with exceptions in the Swedish laws calling for full compensation and in the Ice-

landic laws allowing for slaves or their relatives to take part of the compensation. The codes do not tell us how much compensation was paid in practice. The sagas provide examples of compensation paid for slaves but no examples of anyone being outlawed for killing a slave, although according to Grdgds Icelandic law required this.3° Usually in

the sagas slaves go uncompensated because they are killed in mass battles and the killing of a slave on one side is balanced by the killing of a

slave on the other. Sometimes the person chosen to set compensation balances the killing of a slave against some other crime like theft.37 According to Landndmabok the killing of slaves could precipitate a fullscale feud between two families.38 Whether or not any feuds really arose

for such reasons, the literature depicts the issue as the same as when feuds arose over the killing of family members: a question of honor. It reflects on the master’s honor because it is the master’s property that has been damaged, not because the slaves themselves have any honor. The laws and sagas both indicate that people in Scandinavian society were perfectly aware that slaves were human beings, although this did not contradict their being legal non-persons, but they also indicate that occasionally the recognition of humanity in actual social practice affected the legal construction of the slave and forced the law to treat him or her as a person who could not be injured with impunity. Even though the amounts of compensation for slaves set in the laws are not wergeld but rather reimbursement to the master for damage to his property, this compensation is often mentioned in connection with

104 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE the amounts of wergeld to be paid for free people, and the existence of fixed amounts of wergeld may have contributed to the codification of fixed values for slaves. In most of the Continental Germanic law codes, the compensation for killing a slave is also listed with those for various classes of free and freedmen but, except in the case of the Frisian law, does not seem to be related to the slave’s value.3° By contrast, compensation for the killing of a slave according to his or her value was the rule in Roman law, though the Roman law differed from the various Scandinavian provisions in that it did not set a standard value on slaves. The killing of someone else’s slave was a crime as well as a delict, and a fine

might be payable or other punishment imposed as well as damages owing to the slave’s master.*0 The Continental law codes seem either to hold to the Roman law principle of the slave as res, damage to which is

assessed as for any other chattel, or else to put the slave in the same wergeld system as the free man, although his wergeld was much lower and was paid to the master instead of the surviving relatives. The Scandinavian laws seem to have amalgamated the two systems, assigning the slave a specific value as in a wergeld system but, except in a few of the Swedish codes, considering that amount equivalent to market price and adjusting it accordingly. The law of Gotland, explicitly providing for

slave wergeld, may have been influenced by Lombard law studied at Bologna or by other Germanic law codes. Many of the Continental Germanic codes do not include the wounding of slaves at all in their elaborate list of penalties for various injuries.4! Other codes include injuries to slaves in their compensation catalogues, not always valuing them at a fixed proportion of a free man’s compensation.*2 The Visigothic code most closely resembles the Swedish laws, stating that a free man who wounds a slave must provide the master with one of equal value and pay for the injured one’s care. There was also a fine of ten solidi, which seems to have been for the affront not to the slave but to the master. Elsewhere the penalty for injury toaslave seems Clearly related to wergeld.43 Under Roman law injury to a slave

entailed civil liability to the master, as did damage to any chattel.44 Scandinavian law once again seems to have elements from both the Roman law, relating payments to damages, and from the wergeld system of fixed payments for particular injuries or killings. In the matter of fines for sexual intercourse with female slaves, similarities of language

indicate that Danish law may have drawn directly on Continental law.45

The fines in the Scandinavian law codes for the killing or wounding of slaves may be intended to protect the slaves, but the fines are so low compared to those for injury to free people that they do not seem much

of a deterrent. Nor are the fines intended to benefit the slaves themselves. Only under the Icelandic and sometimes under the Norwegian

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE 105 laws is it clear that slaves get any of the compensation if they are wounded. The fines may be established for the purpose of keeping the peace, but no part of the fine goes to a central authority as with many other offenses, although this approach would seem more likely if keeping the peace were the goal. The Swedish laws on injuries to slaves are explicit that the fine goes only to the slave’s owner and not to the Crown or the community, who would have a right to part of the fine in the case of a free man. The real purpose of the compensation for harm to slaves seems to be to protect the master’s interest in his property. The law thus makes the slave into a fungible commodity. One might conclude that as under the law the slave had no wergeld, he had no personal status or honor and was nothing more than a piece of property. Yet at least the West Norse laws provided for the slave to get part of the compensation in certain instances, and an honor payment was included in the compensation under special circumstances. The honor payment did not go to the slave but to the master; even in the case of free men, however, such payments went to the kin-group, not just to the individual. As part of the master’s household, the slave reflected on the master’s honor.*© The slave’s personal rights and status with regard to others, as reflected by the laws of wergeld and compensation, existed but depended on the master, really stemming from the slave’s role as the master’s property. Honor payment was prescribed only in cases where harming a slave amounted to a direct affront to the owner. The Master’s Power over the Slave Though slaves may have enjoyed some personal rights in that others could not kill them with impunity, this was true because they were the

property of another. If that other wished to kill the slave no law obstructed him. In their relation to their masters slaves were nothing but property. The passage from the Uppland law about the compensation due for a slave specifically exempts any instance where a member of the | master’s family kills or injures the slave. Most of the law codes did not

bother even to consider such a case. There would be no one to bring before the assembly a case concerning what a man did with his own property. There are not even any legal restrictions on what a man could do to his debt slaves, except sell them, though laws that allowed their relatives part of the compensation for their killing might have applied even if the master did the killing. Only the West Norse laws placed any restrictions on the killing of slaves by their own masters, and even there they were not very severe. Under the Gulabing law, the killing of one’s own slave, like that of a free person, was considered murder (mordr} if one did not announce it. The

Frostabing law had a similar provision, making it explicit that if the

106 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE killing were announced there was no penalty.4” The Christian phrasing, which states that the owner who killed his slave might still be responsi-

ble to God, implies that the Church recognized the humanity of the slave even if the law did not, but this recognition had only rhetorical, not practical, value. Christianity similarly provided the only protection for a slave from his master under Icelandic law. An owner suffered no penalty for killing his slave unless the killing took place in Lent or another hallowed season.48 Icelandic literature provides numerous examples of masters killing their slaves. No doubt the killing of slaves, and the killing of free

men as well, was less common in reality than in the action-packed sagas, but the literary examples do show what the authors or composers thought of as reasonable justifications for killing one’s slaves. In the sagas masters generally kill not to punish or vent anger at the slave but rather to keep a secret when the slave has done the master’s dirty work for him. For example, slaves help their master hide a treasure, and he then kills them so that the hiding place will be secret.49 These incidents

are very convenient for the plot, and we cannot assume that they are historically accurate, but the fact that no characters in the sagas hint that there is anything wrong with killing one’s own slave indicates that people thought of it as normal or at least unsurprising. Most Germanic law codes were similar to the Scandinavian ones in failing to provide any penalty for injury done by a master to his own slaves.59 The Roman law was much more restrictive of the master’s actions, though Alan Watson has questioned the practical effect of these

restrictions.>! In the days of the republic there had been no legal restraint on the powers of masters but the Censors could restrain the slaveowners in cases of extreme cruelty. Under the empire a master could be punished for killing his own slave as if he had killed a free man,

unless it was in the course of legitimate punishment. Not only killing but other forms of injury, including castration for commercial purposes,

were prohibited.52 The Constantinian legislation on the subject may well have been influenced by Christian ideas, and it may have been these on which the redactors of the Norwegian laws drew in implying that the master who killed his slave would be responsible before God. This notion, however, does not seem to have been pervasive in the Scandinavian societies, given its absence in Icelandic saga literature and the fact that even the Svear laws ameliorating the status of slaves do not prohibit maltreatment by masters. Perhaps the East Norse laws, though clearly from a Christian milieu, do not show the influence of the Church

on this point because it was considered a matter for confession and penance, not for the secular law, but the lack indicates that the redactors were not merely following foreign models.

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE 107 THE SLAVE AS ACTOR

Though the slave was property with no rights to compensation for injury to himself (with a few exceptions that suggest that the reality differed from the construction], the slave also had few personal obligations. In a society in which any misdeed against another was punishable by monetary compensation or blood feud, a feud against a slave could not satisfy honor, nor could the slave pay the compensation that would salvage the victim’s honor. Slaves in most of their deeds against others were con-

sidered not independent actors but merely the tools of their masters. The master was responsible at law for most of the slave’s actions; this principle is stated, for example, in the Gulaping law, “His master shall be answerable for his words and his actions,” the Frostabing law, “Let each man support his native-born slave with word and oath, or whatever occurs in word or deed,” and the Jutland law, “He who has a slave... shall be responsible for his deeds.”53 Shared Responsibility

That the master must compensate for the slave’s deeds does not mean that the slave would escape scot-free. Although the master had to take some responsibility in order to satisfy the honor and the property rights of the injured party, the slave might suffer too. Under Icelandic law the slave sometimes had to pay compensation himself, if he had the money. Under Danish laws in particular, the slave was turned over to the family of the victim as part of the compensation payment. From the master’s point of view this was no different economically from paying the slave’s value as compensation, but it obviously would have made a great difference to the slave.54 The Swedish laws too require the master to compensate for the slave’s

violent deeds and turn the slave over to the victim’s kin. The Upp- | land law says that what a slave does should be compensated the same way as what a free man does, but does not specify who is to pay the compensation; presumably it is the owner.55 The only other Svear law code to discuss the issue is the law of Vastmanland, which provides for the delivery of the slave to the victim’s relatives; the law of Gotland is similar.56 Under the law of Ostergétland the slave was not surrendered but was hanged if the master refused to pay the fine. The fostre lost his property in addition, implying that his position allowed him to have accumulated some. For injuries short of killing, the master had to compensate the victim, and the slave could in some cases be killed, but the fostre could not; the master had to pay a high compensation for injuries the fostre caused but still did not have to pay fines to anyone but the

108 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE victim.5” The law of Vastergétland states only that the master pays if | the slave kills someone.58 The G6tar laws clearly imply that while the | slave’s owner must make reparation for killings by a slave, the offense is

not against the community or the Crown and cannot redound to the honor of the slave as might happen if he were called a free man’s killer. The crime has been committed by a piece of the owner’s property, not by a person who poses a threat to the community. The Norwegian and Icelandic laws do not contain nearly as detailed provisions about killings and woundings by slaves as do the East Norse laws. The Gulabing law provides only for killing, not for wounding. The master is held fully responsible and must pay a full fine as if he had done it himself, unless he gets rid of the slave. Getting rid of the slave was

obviously the cheapest alternative; not doing so might be seen as an admission not only of the master’s legal responsibility but also of his complicity. The Frostabing laws about killings and woundings by slaves were apparently contained in section 5:23—40, where there is a lacuna in the manuscript. A fragment from the early thirteenth century includes

some chapters of this section, and one of the provisions deals with offenses by a slave, who is to be outlawed for wounding a free man. The

principle here seems to be to punish the slave without punishing the master beyond the value of the slave.59 Gragas does not deal at all with the question of killings or woundings by slaves except if they killed another slave.© The lack of special provisions for slaves implies that slaves would be prosecuted and outlawed like anyone else, unless an agreement were reached. Icelandic literature does show slaves outlawed for a killing.6! We may assume that despite

any provision to that effect in Grdagds, the master was usually held responsible, simply because he was the only one in the position to pay a

fine; the lack of provisions for this situation is probably due to the haphazard nature of the law code rather than the nonoccurrence of the problem. If any solution were to go unstated because it was obvious, it would probably be that the master was responsible. The master was also responsible for theft and other offenses on the part of the slave, although here too the slave often had to suffer even if

the master paid the financial penalty. Under the Gulabing law, the master was to swear an oath on behalf of his slave accused of theft, but if he did not do so, the slave could be beheaded, flogged, or mutilated. If the slave had illicit intercourse with someone the law did not require physical punishment, but the master had to pay compensation and maintain any child born of the union.® The law of Gotland made it explicit that although the master was responsible for the slave’s theft, the slave could still be tortured to extract a confession. The laws of Vastergotland and Ostergotland allowed the slave to be hanged for theft if the master did

not redeem him.®3 The Danish law of Skane allowed the slave to be

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE 109 hanged if the master disclaimed responsibility for him, and even if the master denied the theft on behalf of the slave the slave was subject to the ordeal with hot iron. According to the law of Sjzlland, if a slave stole, the master had to restore double the money to the victim and pay a fine to the king as well, but the amount of the fine was set so that the slave's owner was never out more than a mark in total. If the slave stole more than half a mark’s worth his life was forfeit unless the master redeemed him. There are several other lesser crimes under the Sjzlland laws for which the master had to pay for the slave’s actions.®4 Even if the slave was also physically punished, the only way the master could escape financial responsibility for the slave’s violence, sexual crimes, or theft was to deny all responsibility for them, and in this case he lost the slave. There were several other offenses for which

both the slave and his owner might be held responsible. One was slander, under Icelandic law. Insults normally required full personal compensation; if ambiguous they required only half personal compensation except when uttered by a hired worker against a householder or a slave against a free man. A slave would obviously not have the money to pay full compensation for an insult; his master would have to pay. The slave who had insulted a free man, however, could also be killed with impunity.6 This was not a legal sanction imposed by the community but rather permission to the slandered one to take the law into his own

hands; still, it had the effect of making the slave responsible for his actions. Cases involving compensation for insults, whether between free men and slaves or between free men only, were hardly likely to be

brought to court in any event; the most common insult was that of cowardice, and a lawsuit was hardly the way to disprove such an accusation.6” There are no literary examples of suit brought against slaves for slandering {ree men, though there are cases where slaves are killed because of their insolent behavior.°®

Slaves Answerable for Their Own Actions The idea in the Danish and some of the Swedish laws that the master was responsible for his slave’s acts but could discharge that responsibility by turning over the slave to the victim or the victim’s heirs is closely akin to and may derive from the Roman notion of “noxal surrender,” which most of the barbarian law codes adopt in some form. Under Roman law noxal liability applied to delicts rather than to crimes. In public

penal law the slave was responsible for his own crimes and could be punished by the state.° If the slave’s offenses were civil the personal responsibility could not lie upon the slave, who had no civil personality. For delicts the master had the option of defending or surrendering the slave. If he refused to surrender the slave he might be held personally

IIO THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE liable and required to pay damages.” The Germanic law codes generally followed the Roman law pattern of requiring the master to surrender a

guilty slave, but these codes did not distinguish, as did Roman law, | between crime and delict, so the principle applied for all injuries to or | thefts trom others. The master could deny the slave’s liability by making an oath for him, generally not requiring as many oath-helpers as if he were making an oath for himself. But the master had a strong incentive to turn the slave over: if he did not attempt the oath or did not succeed, his refusal to surrender the slave was an assumption on his own part of responsibility for the injury and could subject him to a compensation payment much higher than the value of the slave (since the penalties for crimes by free people were much higher than for those by slaves).7! There are many instances where public law prescribes particular punishments for the slave, such as a specific number of lashes or even death, and these raise the question of whether, when laws use the term “surrender,” they always mean surrender to the victim or whether they can also refer to surrender to the public authority. 72 The point of the surrender of the slave in both Roman and Germanic law was that the master disclaimed all knowledge of and responsibility for the slave’s misdeeds. Under Roman law, the master was personally liable if the slave committed the crime or delict at his command or even with his knowledge, and the barbarian laws followed this principle, as did the Scandinavian laws.’3 If the slave was out of the master’s potestas the master could disclaim responsibility for the act and be exempt from surrendering the slave; the laws consider this exemption especially in the case of crimes committed by fugitive slaves, and the principle is the same in Roman, early Germanic, and Scandinavian laws.”4 The Scandinavian laws deemed the slave responsible for his own actions in keeping Sundays and feast days. These provisions were obviously Christian innovations, although they are found in the secular law. The Church in theory treated all men as morally responsible, al-

though in some cases the slaves’ responsibility for their actions and need for absolution for their sins took second place to the master’s need for labor.”5 Under the Skane church code a slave could be beaten for working on feast days.” The Norwegian laws also provided for beatings,

but the master had the option of a financial penalty instead. Icelandic law fined the slaves if they had means to pay, but did not fine the master

or physically punish the slave.?”7 Many Germanic laws had similar provisions punishing the slave physically for working on holy days; again, the Church considered the slave responsible for his soul, and since he probably would not be able to pay a fine for an offense against religion, physical punishment was prescribed.’8 These laws imply that slaves had some control over their own work habits. It may be that, as happened in the southern United States and the Caribbean in the eigh-

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE II! teenth and nineteenth centuries, slaves worked on their own behalf on their days off and were allowed to keep the profits. The Master’s Sole Responsibility

Though the law often required that slaves be punished for their of-

fenses even when the master paid a fine, in other instances the law carefully exempted slaves from all responsibility: when the slave committed the offense on his master’s orders. It is doubtful how much effect these laws could have had; the injured party would no doubt often still

blame the slave as well as the master. The Gulabing law stated explicitly that if a free man—not necessarily the slave’s master—and a slave committed a theft together the free man alone was responsible.”? The law of Vastergotland allowed the slave to go free if he stole with his

master but not if he stole with another free man, unless his master wanted to redeem him. The bryte, or steward, who at this time was probably a slave of particularly high status, was held responsible for theft. The law of Ostergétland held that if a free man and a slave killed together only the free man was to be blamed.®° In the sagas, slaves were often considered not responsible for the feuds of their masters, and along with women and the elderly were allowed to come out of a house in

which the master and his kinsmen or retainers were to be burned to death.8!

The law of Gotland and the Danish laws deal with the question of a slave committing a crime on the orders of the master. In Gotland, where the owner had to pay a small fine and deliver up his slave if the slave committed a killing, the master was liable for full wergeld if he would not or could not swear he had nothing to do with the slave’s deed. The Danish laws let the master pay less compensation for a theft or killing by his slave than by himself only if he swore the slave had run away so that he knew nothing about it. One version of the Sjzlland law makes clear that the slave could still be punished even if the master was fined for having ordered the deed.82 Icelandic law made no provision for ab-

solving the slave if he committed a crime at his master’s orders; the redactor of Grdgds apparently did not care about fairness to the slave. The Continental law codes seem in this regard to be more lenient to the slave than the Scandinavian, for they place the penalty on the master if he commanded the crime and do not provide punishment for the slave in addition.83 In a violent society where killings were frequent, a slaveowner might well send his slaves to do the dirty work for him, especially when there was a high chance of the would-be killer being killed first. The sagas provide many examples of offenses committed by slaves at their masters’ commands.®4 This was not necessarily thought cowardly on the

|

Ii2 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE | part of the master; it was clear who was responsible, and any revenge | would be taken upon the master and only incidentally upon the slave. Saxo reports that the king Harald Kesje used slaves to commit evil deeds against the people of Denmark.85 Whether or not incidents like these actually took place, people thought them likely enough to provide for them in the law. The law made the master responsible for the slave’s actions and gave the master compensation for harm to the slave. Both these factors stem from the slave's role as the master’s property. That slaves did not pay compensation themselves for their offenses does deny their legal personhood, but.this is a result of the laws and not a reason why they were so composed. The reason for the provisions, as opposed to their effect, may be simply a recognition of the fact that the slaves had little if any money. If they were solely responsible for paying their own compensation no compensation would be paid. The law protected the victim of a slave’s crime; it also protected the master, for the alternative to compensation was feud. The master would also lose his property if the slave were killed in retaliation, if indeed the master’s own kin were not the victims of that retaliation. THE SLAVE’S PERSONAL RIGHTS

The slave lacked not only the right to wergeld but also other rights of free men. The lack of legal rights need not always work to disadvantage a person: if slaves in practice had certain privileges, the fact that they had

no legal right to them might not have made a great deal of difference. The law might construct them as rightless persons but abstract legal

rights might have little relevance to their lives. Slaves lacked legal rights in the areas of property ownership, citizenship, and family relations. Literature reveals that in practice they were not treated as totally rightless in these areas. The master could always revoke any privileges not guaranteed by law, but in medieval society anyone might have a hard time vindicating even those rights to which he was legally entitled. The legal construction of the slave as rightless made it more difficult for slaves than for free people to control various aspects of their lives, but it did not always make the slaves’ lives unrelievedly miserable as compared to the lives of the free. Ownership of Property While in practice slaves had some money of their own, they had no legal means of protecting their property. In Iceland the law expected that slaves would have their own money, because as discussed above, slaves could take part of the compensation for injuries to themselves or the

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE I1I3 killing of their relatives and in some cases were expected to pay compensation themselves if they had the money.®° The same must have been true in Norway, where slaves were expected to buy their own freedom,

but not necessarily in Denmark and Sweden, where they were not allowed to do so (see chapter 5}. That the law recognized that slaves would

have property does not mean that the law gave them a right to it. Custom and their masters’ sufferance allowed slaves to possess small amounts of money or goods. The Norwegian and Swedish laws limit the types of transactions in which a slave might engage, but not all the laws absolutely prohibit such commerce.8’ The Frostaping law implies that the slave could have possessions, but as he could bring no legal action to

recover them if stolen, he could hardly be said to have a legal right to them. Similarly, one of the testamentary manumissions from Sweden frees two slaves “with those things that they have,” implying that slaves did have possessions but that they had no legal right to them unless the master explicitly gave it.88 The law of Skane implies that slaves have no right to any property they may accumulate, because they must give it up

if they are freed, but they may have been able to use it to free themselves.89

In those Scandinavian laws that imply that slaves could own some property of their own or state that they could engage in small transactions, the underlying principle might have been that of the Roman peculium. The concept in Scandinavian law did not receive anything like the detailed treatment that it did in the Roman legislators and commentators. In Roman law the peculium formed the object of a special legal action.9° The Roman slave did not have, as against the master, a right to

his peculium, the existence of which depended on the intent of the master; this seems also to be true of instances in which the laws conceive of Scandinavian slaves as owning property.

While they do not use the term peculium or develop the notion in any detail, the Scandinavian laws seem closer to the Roman concept than many of the early Germanic laws. Possession of a peculium did not,

under Roman law, automatically give a slave the right to engage in transactions without his master’s permission, but the master generally made a general grant of permission for the slave’s dealings with his peculium.?! Most of the barbarian law codes, however, implicitly reject the notion of a slave’s peculium by flatly denying the validity of any transactions the slave engaged in, whereas at least some of the Scandina-

vian laws limit the amount of such transactions but do not prohibit them. The Continental laws also, as with some of the Scandinavian laws, prohibit self-purchase by the slave, because the slave could have no money that did not belong to the master.92 The Scandinavian laws go much further than the barbarian laws in recognizing that in practice the slaves possessed property and allowing them to engage in at least minor

II4 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE transactions on their own. The difference in law is likely to reflect a difference in practice rather than merely a borrowing from Roman law, since Scandinavian law did not borrow in detail Roman laws about the peculium and only implicitly acknowledge slave ownership of property. The concept of the peculium was necessary in Roman law as it was not in the barbarian laws because Rome was a developed commercial economy that needed some way to allow slaves to enter into contracts. The

resemblance of some Scandinavian laws to Roman law may be a response to a similar need rather than a copying. Civic Participation Slaves, like women, were exempt from certain activities which, as today, could be looked upon either as privileges or as duties of citizenship: military and jury service. There are no laws specifically exempting them, but it is always clear that the Jedung (coastal defense) and the jury are institutions of free men. Oath-helpers, too, had to be free men. The law of Jutland specifically excluded a slave from being a weri (surety, guardian, legal representative) for anyone.°3 The nonparticipation of slaves in military service was not due to a fear of their bearing arms. Icelandic sagas show the masters providing weapons when slaves need to use them and in one instance describe a slave as owning a particularly famous sword.94 Nowhere do the laws or sagas suggest that slaves were not, or should not be, allowed to bear arms.?5 The laws also generally require that witnesses be free people. Both the Gotaland and the Svealand laws cite an exception in the case of a woman who dies in childbirth: a slave’s testimony was admissible to determine who died first, mother or child. The Ostergétland laws also

mention slave testimony in relation to a case where a whole family drowns together, and the Vastergétland laws allow a slave herdsman to testify in a case of one animal killing another.9° The question of who died first was often important for inheritance purposes, but there is no reason why a slave’s testimony should be accepted here when it would not be for other questions, like that of who committed a murder. These

particular provisions may have found their way into the law books because of cases in which the issue actually arose. In Norway, the Frostabing law allowed slaves to testify where they had witnessed the slaying

of their master or in cases of housebreaking, and the Gulaping law allowed freedmen to do so in boundary disputes. The difference between

very similar codes on when a slave may testify supports the idea that these laws were written as a result of specific situations.9” While Scandinavian laws allowed slave testimony only in particular cases, they seem to have accepted it as given and not to have required torture as did Roman law.%8

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE IIs Family Relations One area where the law grants the slave some rights but more seem to be accorded in practice is that of family relationships. Many slave societies have not formally recognized slave families. In a society where people have rights over their spouses and children, those rights are incompatible with ownership of family members by a third party. From the contubernium of ancient Roman slaves, as opposed to coniugium or

matrimonium among free people, to “jumping the broom” in antebellum America, slaves who wished to marry were forced to content themselves with unions that did not have the sanction of law or the approval of the Church. The question of slave marriage in medieval Scandinavia is complicated by the larger issue of the nature of marriage in pre-Christian times.

Although the extant sources were all compiled after the conversion of the Scandinavian lands, they may contain material that reflects earlier practices. It is not clear by what date the Church had imposed its notion of marriage as a sacrament.!00 Pre-Christian marriage did have its ritual

aspects; according to the literary sources it generally required a betrothal ale, financial arrangements, and a wedding feast, and there was probably a ritual of consecration. Much more was involved, in terms of property and kin, than just the Church’s view of marriage as a bond within which sexual intercourse and procreation were permitted. Since in Iceland either party could initiate divorce for any of a wide variety of reasons, the main practical difference between having a wife and having a concubine was that children of a legal marriage inherited automatically. This difference did not matter to slave couples, who had little or nothing to leave to their children, so it may not have made any difference whether or not slaves’ unions were considered legal marriages. The scarcity of provisions in the laws for slave marriage may simply reflect the fact that the only factors that separated marriage from cohabitation related to property and not to a sacrament, and no property settlement or dowries were applicable in the case of slaves. Roman law had not recognized marriage between slaves. A relationship between slaves was contubernium, not coniugium, and brought with it none of the rights bestowed by the latter. Slave family relationships were recognized in practice, but they had no legal force.!°! Several early barbarian laws, however, appear to recognize marriage between slaves.!02 In this they more closely resemble the Swedish and Danish than the Norwegian and Icelandic laws. Canon law protecting the right of the servus (whatever that term meant to the canonists) to marry may have influenced the Swedish and Danish laws. The principle was established in the twelfth century but had appeared as early as the Council of Chalons in 813.108

116 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE The West Norse laws have surprisingly little to say about slave marriage or cohabitation, probably because the canon law had less influence on their redaction than was the case with the Danish and Swedish laws.

The few references to the relation between the partners imply that the union had some standing in the eyes of the law. The Gulabing law implicitly recognizes slave marriage by referring to a mund (marriage payment) that a slave man gives to a slave woman.!° The Icelandic law includes an ambiguous recognition of the bond between a slave man and woman: “A slave has more right in one regard than a free man: a slave has the right to kill for the sake of his wife [woman] although she is a slave woman, and a free man has not the right to kill for the sake of a slave woman although she is his woman [wife].”!°5 Any translation of this passage would be misleading, because the word kona can mean either woman or wife. The law could be translated with the slave woman as the wife of both the slave and the free man; it could also be taken as

a pun, because the slave woman is the property of the free man and therefore belongs to him as his woman (“hans kona”} in a very difterent way than she belongs to the slave as his wife (“hans kona”); or it could be

read so as to make her the slave’s woman, not his wife. In any case, whether or not the relationship was considered a legal marriage, the law accepts his right to avenge her seduction. !0

An example of a slave attempting to take such revenge occurs in Fostbraeéra saga. A slave, Lodin, has as bedfellow (lagi kona} a slave named Sigrid. He gets upset at the amount of time and attention she is giving Porm60, a guest of his master. Though the master, Porkel, promises Loin that there is nothing dishonest going on, Lodin attacks Porm0d, who kills him. Porkel wants to fight Porm60 over this but is with difficulty persuaded to accept compensation. He is granted the right to

set the amount of compensation himself. This is uncommon for the killing of a slave and can only be due to the special justification Lodin had for attacking Porm60.!97 The saga’s implicit acknowledgment of the slave’s right to vengeance contrasts with a provision in the extant church law section of the Borgarping law that mocks the slave: if he finds a man in bed with his wife or daughter, he is to throw a bucket of cold water over them “and bid his kinsman-by-marriage sleep well.’’198 The East Norse laws generally recognize slave marriages, the Danish ones in terms that show clear influence from Roman and canon law. Sjzlland law absorbed the canon law principle that a marriage is not valid if one of the partners enters into it mistakenly thinking the other free: the mistake or fraud, not the unfree status of one partner, invalidates the marriage; by implication the marriage would have been valid if each partner knew the status of the other.!09 The law of Ostergétland discourages the master from any wrongdoing in this regard by stating

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE I17 that if he held his home-born slave out as free for purposes of marriage, the slave would go free.!1° The Swedish laws allow marriages not only between two slaves but also between slaves and free people, and they specify the status of the children of such marriages, as discussed in chapter 2. The law of Gotland, an exception, does not mention slave marriage. In a provision on rape, it distinguishes between married and unmarried free women but not between married and unmarried slaves. Nevéus suggests that this means slaves could not marry, but it more likely just implies that even if a slave woman were married her husband had no property rights over her.!11 The oldest Swedish law code, that of Vastergotland, apparently allows two slaves to marry.!!2 In Ostergétland, a free woman lost her kin rights if she married a slave, but such a marriage was recognized; if slaves of two different masters married, the husband’s owner got twothirds of their property and children and the wife’s owner a third, a clear

indication that the relationship between the two slaves was legally recognized.!!3 The will of Margareta Ragnvaldsdotter, sometime before 1277, freed a villicus (steward) with his wife and children, recognizing a slave’s family relationships.!!4 Danish law recognizes legal marriage

between a slave and a free person, and a father could free his slave children.!!5 In the Danish laws Christian marriage did not make a differ-

ence in the status of the child. Even if their relationships were recognized as marriage in the law of the land, slaves’ families may not have had much integrity in reality. The several wills, including one by a priest, referring to slave women and their children but not mentioning a husband or father imply that slaves often did not live in recognized marriages.!!6 Similarly, the law of

Vastmanland can refer to “the child of a slave woman” as if it had no father or the father were not relevant.!!7 Norwegian law prescribes heavy penalties for a free woman who has intercourse with a slave, and there is no question of a legal marriage between a free person and a slave.!!8 Icelandic law seems to preclude the possibility of a legal marriage between a free woman and a slave: if such

a couple had a child the child was free but could not inherit, which means that he or she was not legitimate and therefore that there was no valid marriage. The law also mentions that if a woman freed her slave in

order to marry him, their children could not inherit, which indicates that she could not marry him without freeing him.!!9 This law could be intended to discourage manumission or, perhaps more relevant to free Icelanders, to encourage women with property to enter into a marriage alliance with one of the existing families rather than to found a new one. Examples of recognized marriages between slaves and free people do occur in Icelandic literature. Generally the slave is freed first, but in the

118 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE sagas this does not seem to be a legal requirement. When a man marries a slave she is likely to be a beautiful princess who has been captured in a raid.!20 There are several examples of male slaves marrying free women. In Svarfdcela saga, Ljotolf wants to give his slave Skidi a reward, and Skidi asks for Yngvild, Lj6tdlt’s free concubine, as his wife. Yngvild says that it is an insult to give her to a slave, so Ljétolf frees Skidi.!2! This

story implies that marriage would have been possible even had he remained a slave. In “Porsteins pattr uxafots,” Oddny, the sister of Porkel Geitisson, gets pregnant. She claims the father is Ivar, a Norwegian who

has been Porkel’s guest; Ivar denies this and says that the father is Porkel’s slave Freystein the Fair. Porkel does not even investigate this charge; it is assumed the child is Ivar’s, but, curiously, later on Freystein is freed and marries Oddny.!22 In the story of R6gnvald, the hero, while enslaved, marries Sigrid, the daughter of a “small peasant.’’!23 The literary examples and the laws implying that a free woman and a slave could have a legal marriage are diametrically opposed to the Continental Germanic laws that mention such unions. If a free woman sleeps with or marries a slave—say all the Germanic law codes that discuss the

matter—she is to be severely punished or enslaved herself.!24 Roman law, on which these provisions rely, was also very harsh against free women sleeping with slaves.!25 The rights of slave parents over their children were limited because slavery was hereditary and the child, like the parents, was the master’s property. But some kin rights were recognized. Besides the slaves’ immediate families, they might belong to a larger kin group. The Swedish laws on manumission (see chapter 5} provide for slaves to be freed by their kin, so presumably a kinship link could exist between slaves and free people. The law of Skane shows this to be the case for slaves captured in raids. If they were later killed while still slaves, their relatives could claim compensation at a free man’s price. If the slaves were in penal slavery, however, their relatives could not claim compensation for them. Similarly, under Icelandic law, a debt-slave’s kinsmen could take compensation for him if he were killed. He could also inherit from his kinsmen, so the kinship was clearly recognized, as well as the right of a debt-slave to receive property, though it is not clear whether he could keep it or had to put it toward his debt.!2° In most cases, however, slaves remained without inheritance rights and with little relevance to

their free kin unless the latter chose to free them. One of the great tragedies of many slave societies, the division of families, does not seem to have been an issue in Scandinavia. There are no references in law or in literature to husband and wife or parents and children separated by sale. Carl O. Williams states that “thrall-children were torn from their parents, the thrall’s ‘wife’ was separated from her ‘husband,’ and they were sold separately if the owner could not sell

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE 119g them to one buyer,” but the examples he gives all deal with situations where children are taken from their parents in slave-raids, not where they are sold separately when both are already slaves.!27 It may be that

families were separated and the sources do not mention it; the laws would have no reason to do so if the practice was not prohibited, and the

saga writers are not known for the interest they take in the personal tragedies of slaves’ lives.128 One might expect, in light of the attitude the Uppland laws take toward slavery, that they might have forbidden the sale of a child away from its mother had this been a current practice, but of course it might not have been seen as a problem. One cannot say, ex silentio, that the division of slave families did not occur, but we have no evidence that it did. The laws certainly did not forbid it, so they did not give slaves rights over their families in this regard. LAW AND THE SLAVE’S IMAGE

Legal constructs such as the lack of honor-price compensation for slaves or slaves’ lack of responsibility for their actions bear an unknown rela-

tion to social reality. We do not know that the laws were ever exactly followed. Comparison between the Icelandic sagas and laws in general indicates that the laws may have served as guidelines but that compensation was often worked out by private agreement rather than judgment of the assembly. This probably also holds true for the other Scandinavian countries. The laws were only moderately accepted as prescriptive and were perhaps not at all descriptive; the lack of honor-price in the laws does not necessarily mean that everyone thought of slaves as non-

persons. But it does mean that an influential stratum of the culture could define slaves in that way; the legal construction of the slave would

have been different had it not fit in well with the society’s general outlook toward slavery. Given the weak or nonexistent governmental power, people’s rights

and obligations in practice were what they could obtain through strength—their own, their kin’s, or their supporters’—and negotiation. Slaves were dependent on their masters for both. Whether they in practice received compensation for injuries depended upon the zeal with which their masters prosecuted their cases and the generosity of the master: the law might award part of the compensation to the slave, but no one would enforce the code if the master chose not to share. Similarly, whether a slave was in practice punished for an offense would depend on whether the master was active in gathering oath-helpers and whether he chose to pay a ransom to keep the slave from a beating. The laws reveal what the legislators and codifiers thought the slaves’ legal status, rights, and obligations ought to be, but those rights and obligations remained parchment promises.

|

I20 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE Yet those parchment promises constructed the slaves as the domi-

nant culture saw them, and that is the only version of the slaves to which the modern scholar has access. What that picture reveals is a piece of property, whose humanity is recognized grudgingly in the area

of family law and sporadically in others. This picture seems largely taken over from Roman and Continental law. This does not mean that we can Say the “status” of the slave was the same as that of the Roman slave, but merely that the legal construction followed in that tradition. Since the Roman law of slavery had an effect on Scandinavian law, especially that of Denmark, it is possible that the foreign influence on the laws extended even to the clear demarcation of slave status. It could be that the group of people the laws and sagas call “thralls” and equate with the Roman servi were not in a clearly defined legal state that we would call “slavery” before the reception of Roman law. Perhaps those who framed the law codes saw in the Roman laws on slavery a convenient way of defining the status of thralls, and in so doing altered that status to that of slaves. Legal status is, after all, always imposed by those who write the laws upon those whom the laws govern. The balance of the evidence, however, points to slavery as a social reality apart from the law codes, not just a creation of those learned in the Roman law. The Icelandic sagas, with all their problems as source material, clearly depict slavery as a social institution in a way that does not seem to be copied from a foreign literary tradition.!2? The Norwegian and Icelandic laws on slavery are different enough from Roman and Continental law to suggest that they were tailored to the situation at hand, where slavery was an important reality. The situation for Denmark and Sweden is more problematic. For Sweden the different approaches to slavery in the different groups of laws indicate adaptation to

particular circumstances, and the many known testamentary manumissions point to the existence of slavery as a social reality independent of the law codes. 13° These manumissions begin around the middle of the thirteenth century, before the redaction of most if not all of the Swedish laws. For Denmark the will of Archbishop Absalon, who died in 1201, provides independent evidence of slavery that predates the laws of Skane, as does the much earlier runestone raised by a freedman to his patron.!31 Slavery in Denmark was not a figment of the imagination of a jurist like Andreas Suneson who might have decided that the thrall was equivalent to the servus and therefore subject to the legal disabilities that made him a slave. Despite the borrowings of Danish law from the Roman law on slavery, it seems clear that slavery did exist in Denmark

at the time of the redaction of the law codes and, influenced by the Roman treatment of slavery, the redactors applied Roman principles to a group of people who were already slaves. The specific way the law

THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE I21 constructed the slave identity, though, owed much to the foreign influ-

ences on the laws. |

The laws reveal some underlying assumptions society made about the slave. Some laws insult the slave’s manhood.!32 Some explicitly equate slaves with household animals.!33 These laws express not so much a contempt for slaves as people as an emphasis on the other aspect of slaves besides their humanity, that is, their role as property. Treating people as property certainly implies contempt, which be-

comes explicit in such statements as that of the Sjzlland law that if a free man’s nostrils were slit a large compensation was to be paid, “because that is a slave’s mark and not a free man’s.”1!34 The law probably

means not that all slaves were marked by having their nostrils slit— there is no support for this anywhere else—but rather that a slave could be so marked as a penalty for some offense.!35 This is far from the only

law implying that some punishments could be inflicted on slaves but not on free people, but this law makes it clear not only that slaves could be punished more severely than free people but also that some types of physical indignity were to be borne only by slaves and not by free people

at all. The verb brelbzrja, “to beat like a slave,” which appears in the law of Jutland, shows that these negative implications of slavery might persist even after there were no more slaves. The law of Vastergotland stresses the low status of a player or vagabond, who had no right to claim personal compensation: “let him never ask for more rights than a beaten slave woman.”136 One’s wergeld or the legal class to which one belonged may not have

made much difference in daily life. People’s reactions to the other people with whom they worked and lived no doubt depended on who had the power and who was the dependent, but this did not necessarily run with legal status. A rich freedman might be a patron of a less well-to-do

freeborn man, or slaves and hired workers might be treated equally within a household. The very looseness of some of the terms for slaves, the occasional interchangeability in the sagas of bre] and husmaor or ambatt and huskona, indicates that legal status was not always clear or that social status did not always depend on legal status. Legal status and social status are by no means synonymous. Yet legal status is the best guide we have to how the culture thought about and classified groups of people in medieval Scandinavia, and in legal status the slave was distinct and degraded.

Slavery and Freedom

The movement from slavery to freedom is a matter of the redefinition of personal status, but the reasons may be religious, economic, or social. One dimension of the oppressiveness of any slave system is the ease and

frequency of manumission. Rebellion may be less likely if manumission is a reasonable hope for most slaves than if they see no way out of slavery.! The law codes and other documents such as wills indicate that manumission was a reasonable hope for Scandinavian slaves. Most scholars who have written about Scandinavia have spoken of economic reasons for the ending of slavery. At issue here, and the focus for this chapter’s discussion of economic reasons for the ending of slavery, is the question of why landlords changed from slave labor to free labor. When this question involves slave members of the household who were replaced by hired laborers fulfilling much the same economic functions, we can answer it with the reasons that one way of obtaining labor was more advantageous than another. When it involves a shift in economic organization from demesne-type slavery to tenant farming, however, the question is more complex. As chapter 1 has shown, all over Europe people who were no longer directly exploited remained unfree—

serfs who were defined legally in the same way as slaves. There is no reason that manumission, a change in personal status, need accompany the change in economic function. Tenants may gradually gain more rights and freedoms than prebendal laborers, but there is no reason that a

laborer’s personal status should initially change when he or she becomes a tenant. We must therefore look beyond changes in economic organization to explain why slaves became free tenants rather than serfs.

Manumission did not immediately place the slave in the same social

category as the former owner. Societies employ a variety of control mechanisms to prevent former slaves from achieving equal footing with

the freeborn. Freeborn people may distinguish themselves from the freed by stressing the distinction of blood rather than legal status between slaves and free people or by denying full citizenship to former slaves. In Scandinavia, the growing social distinctions among the gener122

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 123 al group of free people, that is, the development of new systems of classification, kept the former slave distinct from the former master and made slavery, as a conceptual category, obsolete. SLAVE RESISTANCE

In many slave societies the masters’ inability to control their slaves contributed to the demise of slavery. The masters’ ability to prevent rebellion always set a limit on the number of slaves in a society. The constant fear of slave revolt particularly troubled masters in places like the Caribbean where slaves far outnumbered free people, but it was also

a factor in ancient Rome and perhaps medieval Europe.? Control of slaves would seem particularly important in societies like those of medieval Scandinavia, where the slaves, instead of working in gangs with overseers, mingled freely with their masters and were even permitted to carry weapons.? A high degree of contact could have promoted a paternalistic relationship in which slaves grew loyal to their masters, but in

other slave societies where the masters claimed to have this kind of loyalty the slaves still resented their masters and resisted their control in many ways, from sloppy work and pilfering to outright revolt.4 The stereotype in Icelandic literature of the lazy slave could derive from such a deliberate refusal to work zealously in the master’s interests. Despite the possible dangers, the laws did not give the Scandinavian slaveowners much protection against slave revolt. To some extent, legislation was not necessary: if a slave wounded or killed his or her master,

the master’s kin group would not need a law permitting vengeance, because punishment for the slave in such cases was assumed. It is nonetheless surprising that the only form of slave resistance most of the law codes consider is flight. The laws about escaped slaves fall into three categories: those punishing the slaves, those rewarding people who capture runaways or punishing those who abet them, and those absolving the masters of respon-

sibility for crimes their slaves commit after running away. The first type, alaw punishing slaves for escaping, is found only in the Norwegian law of the Frostaping. A native slave who ran away was flogged; a for-

eign-born slave was castrated.5 The phrasing of this law required the master to have the slave flogged or else pay a fine; its purpose was not to

permit the master to punish his slave but to require him to do so, presumably for the protection of the community. No other code has similar provisions; since masters could kill their slaves with impunity, there was no need for legal sanction for punishment, and nowhere else was it deemed necessary to ensure such punishment by law. Many Scandinavian laws provide rewards for helping find fugitive slaves or returning them, in contrast with the Roman and Continental

124 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM Germanic laws, which place the emphasis on penalties for helping the slave escape.® Both of the Norwegian law codes provide rewards to peo-

ple who capture an escaped slave. The Gulabing law forbids helping a slave escape but does not state a penalty: presumably this was left to private vengeance. The Swedish laws also reward the finder of a runaway Slave. In the island province of Gotland, not the master but the owner of a ship who carelessly allowed a slave to steal it had to pay the reward for the return of a runaway. The law of Skane allowed someone to search another’s property for his slave or take the slave even from the king’s or bishop’s estate; the law of Sjzlland did the same but warned of the heavy penalties if the supposed slave thus reclaimed could prove he was free.’ Several laws from Denmark and Gotland that make the master responsible for his slave’s theft make an exception if the slave has run away.® These laws are more concerned with the master’s pecuniary liability for the slave’s actions than with his loss of the slave’s services. Most Scandinavian law codes do not discuss the master’s responsibility for the escaped slave; in contrast, this issue is a primary focus for the Continental law codes’ discussion of runaways.? The only laws that mention slave resistance other than flight are those of Iceland, a place where flight might have been particularly unattractive, and those of Uppland.!° The Icelandic law puts three marks on the head of a slave who kills his master or a member of the master’s family. This price was high for an outlaw.!! In the Uppland law a slave or

a servant who killed his master, the master’s steward, or their wives or children was to be broken on the wheel.!2 The Uppland law puts slave revolt in the context of any rebellion against the social hierarchy: the first provision in the chapter deals with revolt against the king. That the Uppland law, which of all the extant codes shows the most evidence of an effort to ameliorate the slave’s status, considers the possibility of such slave revolt where others do not may simply be an indication of its thoroughness. It might also be a quid pro quo: in exchange for their acceptance of certain provisions lightening the slaves’ lot, the masters may have insisted on making clear that rebellion would not be tolerated. Since the other extant law codes do not have parallel laws recognizing that masters were under a certain threat from their slaves, it may be that people did not consider the problem significant. That the laws take so little account of possible slave rebellion contrasts with the fear of revolt expressed in the mythological and legendary literature. Tales of the mythical past recorded in medieval Iceland mingle apprehension with a sense that the slaves were only doing what any enslaved captive would do: fighting back. In the “Mill Song” (Grottasgngr), the mythical King Frodi has captured two giantesses to turn his grindstone, grinding out gold and peace. He works them so hard that

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 125 they begin to grind out death and destruction instead, and eventually they destroy the mill.!3 Ynglinga saga, Snorri Sturluson’s version of the tale of the legendary Swedish kings, tells of a disgruntled slave who led a revolt in which a group of slaves lived in the woods and made raids. They

developed quite a following in the countryside until the king of Denmark came with an army to control them. In another, totally legendary saga, a king and all his household are slain by slaves, but it is specified that the rebels, recent captives from the west (Ireland or Britain), were from magnates’ families and did not much like their servitude.!4 None of these stories can be taken as factual, but they show that people in the thirteenth century thought of slaves as having been potential threats. There are a few accounts of slave resistance that may have more historical validity. Rimbert, the biographer of St. Anskar, tells of a slave revolt in 865, in which Christians, enslaved by barbarians, escaped to Nordalbingia. Presumably the place they were kept in captivity was Denmark.!5 Unfortunately, the Nordalbingians reenslaved them and either kept them or sold them to pagans or other Christians. Even if the account is true and does refer to Denmark the scale of the revolt is not clear. Several slave revolts were reported in early Icelandic history. Land-

namabok mentions two from the early days of the settlement. One settler, Hjorleif, had ten slaves, captured in Ireland. Dufthak, the leader of the slaves, suggested that they kill Hjorleif’s ox and say that a bear did it. When Hjorleif and his men went into the woods to look for the bear, the slaves fell upon them and killed them. The slaves then fled to the islands with the movable property, the boat and “konur peira” (it is not clear whether this means the wives of the murdered men or the slaves’

own women}. Ingolf, another settler, believed that Hjorleif had died such an ignominious death—“it is a sad end for a warrior to be killed by his slaves”—because he did not sacrifice properly to the gods. Nevertheless, Ingolf did his duty by tracking down and killing the slaves, taking the women back with him. Another incident occurred when Ketil Gufa (“Steam”) was away from home. His slaves ran away and burned Pord Lambason in the house at Lambistead, taking the goods and horses that were there. The slaves all bolted in different directions but Pord’s son Lambi and his men tracked them down and killed them. !6

These small-scale rebellions took place in the Settlement Age, before Iceland was as fully settled as it became by the middle of the tenth century. Perhaps revolts became more difficult later because the slaves would find it harder to escape or because there were enough free men

around to keep them under control. Later it might be easier for a rebellion to spread from one farmstead to another, but it might be that in later times no one owner would hold as many slaves as in the settlement period, at least in relation to the number of free men on the farm. Per-

126 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM haps, too, after the initial settlement more of the slaves were born to slavery and used to that status, and therefore less likely to rebel. Another literary example of a slave rebellion comes from the early years of Greenland’s settlement, providing more evidence that revolts were easier at times of sparse settlement or at least that Icelandic authors thought they were. Greenland is a place where flight by individual slaves would not be a realistic alternative. Fldamanna saga is set in the late tenth and early eleventh century. The hero, Porgils, goes to Greenland after the conversion of Iceland in the year 1000. One day he leaves his house despite his wife’s forebodings, and when he returns home later that day he finds his house ransacked and his wife dead. He tracks down his steward (bryti), who says that the slaves threatened to kill him if he

did not accompany them. Porgils kills him. He later finds the slaves, who have made good marriages and amassed property; on the advice of Porstein the White, instead of killing them he sells them back into slavery and takes their property.!7 Sagas recount occasional attacks by individual slaves on their masters. In the story of Rognvald, wrongfully enslaved by Porolf, Rognvald

oversees the construction of Pérélf’s new house and makes sure large stacks of wood are piled all around it so that he can easily set it afire later. In the “Dreams of Porstein Sidu-Hallsson,” a short but particularly

gruesome story, Porstein is warned in three separate dreams that he should kill his Irish slave Gilli, supposedly a great-great-grandson of an Irish king, who means to betray Porstein because he castrated him. This is the only example of castration of a slave in Icelandic literature, and

the story gives no reason for it. Pérstein searches for Gilli after each dream, but the slave has disappeared. Gilli does kill Porstein, sneaking into the house at night with an ax. The retainers (heimamenn) find Gilli and Porstein’s wife questions him to find out who instigated the deed. When he says that no one had any part in it but himself, she has a red-hot metal basin placed on his stomach till his skin crackles and burns. She has it removed when he threatens to put a curse on her kindred; he is then taken and drowned in aswamp.!8 Apparently the author of the saga thought it was to be expected that Gilli might have been part of a conspiracy, not just a disgruntled individual. Given the generally violent tenor of the surviving stories of life in

Iceland, one would expect to see incidents like the story of Porstein Sidu-Hallsson more often in the sagas. The incidents in which slaves kill their masters, however, are usually attributed to bribes rather than revenge for mistreatment. In Fldamanna saga, Porgils’s enemy Asgrim bribes Pérgils’s slave Kol to kill him. The plot fails, however, because Porgils discovers the bribe money and kills the slave. In Droplaugarsona saga, Droplaug and her son Helgi persuade Poérgils, the slave of Droplaug’s second husband, Hallstein, to kill Hallstein. Helgi immediately

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 127 kills the slave, but it is clear that the slave has not killed his master purely on his own initiative. In Reykdcela saga, a slave does not himself kill his master but informs on the latter’s plans and his whereabouts toa neighbor, because the neighbor once gave the slave a pair of trousers.!9 The histories of the kingdoms of mainland Scandinavia record sever-

al killings of masters by slaves. In the saga of Olaf Tryggvason, the powerful Earl Hakon has to hide from a body of farmers up in arms against him. He and his slave Kark hide in a pigsty. Kark kills the earl and takes his head to King Olaf, expecting a reward; the king has him beheaded. Saxo Grammaticus reports that King Sverker of Sweden was killed by a slave (servus) in charge of his bedchamber, at the behest of his rival Magnus.2° None of these incidents shows a high level of political consciousness

or even resentment among the slaves. We cannot take the stories as indicative of the slaves’ attitudes and feelings, of course, since they were written by the masters, who had an interest in suppressing stories that

might give their slaves ideas and who might not have wanted to attribute to slaves the goal of vengeance, which the Norse considered such

a noble act. Still, the absence in the literature of any concerted slave rebellions after the time of settlement indicates that while people were aware of the possibility and expressed that awareness in the legendary material, they did not consider it a clear and present danger. It is probable that there was not a high level of overt violence by slaves against their masters in any of the Scandinavian countries, at least not after the Viking Age. Recently captured Irish slaves, imported in a group, would have enough in common, enough resentment of their

master, and little enough to lose to take part in the kind of revolts described in the two examples from Landndmab6ok. Slaves who were not recent imports or who did not have the backing of a group would have fewer incentives to action. There may not have been a realistic alternative for the slaves: there was nowhere to run, and the climate and ecology of Iceland are not such as to make a maroon colony a pleasant

prospect. Slaves may not have been loyal to their masters, but their disloyalty and resentment probably took the form of not being there when needed or not going out of their way to defend their masters rather

than attacking them in the night.2! There is no evidence that slave resistance contributed significantly to the ending of slavery. MANUMISSION

Before looking at those factors that did contribute to the end of slavery as an institution, we must sketch the legal processes involved in the end of slavery for an individual. Scandinavian law made available avenues

for mobility out of the category of slavery. All the laws provide for

128 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM manumission and some allow slaves to be freed by their own or their relatives’ efforts as well as by their masters’ generosity. The laws do not tell how many slaves were freed in any period, but they do make clear that emancipation was possible and that in many cases the slave could

demand it whether or not the master wanted to grant it. Circumstances

A man usually had the right to free from slavery his children by someone else’s slave; under Norwegian law, where the ownership of slave children was considered a disadvantage, he was required to pay for bringing up his children even if he did not free them.22 Not only their

fathers but also other relatives could free slaves, taking responsibility for them. Both Gotaland laws allowed kin related within certain degrees to free slaves, and the master could not refuse unless the slave was his child.23 Probably the people most frequently released under these provisions were the children of a free man by a slave woman or the offspring of aman captured in a raid or enslaved for crime or debt, redeemed by their father’s relatives.24 In the law of Skane, slaves’ relatives could free them

only with the master’s permission.25 The Roman law, though it provided amply for manumission of slaves, allowed no right to purchase the freedom of someone else’s slaves, even if they were one’s kin.26 Here again the law of Skane adopted the Roman law principle. In a few special cases the Scandinavian laws mandate emancipation

without the master’s consent, as a punishment to the master for some offense involving the slave which he had committed against the community. Most examples of this are found in the Swedish laws. In OstergOtland, if someone represented a slave as free in order that the slave could marry a free woman, the slave would go free. In Uppland, if a master attempted to sell his Christian slave, the slave would go free. By the law of Jutland, if a master attempted to send a slave todo his military

service for him, the king could declare the slave free.2” The principle behind these provisions also occurred in Roman law, where a slave could be freed if the master committed certain offenses against him, but the offenses were different.28 A master might wish to free a slave as a reward for some good deed or for faithful service, or the community might free a slave for that reason

whatever the master’s feelings on the subject. Unlike Roman law, the Scandinavian laws did not provide for reimbursement of the masters when the state rewarded a slave with freedom.29 The Gulaping law provided that if the land were attacked and a slave killed a free man in battle, the slave would go free.3° The literary examples of manumissions as reward are numerous. Saxo reports that the ancient King Frodi ordered that any slaves who

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 129 fought valiantly in his army be freed. The Icelandic sagas show slaves being freed not for service to the commonwealth but rather for individual deeds on behalf of their masters. In some cases, the slave is freed for committing murder for the master.3! Usually, however, the deed for which the slave is freed is more positive in the eyes of the community, even if it involves betraying other slaves, as when Vifil was freed for bringing to Ingolf’s attention the revolt of Hjgrleif’s Irish slaves. One slave is given her freedom for helping capture an outlaw; others are freed for defending their masters’ property from attackers.32 Geirmund Heljarskin frees his slave Atli because he has acted to enhance his master’s prestige.33 Men also occasionally buy freedom for another’s slave who

has helped them out. In Gisla saga, a slave helps Gisli escape from his enemies; he gives her a gold ring to buy her freedom and that of another slave with whom he has exchanged clothes.34 This story implies that slaves could own property and buy their own freedom; Grdgds does not provide for any such procedure, but slaves may well have been permitted to do so in practice without having the legal right. These stories of manumission as reward date from the settlement period in Iceland, when it seems to have been fairly common to manumit slaves and establish them on their own farmsteads. An independent economic position seems to have been considered an automatic concomitant of free status. The freed slaves of the settlement period became assimilated into Icelandic society, enough so that at least one editor or scribe of Landnamabok thought that the purpose of writing the history of the settlements was to provide an answer to foreigners who thought the Icelanders “were descended from slaves and scoundrels.’’35 The real motivation for the manumissions was probably not the desire to reward slaves for good service but rather the idea that free status was

more compatible than slave status with the economic function of a tenant. When the master could no longer directly control the slave, he may not have wanted the legal responsibility for him, and he could get credit for generosity while making a greater profit (see below on economic reasons for ending slavery). The Manumission Process In the Norwegian laws there seem to be two phases of emancipation.

An owner could grant a slave freedom, but the slave still could not control his own marriage, household, or business dealings. After he gave a “freedom ale” ceremony the law accorded him a good deal more autonomy, though some ties of dependence still remained. The terms for the two types of freedman are frjdlsgjafi and leysingi, but the laws do not

always maintain a clear distinction between the two.36 The root of leysingi implies “release” from slavery; frjalsgjafi implies that freedom

130 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM has been given. Frjalsgjafi sometimes seems to mean a lower status, but the two words are often used interchangeably.37 The Gulaping law provided that a master could free a slave in such a way that the freedom ale was not necessary. A slave could buy his or her own freedom under either law, but the laws are not clear on whether or not such a slave had to give a freedom ale. Slaves in the process of buying their freedom could be freed before the full value was paid. Presumably they would still have to give a freedom ale.38 Both law codes describe the

freedom ale itself in an extremely picturesque manner, calling into question whether it really was an ancient ritual preserved in tradition or whether the compilers of the law codes went overboard in antiquarian enthusiasm.?? The laws imply that the freedman could give his freedom ale with or without the agreement of the master, but as a first stage the master had to have released him from slavery. Both the provisions for buying oneself out of slavery and those for the freedom ale imply that slaves would be expected to have money of their own, but whether this was the case no doubt depended upon the wishes of the master. Snorri Sturlusson reported that Erling Skjalgsson, St. Olaf’s retainer, allowed his slaves to earn money on their own and purchase their freedom; the account indicates that this was at the master’s option and also that it was to his economic advantage.4° In Iceland too the law implies that the emancipation process was twofold, though no trace of the second step appears in the literary material. According to Gragds the master could grant a slave freedom, but that freedom was not complete until the slave had been “led into the law” at the assembly.*! The absence of such a procedure from any of the literary references to freeing slaves does not signify that these rituals did

not actually occur but it does indicate that the saga writers did not consider it of prime importance in the freeing of the slaves. Several of the Continental law codes contain detailed rituals comparable, though not particularly similar, to those in the Norwegian and

Icelandic codes. While some refer to written charters of freedom or

merely the presence of witnesses, others provide for freeing slaves at a church, before the king, or by an elaborate ritual of transferring the slave from owner to owner until the fourth man frees him by taking him to a crossroads, giving him weapons, and offering him the choice of which road to take.42 The Norwegian and Icelandic laws obviously did not borrow directly from any of these, but the notion that some elaborate ceremony was necessary may itself be a borrowing rather than ancient Scandinavian tradition. In Denmark, the law of Skane allowed slaves to buy their own freedom if the master consented; this may seem restrictive, but laws elsewhere prohibited self-purchase even with the master’s agreement.*3 St. Knut’s biographer listed among the king’s good works “publicly declar-

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 131 ing free manumitted slaves and those redeemed with a price acquired by the work of their own sweat,” though the fact that they still needed the

king to declare them free indicates that their rights may have been shaky.*4 For slaves to purchase freedom, with or without the master’s permission, they presumably could own money, but upon the slave’s emancipation the master got to keep it all. The slave had to be adopted into a kin group at the time of emancipation. The Sjzlland law did not

set any such requirements, stating only that the master should announce the manumission at the church door, perhaps a successor to the

assembly ground as sacral place. The fact that the master had to announce the manumission implies that his consent was required.45 The one reference on a runestone to a freed slave indicates not only that the slave appreciated his master’s generosity in freeing him but also that the master gave the slave money. Perhaps Thorkel Gudmundson,

who freed Toki the Smith, provided him with his own landholding or with a workshop and tools because there was a continuing bond of clientship after the slave was freed. This runestone, from western Jutland, is dated several centuries earlier than the law codes but hints at the same sort of social institutions.*® The law of Gotland, like that of Sjzlland, provides for the slave to be freed at the church door, but it implies that the master had no choice about whether or not to free the slave. Slavery on Gotland seems to have been for a set time period.4”7 The other Swedish laws do not discuss slaves redeeming themselves from slavery. The Svear laws simply do not address the question of who can free a slave. The Ostergétland law explicitly states that when a slave’s relatives adopted him into the kin, they had to swear that they were not paying for the slave with his own property, and the only method of obtaining one’s freedom provided in the Vastergotland laws is adoption into the kin.48 Probably a master could grant a slave freedom if he so wished, and a slave might be able to obtain freedom by means of a private arrangement with the master, but

the law did not protect the slave’s right to do so. The testamentary manumissions, from approximately the same era as the law codes, indicate that masters could in practice free their slaves apparently without making special provisions for them. The wills do not reflect any other arrangements, such as payments from the slave to the master, that may have taken place as preconditions for the testamentary manumissions. Effects of Emancipation

According to the law codes, a freed slave was still a long way from enjoying the full rights of a freeborn person. A slave in the West Norse area who had not given a freedom ale or who had not been “led into the law” did not have the right to manage his own business affairs or arrange

132 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM his own marriage. Even after the freedom ale former slaves still owed some special sort of respect or deference to their former masters. They had to support the master in whatever he undertook, and they could not leave the fylki without his permission. The Frostaping law implies in one place that dependence (byrmslum) was only necessary from a freed-

man who had not given his freedom ale, but another provision that seems to apply even if the freedman had given a freedom ale states that the freedman remained in dependence.*? The dependence prescribed in the law seems to have been intended not to provide any actual benefit to

the master but to prevent the slave, once freed, from giving free rein to any animosity he might have against his former owner. The freedman’s support in legal matters was probably not of much use to the former master, but the commitment not to join with his enemies might well be. The right to inheritance seems to have been the main right the mas-

ter retained over the former slave in Iceland as well as Norway. The Gulaping law implies that if freedmen or women had not given their freedom ales, not their children but their former masters would be their heirs. The freedman could, however, buy the right for his children to inherit. Even if the freedman had given his ale, the master got the inheritance before more distant members of the freedman’s family. In Iceland, a master got his freedman’s inheritance if there were no children. The

| master was also responsible for maintaining the freedman. Landnamabok and Eyrbyggja saga give an example of a dispute over the inheritance from a freedman.*° In the Roman and Continental Germanic laws,

the right to inheritance was also the main right a master retained over his freed slaves, though there could be other rights of patronage.®! Norwegian laws prevented the master from taking back the slave’s freedom unless he was in dire need. If the freedman fell into need the master was still obliged to support him, under both Norwegian and Icelandic law. The master could force the freedman’s children to work or force the freedman to abandon them; the purchased freedom seems to

have had little effect in this case.52 There are no provisions for the reenslavement of an ungrateful freedman as in Roman law.‘ In the Danish and Swedish laws, in contrast to those of Iceland and Norway, once a slave was freed the master was no longer involved. This did not mean that the slave was now completely independent, but ac-

cording to the laws it was the kin group into which he or she was adopted, not the former master, to whom the slave’s allegiance belonged. Usually the kin group had a right to inheritance and compensation. In the Skane law the kin had to pay compensation for the freedman’s deeds and also took compensation if he were injured.54 The law of Vastergotland provides that the one who adopted the freedman or woman into the kin inherited in the absence of close relatives, though it also

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 133 seems to imply that not all freed people would be adopted into a kin group. The Ostergétland law requires the one who adopted him or her into the kin to pay compensation. The master had no more rights over his former slave.55 The Svealand laws do not provide any special regula-

tions about inheritance and compensation for a freedman, but they do make provision for a dispute over whether or not a slave has been freed. The putative freedman has the right to testify.5° The people who testify as to the slave’s freedom are those who accepted him at the assembly. This provision implies what is never explicitly stated—that emancipation in the Svear provinces too involved adoption into a kin group at the assembly or else freeing at the church door before the parish.

The extant wills do not bear out the manumission procedures prescribed in the laws or the dependence of the freed person on a kin group. The testamentary manumissions, whether from Svealand or Gotaland, contain no references to adoption into the kin. This might mean that the

legal provisions about such adoption were never effective, or it could mean that slaves freed by testament were not yet completely free.5’ Some wills contain phrases like “full freedom,” which might imply that the owners were trying to get around the regulations about adoption into the kin, although these might also be rhetorical phrases with no meaning more specific than simply freedom.*® In the Scandinavian laws in general, freed people had a status some-

where between that of freeborn people and slaves. In at least parts of both Denmark and Sweden their wergeld was lower than that of freeborn people, although a level of half that of a free person was still a great

improvement over that of a slave. The Sjzlland law, however, gave a freed slave “full rights as if he were freeborn.” In Norwegian law many types of compensation varied according to the status of the offender, and the freedman always had to pay less than a freeborn man.°? Under the Gulaping law, if a free man freed his child by a slave, even the slave of

another, the child was treated as freeborn; this was not the case under the Frostaping law, nor in Denmark. In Continental Germanic law, too, freed people had an intermediate status: while under the Lombard law the complete emancipation ritual would make the slave “folk-free,” under this code as well as the Visigothic the master could place limits on the freedom he gave.®! Under other laws the freedman had an intermedi-

ate status, like that under the Norwegian law codes.® The picture of freed people’s status given in Icelandic literature agrees well with the intermediate status accorded them in the laws. They appear as clients of the masters who have freed them. Sometimes they become foster parents to the master’s children, which implies a certain amount of mutual trust and loyalty as well as an acknowledgment of the freed person’s subordinate position.6? The freedman, according to the literature, might be looked down upon even by his free-

134 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM born kin. Ogmund dytt was the son of Hrafn, one of Glim’s mother’s freedmen who had grown rich and married a kinswoman of Gluim’s, but his free kinsmen reproach him with his slave ancestry (see chapter 2). Hrafn had managed to marry a free woman, but many wellborn families did not want their daughters to marry freedmen. Yngvild in Svarfdcela

saga and Oddny in “Porsteins pattr uxafo6ts” marry freedmen, but Yngvild has been someone’s concubine and Oddny has had an illegitimate child. Porbjorn Vifilsson does not want his daughter to marry the

son of a slave, even one who had become wealthy since getting his freedom, even though Porbjorn’s father himself had been a freedman. In Valla-Lj6ts saga, Halli Sigurdarson does not want his widowed mother

to marry a freedman who has made a good offer for her.64 There are numerous instances of resentment over freedmen who have become well-to-do.® The sagas do not regard freedmen as full members of the community unless they are the children of free fathers with slave women and the fathers have given them a kin group with which to identify. There are no comparable literary sources for the East Norse region, but on the basis of the laws alone there seems to have been a difference in what manumission could accomplish. The kin group made that difference. Adoption into the kin does not mean that former slaves automatically became the kin group’s leading members, but they were members rather than clients. If the freed slave usually had a kin group to go to, this would imply that slavery was in most cases a home-bred phenomenon (or that only slaves with kin in the province were generally freed). It seems that in Denmark and Sweden a freed person was closer to freeborn

status than in Iceland and Norway; however, this conclusion comes only from the laws, and the testamentary manumissions indicate that the laws may not reflect the way the process actually worked. DATING THE END OF SLAVERY

The process of manumission—the transition out of slavery for an individual—is only a small part of the transition away from slavery for an entire society. We cannot correlate the decline of slavery in the various Scandinavian countries with other social and economic changes unless we Can put a date on it. There is no firm date for the heyday of slavery, because most of the evidence comes from the thirteenth century, and though it probably applies to an earlier period we cannot identify that period very precisely. It is not possible to draw solid conclusions about

the extent of slavery in the period of the law codes compared to its extent in the Viking Age. Because slavery was apparently just ending as

the sources were being written, we can put approximate dates on the decline of slavery, but we must remember that they may be deceptive because we have no earlier sources with which to compare them.

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 135 Iceland The date for the end of slavery in each of the countries, with the partial exception of Sweden, depends upon argument from silence, which is always dangerous. In Iceland, the law codes of the thirteenth century, Jarnsida and J6nsbok, take much material from Grdagds and Norwegian law but contain no references to slavery.°° We could then assume that slavery ended between the time of Grdgds and 1271, but the time of Grdgds is not itself clear (see appendix). The origin of the code has generally been attributed to the twelfth century, and there are some

twelfth-century manuscript fragments, but as the two full redactions that exist are both known only from manuscripts from the mid- to late thirteenth century, any twelfth-century material in the code could well have been altered. It is not likely that slavery was more significant in the thirteenth century than in the twelfth, so the material on slavery is not likely to have been newly inserted by a late redactor unless it was borrowed from abroad and included for scholarly reasons, which does not seem to have been the case. It may be, however, that an earlier version

contained a good deal more about slavery than the extant redactions. Gragas does not focus directly on family relations among slaves but discusses them mainly in the contexts of compensation and manumission. It has fewer references and allusions to slaves than many of the other Scandinavian codes. Probably slavery was already on the decline by the time the extant redactions were written, and either some provisions of an earlier version were dropped or the redactors failed to consider certain issues because slavery was no longer significant. Gragds does not necessarily contain the remains of early Icelandic law on slavery; it could be the redactors’ version of what the law had been or ought to have been. That slavery does remain in the Grdgds manuscripts of the mid-thirteenth century would not necessarily mean that slavery lasted that long, because the manuscripts build on earlier material, either Icelandic or foreign, yet if there had once been more detailed provisions on

slavery in Icelandic law there must be some reason why some were retained.§7 The last datable events in the family sagas that involve slaves, datable because characters and historical events can be identified even if the action is fictional, are supposed to have taken place in the decade 1050— 60.68 Slaves remained on people’s minds long after that time, for many

lower-class characters in the later medieval romances or mythological tales are called slaves (where they would be identified as serfs or villeins in other European vernaculars}, but Sturlunga saga, describing events of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, does not contain any slaves.® While it is impossible to assign an exact date for the last slave in Iceland, it seems most consistent with the evidence to suggest that slavery still

136 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM existed but was not very common by about the middle of the twelfth century and probably no longer existed by the mid-thirteenth. Norway As with Iceland, the argument from silence provides a terminus ante

quem for the end of slavery in Norway: the national law of Magnts Lagabeter, from the 1270s, does not include it, except for the use of “begn oc prell” as a synonym for “everyone.”7° Both the Gulaping and Frostaping laws, however, show slavery as quite a vital institution. The only sign of its disappearance is the Frostaping provision for road repair as a pious act in place of manumission.’! This could just as well signal

the decline of roads as the decline of slavery. Even if it is a sign of slavery’s decline it could be a late addition; the manuscript dates from the mid-thirteenth century although, as discussed in the appendix, the material in the Frostaping law is usually dated to the twelfth century. The material on slavery in the Frostapbing law as well as that in the Gulabing law, of which twelfth-century fragments exist, probably goes back to the twelfth century and shows slavery as a significant societal institution. It is dangerous to assume that the law codes reflect actual circumstances at a time prior to their redaction, but it is not likely that

the extensive provisions on slavery were new in the mid-thirteenth century, considering that they were entirely absent a few decades later.

Nor do they seem to have been drawn from any foreign source. The question here is not whether the material in the Norwegian laws is valid for slavery at an earlier period, but whether we may take it as proving the existence of slavery at the time of the extant redactions. Slavery might already have been on the wane by the time the codes as they now stand were written, and they might have included the extensive provisions on slavery merely out of scholarly interest. Yet the codes not only formally discuss slavery but also allude to it many times in ways that would not seem to have been of much antiquarian interest to the redactors—for example, the provision that the cook for the Jedung should be provided by those who owned slaves. It seems reasonable to conclude that slavery

was a Significant institution still at the time of the redaction of the Norwegian provincial codes.’2 Its decline, then, probably occurred in the hundred years or so preceding Magnts’s national law code. A particular point during that period is impossible to identify, but there do not seem to be grounds for saying that the extant provincial laws show a slave system already in decline. Saga evidence is consistent with a date

of late twelfth to thirteenth century for the decline of slavery in Norway.’

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 137 Denmark For Denmark the dating problem is even more difficult. Denmark had no national law code until the sixteenth century. The law of Jutland,

issued under royal sanction in 1241, provides a starting point for the argument from silence. This law code mentions slaves only four times,

all in provisions focusing on other status groups or issues other than slavery (like ledung service).”4 The absence of other provisions might mean that slavery was unknown in Denmark, or at least in Jutland, by that time. The four provisions would then have to be explained as relics

of some older legal tradition. |

Silence on slavery, however, need not imply its nonexistence. The

law of Jutland does not deal extensively with the landbo or tenant either, though the other law codes do so; one cannot conclude from this that tenants were unknown in Jutland at the time of the law’s redaction. It could be that the law of Jutland was more concerned with issues like the relation of king to nobility and church to state than with the relation of master to slave or landlord to tenant.’5 Yet the law of Jutland does

deal with compensation for injury, penalties for theft, marriage, and inheritance, contexts in which other Scandinavian law codes discuss slavery. The Jutland law’s silence on slavery cannot be taken as proof of the absence of slavery, but it does speak for its insignificance. At about the same time as the redaction of the Jutland code, the later redaction of Valdemar’s Sjzlland law introduced a whole section of material on slavery that was not included in the earlier redactions.’”® That these issues about slave crimes and slave inheritance were not included in the earlier version might suggest that slavery was already

insignificant—their inclusion in the later redaction would then be a scholarly effort without practical relevance—but a chapter on theft similarly appeared for the first time in the later redaction, and theft cannot have been obsolete in the first half of the thirteenth century. The later redaction of the Sjzlland law indicates that the law of slavery was seen as relevant there in the middle of the fourteenth century and therefore that slavery still existed, even if it was not widespread.7’ Slavery probably still existed in Denmark in the middle of the thirteenth century, but we cannot say that it was significant much past the beginning of that century. It does appear in the Skane and Sjzlland laws

but does not form as organic a part of them as in the Norwegian or Swedish laws. The Danish laws on slavery, particularly the law of Skane, strongly resemble the Roman law, a fact which suggests that they may have been borrowed. While they probably would not have been selected for borrowing if slavery did not exist in Denmark at the time of the redaction, the existence of the laws does not establish the

138 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM significance of Danish slavery at that time. Erik’s Sjzlland law has only scattered references to slaves, and the law of slavery in Valdemar’s Sjzlland law is all in one section, not integrated into the whole code. It is possible but not certain that slavery had practically disappeared at least in Jutland by 1241. Sweden

Argument from silence can also be made for Sweden—the national law code of Magnus Eriksson, from the 1340s, does not mention slavery—but for Sweden, alone among the Scandinavian countries, there is better evidence as well. The testamentary manumissions, which are at their most numerous in the last quarter of the thirteenth century, have ended by 1310.78 This does not mean that slavery no longer existed after 1310, but it hints either that it was no longer so significant numerically or that for some reason masters were no longer freeing their slaves, a less likely alternative. These wills from the late thirteenth century, together

with the Uppland law of 1296 which clearly recognizes slavery as an existing institution but includes a number of provisions ameliorating the legal status of slaves, give the impression of a society in which slavery was present but obsolescent.’? The S6dermanland law redaction of 1327 still recognizes the institution of slavery and does not include all the reforms of the Uppland law, yet its provisions on slavery are even

less thorough than the Uppland law, indicating that slavery was not very important but that the province was not ready to abolish it.8° The impression that slavery was obsolete is confirmed by the Skara ordinance of 1335. The Skara ordinance is the only public law freeing the slaves from any of the Scandinavian countries in the Middle Ages. The ordinance, issued by Magnus Eriksson during his eriksgata (ceremonial tour of the provinces of Sweden) in 1335, contained nine provisions, of which the last dealt with slavery:

Ninth: that my lord King, by the grace of God, to the glory and honor of the Virgin Saint Mary and for the soul of his dear father and uncle, has given this to be law and right, that all men and women who in the law district of Vastergotland or Varmland are born of Christian man or woman, may never be slave or slave woman or bear that name; for, as God freed [or saved] us, free from

heathens and heathendom, so He also freed [or saved] them, and the above-named King with him.8!

The Skara ordinance does not abolish slavery in Sweden. It only applies to two provinces, Vastergotland and probably Varmland, and it applies only to those born of Christian parents.82 There could have been

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 139 similar ordinances, which have not survived, issued for the other provinces during the eriksgata. The two scholars who have most thoroughly

considered the subject disagree on whether the Skara ordinance was merely a royal confirmation of laws decided upon by the provincial lawman and assembly or whether the form of the ordinance is so unusual as to indicate that it is a record made in Vastergotland of a proclamation the king made orally there and perhaps elsewhere.8? By 1335 Sweden had been Christian long enough that anyone born

there would likely have Christian parents, so the ordinance may not really have been very limited in its applicability. The qualification “born of Christian man or woman” could be just a rhetorical phrase with

no significance beyond the Christian motif of the justification for the

ordinance, but it may be significant that the law thereby allows a loophole for the holding of slaves from abroad, perhaps like the “Karelus” mentioned in a will of 1310.84 There is no concrete evidence that

slaves were still being imported, but the ordinance left open that possibility, and Sweden’s wars with Novgorod may have resulted in the capture of Slavic or Finnish slaves. The Skara ordinance was probably intended to eradicate a persistent if moribund evil rather than merely to ratify an already existing situation.85 It does not seem likely that it would have been issued had there no longer been any slaves and no question as to whether anyone could be

enslaved; on the other hand, it does not seem likely that slavery was very significant to Swedish society at this time, because much more diplomatic material survives from this period and none of it mentions slaves or slavery. The ordinance, particularly if it was proposed by the lawman of one of the provinces rather than the king, or by the king only

for this province, might have its roots in a particular local situation. There may have been a case of debtors being forced into slavery, for example, and the lawmakers might have felt it incumbent upon themselves to state that this was not legal. The lack of similar ordinances for the other provinces or, more significantly (since ordinances for the other

provinces might simply not have survived), in the national law code lends credence to the idea that the Skara ordinance was based on the persistence of slavery in a few isolated instances. The other provinces did not consider abolition necessary, except Uppland where the law either since 1296 or in a later interpolation set free the child of two married slaves.86 In Sweden by the late thirteenth century, slavery seems to have been still in existence but seen as an evil. The Uppland law, while attempting

to ameliorate it, still regulated it as an integral part of society. By the middle of the fourteenth century efforts to abolish it were probably successful. If SjGholm’s dating of the Gotland law to the time of Magnus Eriksson’s national law is correct, this might imply that slaves were still

140 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM held in that part of Sweden well into the fourteenth century, but it might also explain why slavery in Gotland appears to be for limited periods of time. This might be a late and ameliorated version of slavery;

perhaps only debt or penal, but not hereditary, servitude survived.8’ The question remains, for Sweden as for the other countries, why slavery ended when it did. It is hard to relate the end of slavery to specific

economic developments, both because the dates for that end are so approximate and because economic changes do not always have the same impact on ways of categorizing groups within the society. Some general connections may be made, however, between changes in the Scandinavian economies and the decline of slavery. Before considering economic factors we must first examine the role played by Christianity, so often proposed as a reason for the decline of slavery in Scandinavia. THE CHURCH’S ROLE

The relation of Christianity to slavery, not only in the Middle Ages but also in the ancient world and the modern period, has always been pro-

foundly ambiguous. On the one hand, the Church preached that in Christ was “neither bond nor free” (Gal. 3:28}. But on the other hand this

equality of all people before God did not often transfer itself into the temporal sphere. While some churchmen in both the ancient and modern periods challenged the practice of slavery, others saw it as part of natural law, and most agreed that slaves owed their masters the duty of obedience.88 During the Middle Ages the Church often held slaves, indeed could not manumit them even while urging secular landowners to do so, because that would be alienation of church property. The typical role of the Church was to present manumission as a pious act, to encourage slaveowners to recognize the humanity of their slaves, and to campaign for slaves to be given the benefits of the sacraments of baptism and marriage. The medieval church did not campaign for the abolition of slavery.89

There is little evidence of direct opposition to slavery by the Church in Scandinavia. Though homilies might stress the equality of all under God (see chapter 2], the practical effects do not seem to have been large until quite late, in Sweden. The Christian recognition of the humanity

of the slave might have led to better treatment—the Frostaping law providing that a man who killed his own slave would be responsible only before God, while providing no penalty, does imply that the Church discouraged the practice®°—and better treatment of the slave might have led gradually to the abolition of slavery for either ideological or economic reasons. If people could not kill their slaves when the latter became incapable of working, it might be more profitable to use some other form of labor. The Church did recognize the humanity of the slave

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM I4I and the slave’s equality as a Christian by requiring the baptism of slave children and by penalizing slaves, like free people, for sexual transgressions. Although the slave’s penalty in Vastmannalagen was only a quarter of a free person’s, it may be presumed (though it is not stated explicitly) that at least in the other Svear laws the slave was penalized as a free person for offenses against canon law.?! Churchmen held slaves, and ecclesiastical institutions probably did

so as well.92 The archbishop Andreas Suneson, who had studied at Bologna, may have been responsible for bringing strict Roman law principles on slavery into Danish law (see appendix}. Even Pope Innocent III condoned slavery in Denmark, when he wrote to Archbishop Andreas about whether slaves should come to Rome to be absolved for attacking

a priest: if Andreas judged that their masters would suffer from the slaves’ absence, he might substitute some other penance for the trip to Rome.?3 The Church certainly recognized the property rights of masters in their slaves. The Church did encourage manumission.?4 The Gulabing and Frostaping laws called for manumission of slaves each year by the community as an act in honor of God, although in the Frostaping law this was later

replaced by the building of roads.95 The Church seems also to have encouraged manumission as a pious act on the part of individuals, although it never opposed slavery as such. Testamentary manumissions from Denmark and Sweden from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries indicate this development. They did not add pious phrases like “for the remedy of my soul” to the manumission clause, but the whole will often consisted of pious donations and opened with a standard clause about pious motivation. Though testamentary manumission could have other motivations besides piety, laws placing limits on it make clear that freeing slaves was considered good for one’s soul. The Ostergétland law attempted to prevent people from using pious manumission as an excuse to escape

responsibility for a slave’s actions: the master remained responsible until the slave was adopted into a kin group. A slave freed by will did not have as many rights as one freed by the kin.9” This law could have been a

response to the increasing numbers of testamentary manumissions in the second half of the thirteenth century. The Sjzlland law put limits on what people could give away on their deathbeds, including freedom to slaves. Andreas Suneson’s paraphrase of the Skane laws also refers to deathbed manumission.98 The Frostaping law does not, but it does indi-

cate that some slaves were freed for altruistic though not necessarily pious motives.?? The freeing of slaves in church, which appears in several of the law codes, may also imply that the Church was encouraging manumission or ensuring the rights of the freed slave, but it could also be simply that

142 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM this was the best way of making the manumissions public.!°° In any case, encouraging manumission does not necessarily mean opposing slavery. Testamentary or other manumission for ostensibly religious reasons may mask economic reasons, for example, granting freedom to slaves who are too old to work. The Church may have encouraged the provisions in the Uppland law that improved the slave’s condition by recognizing slave marriage and preventing the sale of Christian slaves. The latter provision gives a clear

Christian rationale.!°! Preventing the sale of Christian slaves would certainly have had a dampening effect on slavery as an institution, but by 1296 it may be that slaves were not being bought and sold much any more, that those slaves who still existed worked in the households or estates where they were born. Freeing the children of a Christian marriage between slaves would certainly tend to diminish the slave population, but only if the slaves were allowed to have such marriages and if the law was actually applied. That churchmen had a hand in the redaction of these and many of the other laws might have had an ameliorating effect on the legal position of the slave, but the relation of legal status to the actual end of the institution is not clear. The advent of Christianity was probably a contributing factor in the

decline of slavery in Scandinavia, but there is no evidence that the Church took a strong position—or any position at all—on abolition, and it is not likely that Christianity brought slavery to an end.!02 The fact

that the Skara ordinance expresses a Christian justification does not prove that this was the real motivation. Rather, Christianity provided an ideological justification that accorded well with economic developments. The Church held the same position throughout the Middle Ages: that slaves should be treated as human beings and fellow Christians, and

that manumission of individual slaves was a pious act, but not that slavery itself was an evil to be eradicated. Better treatment for slaves and

manumission both might tend to make slaveholding more expensive, and seeing one’s slaves as fellow Christians might have made slavehold-

ing more difficult psychologically. The Christian attitude did not amount to a campaign for abolition but combined with economic and social factors to bring about the end of slavery. ECONOMIC EXPLANATIONS FOR THE DECLINE OF SLAVERY

In discussing economic factors in the decline of Scandinavian slavery, we must keep in mind that slavery is first and foremost a conceptual category. An economic explanation must speak to a change in the way society categorized people, not just to a change in the way it organized agricultural production. A move toward more economic independence for the primary producers might explain a transition from slavery to

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 143 serfdom but it alone cannot explain a transition from slavery to freedom.

Iceland: Free Labor and the Supply of Slaves

One possible economic explanation for the disappearance of the category of slave would be simply a decline in the supply of people who

fit that category. The lower number of available slaves has been the standard explanation for the end of Icelandic slavery in the twelfth century or, according to some, in the eleventh.!03 From saga evidence alone slaves do not seem to have been self-reproducing, though the absence of slave families in the sagas, like the small number of slave women, is probably more a reflection of exigencies of plot than of social reality. During the Viking Age, when an external supply of slaves was still available, it may well have been more profitable to purchase new slaves than to rear slave children; the latter may have been exposed, but the literary evidence does not actually point to exposure of slave children. If in fact the slave population in Iceland was not self-reproducing

or could not be made so, once the external supply was cut off slavery would have to end. Arni Palsson has argued not only that it was cheaper to import slaves than to rear slave children but also that the prohibition on exposure of children, introduced into Iceland shortly after the conversion to Christianity, meant that even if an external supply had continued, to import workers and classify them as slaves would now place

on the master the unwanted burden of supporting their children. The cost of keeping slaves at all became prohibitive. !°% Since slaveholding entailed support of the slave, masters may have sought a cheaper way of obtaining labor. The cost of rearing slave children must be viewed relative to other sources of labor. Even if the end of the importation of slaves into Iceland decreased the labor supply, if the slaves already there were not freed but were encouraged to marry and

reproduce, and if enslavement for debt were vigorously pursued, the slave population might have been perpetuated. Slavery certainly continued in Sweden long past the Viking Age with its slave raids. That this

did not happen in Iceland indicates that other sources of labor were either cheaper or more advantageous in other ways, for example, less likely to escape or rebel—in other words, there was no longer a demand for slaves. As in ancient Rome, without external supply to keep the cost of buying slaves below that of rearing them, other forms of labor became more profitable, but if other forms of labor had not been available, rearing slave children would have been the least costly alternative. Several forms of organization of labor could have become cheaper or

in some way more advantageous to landlords than direct control of slaves. One is the establishment of tenant farms: instead of working on

144 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM the master’s farm the dependents worked their own farm independently and paid rent. According to the picture given by the sagas tenant farmers also would have acted as clients of their patron, supporting him when he needed a large following. Landndmab6k depicts a transition from slaves to tenants in which the early settlers claimed large estates and parceled them out among slaves whom they freed.!©5 While much of the division of the old Jandndm farms or estates may have happened through gift, sale, dowry, or inheritance rather than renting out, the rental of land was certainly known by the twelfth century and probably by the eleventh. Much church land was worked by tenants, and the land of private individuals as well.!°6 Both Gragds and Jonsbok have provisions requiring

farm owners to rent out whatever portion of the land they could not work themselves, as well as regulations about the relations between landlords and tenants. !0°7

Once the Church began to accumulate large estates, many former small proprietors must have become tenants, some on what was formerly their own land, after they lost its ownership to the Church or a wealthy farmer who got a portion of the tithes and other church income in return for hiring the priest and maintaining the church.!08 But much of the early shift to tenancy came through the splitting up of farms into smaller holdings, perhaps because it was a better way of exploiting labor than was direct exploitation of slaves on larger farms, especially when labor became more abundant. Some tenants may have been former slaves, but many probably were not.!09 They might have included family members, new immigrants, or men who had received their inheritance in cash instead of land and had to seek land to farm elsewhere. There seem to have been enough people around to create a demand for the dividing of the farms, and the smaller farms required less labor power per farm. Directly exploited unfree laborers—slaves—were no longer necessary.

Besides the splitting of larger farms into smaller tenant holdings, another alternative to the exploitation of slaves also began to appear: a group of free landless workers. Glimpses of these people appear in the sagas, for example, Atli who comes to Njal looking for work.!!° Grdgds provides extensive regulations about the hiring of household workers, male and female, whose term of service (one year) and maximum wages

were fixed. Jarnsida and Jénsbok, which do not include provisions on slavery, also regulate the hiring of free workers.!!!1 The household servants referred to in Sturlunga saga, and perhaps those in the family sagas who are not referred to as slaves, must be from this group of people.!!2 If another form of labor replaced the direct exploitation of slaves, we must still consider why the new laborers were classified as free rather

than unfree, that is, why the free tenants were not serfs. One factor might be their origin: as native Icelanders they would have been harder

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 145 to conceptualize as outsiders. Another factor might be that the need for

juridical unfreedom became less as the pressure on the land became greater. With no new land for the taking, the alternatives for free people were limited. By the twelfth century in Iceland, and perhaps even earlier, the population seems to have increased enough that people had to hire themselves out to those who did have land. With such a labor pool available, the landlords no longer needed their dependents to be defined as juridically unfree in order to ensure a supply of labor. Economic rather than legal necessity compelled laborers to work for landlords. Slavery, which required supporting the slave when he or she was too young or too old to work (especially since the Church now discouraged killing slaves who were no longer productive}, which ran the risk of revolt, and which gave little incentive for hard work since the slave’s contract did not have to be renewed, was probably a less attractive alternative. The argument that slavery or serfdom exists in societies where there is free access to land was first put forward by H. J. Nieboer and developed into a formal economic model by E. D. Domar. Landlords in societies with available land desire some sort of legal mechanism to guarantee a supply of cheap labor on land already claimed, and slavery or serfdom

fulfills that function. In societies with no free land there will be an adequate supply of cheap free labor; as population grows, wages will be

driven down to subsistence levels.113 The model has run into severe Criticism as a universal theory but does seem to provide a reasonable explanation of the Icelandic situation—not for the introduction of slavery, but for the economic component of its decline.!!4 With free laborers available who did not have the alternative of settling their own land, it

was no longer economically advantageous for the masters to have a group of people under their absolute control. They no longer reaped a greater profit from those categorized as unfree. One would expect that an increased supply of labor would result in worse conditions for the laborer, so it might seem paradoxical that an abundance of labor led to the decline of slavery. That slavery disap-

peared does not, however, mean that the economic condition of the typical worker improved. Because of the increased labor supply it became easier to exploit workers without categorizing them as slaves. This did not necessarily improve either the legal status of those who were already slaves—most landowners probably did not free their slaves but just did not replace them when they died—or the economic status of the legally free but economically dependent laborer.

Norway: Tenant Farming

The decline of slavery in Norway has usually been linked to the | development of the system of leiglendingar (tenant farmers), though

146 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM once again a shift in economic organization does not necessarily imply change in personal status, and if the latter accompanies it there must be some reason other than economic. The reasons that tenant farmers were conceptualized as free rather than unfree are discussed in the final sec-

tion of this chapter, but it is worth noting here that the sources for Norway do seem to view the purchase of one’s freedom as an integral part of the movement from directly exploited slave to domiciled tenant. A decline in the supply of slaves from overseas cannot be the full explanation of the shift to tenant farming, because slaves could have been encouraged to reproduce had the landlords wanted to keep up the supply. Rather, it may have been the decline in the supply of relatively cheap slaves—in other words, the decreasing profitability of slave labor relative to free labor—that promoted the change. Unlike the Icelandic laws the Norwegian ones do mention the children of slaves, though they treat such children as burdens on a slaveowner; there is no reason to think that hereditary slavery could not have continued if it had been to the owner’s advantage. Snorri Sturlusson’s account of Erling Skjalgsson’s treatment of his slaves in the saga of St. Olaf describes the process of emancipation, it is often taken as typical of the process by which slaves became tenants. Erling lived in the eleventh century but this passage may reflect a later period with which Snorri was more familiar. Erling always had at home thirty slaves as well as other men. He assigned his slaves their daily tasks and gave them afterwards time and permission so that to each of them who wanted to work for himself in the evening or at night, he gave land to sow grain for himself and keep the produce for his profit. He laid on each their value and redemption-price. Many freed themselves in the first or second year, and all who had any thrift in them freed themselves by the third winter. With this money Erling bought other men, and he established some of his freedmen in the herring fishery and some in other jobs. Some cleared fields and made their dwellings there. He helped all of them to thrive.!15 Some of the slaves Erling freed seem to have become hired fishery work-

ers, others householders of some sort, probably tenants, on newly cleared land. Snorri’s account is not a description of the end of demesne slavery as a means of organization of labor. Erling uses the money to buy other slaves.!16 He does not divide his landholdings into tenant farms; the freed slaves who set up their own households are those who clear new land. Snorri’s account of Erling may well describe the process of manumission and land clearance during the twelfth century.!!7 After a certain point it may not have been easy for landlords to buy new slaves to replace those who cleared land and became tenants.

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 147 There is no evidence that estates the size of Erling’s, which would have required the labor of thirty slaves, actually existed either in the Viking Age or later. Erling may have been a real character but the de-

scription of his farm is fictional, and it is more likely that there is a kernel of truth in the description of the emancipation than that the actual numbers are correct. Whatever large landholdings did exist do seem to have been divided among tenants; early documents give no evidence of any other sort of organization.!!8 That large concentrations of land were divided among tenants only as a result of a decline in the supply of slaves is not likely. A shift from large-scale farming to tenant farming does not necessarily depend on the legal status of the laborers involved. If the free labor was available to provide tenants, it would also have been available for wage labor in large-scale farming. While there is little evidence of really large estate-type farms, the farms dating from the Viking Age generally seem to have been larger than those newly established in the early medieval period, and the archeological record and place-name evidence reveal the splitting up of larger farms into smaller holdings. It may be that agriculture was becoming more intensive and the same amount of land was now able to support more people, but it could also be that instead of extra household labor, presumably from slaves, the household of the original farm now relied in part on rent. As in Iceland, the tenants may have been former slaves or perhaps family members.!!9 The law codes give little indication that the typical freed slave would become a tenant of his former master. According to the Gulabing law, the freed slave could take care of his own transactions (kaupum), which might imply that he was established in his own household, but the same chapter of the law required that he continue to work for his master for twelve months. The definition of the byrmslum given in the Gulabing law does not imply an economic dependence, only that the freedman will not in any way act against his master. In fact, by prohibiting him from entering the service of a more powerful man than his master or from acquiring property in another fylki without permission, the law implies that he could go into the service of another man who was not so powerful or could acquire property in the same fylki.!2° The Gulabing law required the freedom ale if the former slave wished to control his transactions and marriage; the Frostabing law required it if he “comes into land or a dwelling,” perhaps meaning if he becomes a tenant. Tore Iversen argues that the slave would first have been domiciled in order to earn the money to purchase his freedom and give the ale, but the story of Erling shows how slaves may have been able to buy freedom without first being domiciled.!2! Nothing in the laws about tenants implies that they were former slaves. It may be that some slaves were freed to become tenants, but the law codes do not at all envision that this would be the case, and it may be that many became hired workers. !22

148 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM Iversen argues that slavery declined and slaves were made tenants on land owned by the former slaveowner because the owner was no longer

liable for certain payments if he had tenants rather than slaves. Landowners had to pay a tax to support the ship levy, and they had to pay it for

their slaves, so it was to the owners’ advantage to set slaves free and make them responsible for the payment themselves.!23 Similarly, he suggests that the growth of centralized power in both church and state, in particular their ability to punish with fines, made slaveholding less economically desirable: the master did not have to pay fines for misdeeds by free tenants.!24 However, as Iversen points out, such financial penalties were old and do not date just from the time when slavery was on the decline. Whether not having to pay the tax would make leasing land more profitable than slaveholding would depend on how high the rent was set. We do not know whether the landlords were extracting as

much surplus from tenants as from slaves. Furthermore, the owner’s responsibility for his slave’s acts was limited to the value of the slave, since he could turn over the slave instead, and he could be compensated for harm to his slaves as he could not for harm to free tenants (whose rent he might lose if he could not immediately replace them).

Some tenants on newly divided land may have been domiciled slaves, but not all. At least part of the explanation for the division of larger farms into small holdings lies not in the improvement of the status of slaves, freed and given new land to clear, but in the decline of

the economic position of the free peasant. Many leiglendingar were former peasant proprietors forced to sell their land.!25 Kare Lunden argues that the Nieboer-Domar hypothesis explains the decline of slavery in Norway. By the end of the eleventh century the marginal product of any as yet uncleared land was low, and there were now legal mechanisms to prevent just anyone who desired land from going out and clearing it.126 Free people were forced to become dependents, tenants, or hired laborers, so slaves were no longer necessary. Knut Helle doubts

this hypothesis on the ground that there is not enough evidence to determine when slavery ended and when free access to land ended.!27 As discussed above, however, it is likely that slavery lasted barely into the

thirteenth century, when leiglendingar (tenants) were common; this pool of free non-landowning labor came into existence at a time when slavery still survived but was on the decline, the time of the provincial law codes.!28

Denmark: Demesne Laborers and Tenants

For Denmark it is very difficult to draw the connection between changes in agricultural organization (from large demesne-type farming to tenancy) and changes in juridical status. The standard view that freed

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 149 slaves formed the major part of the inquilini and coloni in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is based on reading backward from the law codes’ references to slavery and on assumptions about what forms of economic organization are associated with slavery. Since we know that slavery did exist, we may guess that where a document lists no tenants connected with a curia it was worked as a demesne by slaves or their descendants. But this is pure inference, and it does not explain why slavery as a juridical status ended. The juridical shift from slaves to free domiciled demesne workers who had just enough land for subsistence but did not pay rent (a group assumed to have existed on those curiae without rent-paying tenants} can have been influenced either by the Church’s encouragement of manumission or by a shift in society’s perception of the group. The motive behind giving inquilini very small plots of land may well have been to give them the opportunity, and also the burden, of feeding them-

selves, so that the master or steward did not have to concern himself with it.!29 As chapter 1 showed, the domiciled slave with some control

over his economic life tends gradually to acquire privileges in other areas. But unfreedom as a juridical status usually persists, and if it did not in Denmark there must have been other reasons than changes in agricultural organization. There is no direct evidence for the curia with inquilini before the second quarter of the thirteenth century, which is probably about the time of slavery’s disappearance.!3° The inquilini and dependent coloni

with their small holdings in the land registers are not necessarily all former slaves or the descendants of slaves. Some formerly more independent tenants probably fell into dependent status owing labor dues on a curia because of developments in the system of taxation.!3! Estates with larger tenant holdings (coloniae) probably developed in the twelfth century due to both the division of large-scale farms worked by slaves and the accumulation by large landowners of small pieces of property. In the latter case the tenants would be former proprietors; in the former case they might include some free people who had no property of their

own and were forced to rent from another, but they may also have included former slaves. Former slaves were not necessarily inquilini rather than coloni: the difference is at least partly regional, though in some cases it seems that the colonus held rent-paying land and not the inquilinus. !32

We know nothing about the end in Denmark of small-scale slaveholding by small-scale farmers. It might be that population increase led to the splitting up of formerly free farms and that free labor replaced slave labor on the new units. There is no indication either way in the sources. The provisions about Jandbor (coloni) in the provincial law codes use the term bonde for the landlord, implying that the tenant

I5o SLAVERY AND FREEDOM might be renting land owned by a wealthy peasant, not by a great lord, tenants may have replaced slaves even on this level.!33 With the transformation of slave to inquilinus supporting himself on

his own plot of land, demesne slavery in Denmark came to an end, perhaps in part because of the availability of free labor to cultivate land formerly cultivated by slaves. If more and more free tenants were avail-

able, it made sense to divide up the former demesne, and remaining slaves would then have to become tenants or landless workers for hire.!34 The sources do not tell us why juridical status changed with economic position. Sweden: Tenant Farming and Internal Colonization In Sweden, where slavery clearly lasted into the fourteenth century, its decline cannot be due to the end of Viking slave raids.!35 The Church promoted pious manumission, and the laws like the Uppland code and

the Skara ordinance removed the heritability of slavery, which would

certainly affect the supply of slaves. But it is not likely that large slaveholders would have accepted such laws if the demand for labor were such that the slaves were necessary. Rather, the manumissions and the laws may be seen as indications that the economy now relied on other means of obtaining labor. During the thirteenth century large landowners were accumulating more land formerly owned by peasant proprietors, especially after 1279— 80 when the Church and nobility received exemption from the land tax and many former peasant proprietors gave up their land to a large landowner to obtain the tax exemption.!36 Since these newly acquired scattered holdings were worked by rent-paying tenants, landlords may have found it more economical to divide the larger estates and exact rent in the same way rather than continue to control workers directly through a steward.!37 This may account for the division of demesne-type estates into tenant holdings seen in the land register from Sko, though, as chapter 3 discussed, it is impossible to tell how common the pattern of largescale agriculture was. If tenant farming was more profitable than large-scale exploitation in

the late thirteenth and fourteenth century, there must be some reason that it was not more profitable, or not seen to be so, before that time. One reason is the landlords’ increased acquisition of the scattered holdings of former peasant proprietors, which could not easily be combined into large demesne-type farms. Another is the development of the royal taxation system that could have served as a model: the administrative apparatus for extracting regular taxes from peasant proprietors developed in the late thirteenth century and landlords could have realized the advantages to be gained by collecting similar annual payments instead of direct exploitation. 138

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM I§i The change from demesne-type to tenant farming need not imply anything directly about the end of slavery. In the first place, a change in juridical status need not accompany a change in economic role, and in the second place we do not know that many of the tenants were former slaves. In none of the wills freeing slaves is it apparent that the slave was to become a tenant, although in one it is at least possible: Brynulf the carpenter is given “freedom, two oxen, four cows, and two gras of grain,” and it may be that this carpenter was settled on his own holding. In the same will two brothers are freed “with the things that they have,” which might imply that they had been in the position of tenants and were now given ownership of their household goods; on the other hand, it could simply refer to clothes, knives, or money that the slaves possessed but that was still legally the property of the master. One other will leaves goods to a slave: Karelus received a horse and saddle trom his master, but this hardly implies that he was a tenant. Johan Eriksson in 1268 gave

land to a slave whom his father had freed; it is possible that he was already a tenant on this land to which he and his heirs now received perpetual rights. One of the stewards freed by Margareta Ragnvaldsdot-

ter also received land, but not apparently as a tenant.!39 Nevéus has suggested that the wills mentioning slaves in connection with particular pieces of property indicate that the slaves were already domiciled and

were now being given legal freedom accordingly, but it seems more likely that these were merely the places where the slaves worked and were mentioned to identify the slaves. !40 With slightly more certainty than in the case of the slaves freed in the wills, the fostre in the laws of Ostergdtland and possibly Vastmanland can be seen as at least a potential tenant.!4! The fostre is a slave, not yet freed, but domiciled. He has his own household and certain rights

over his goods at least during his lifetime. The status of fostre, not yet involved in a contractual relationship like that of the landbo and landowner, may have been a step on the road out of slavery into free tenancy; the real puzzle is why freedom was assumed to go along with tenancy. !42

It is impossible to relate either the fostre or the slaves freed in the wills to the dissolution of large-scale agriculture into tenant units. The wills are made by individuals, so they do not reveal anything about the structure of agriculture on ecclesiastical or crown estates. Nor do they indicate clearly whether the freed slaves had been demesne workers or household members.!43 Laws about the fostre do not identify his position in the economy before he received his own land; they seem to envision individual landowners, not institutions. We cannot tell whether those institutional landholders freed their slaves in the same manner. Large landholders were probably behind much of the land clearance and

expansion of settlement that took place in the high Middle Ages.!44 Tenant farms were created not only through division of large farms but

152 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM also by clearance of new land under the auspices of a landlord. Those doing the clearing and settling might have been former slaves, given freedom in exchange for the work.!45 The reasons for the ending of demesne agriculture among large landholders—and hence the economic reasons that slavery as a category was

no longer necessary—are easier to see than those for the ending of household-level slavery among the peasant propriétors. Those who were forced into tenancy by taxation might not have been able to afford nonfamily labor, but many peasant proprietors did still remain. Pressure from the Church for better treatment of slaves may have been a factor. As ecclesiastical and other large landowners found tenant farming more profitable and stopped keeping slaves, it was no longer particularly in the economic interests of those who made the laws that the institution of slavery continue. Without any powerful economic interests to oppose them, ideas about the equality of all Christians before God and about the humanity of the slave may have been given more latitude, the law of Uppland and the Skara ordinance being examples of the result. Gosta Hasselberg suggests that there was a conflict between the large landowners who no longer needed slave labor and were therefore willing to let slavery be abolished for ideological reasons and the small proprietors who still relied on slave labor in the household; Hasselberg argues that the unofficial Vastmanland law’s refusal to accept the royally commissioned Uppland law’s provisions ameliorating the lot of the slave reflects this conflict. !46

The law codes’ omission of protections for the master’s property interests in his slaves and their offspring may have been a reason for the

end of small-scale slaveholding, but the availability of other labor no doubt played a role too. Not only the large landholders had tenants; as in Iceland and Norway, family farms in Sweden were split up and peasant proprietors shared their land with tenants. Some of these tenants may have been former slaves, but, as Thomas Lindkvist points out, the split-

ting of small farms between proprietors and tenants probably arose mainly as a way of rationalizing land cultivation after a division of

ownership, or when one peasant had need of more land than he owned.!47 This group cannot be traced in the ecclesiastical land registers or privileges of the large landowners. Slavery may have lasted longer in Sweden than in the other Scandinavian countries because the phase of expansion onto new land and internal colonization lasted longer there, so Sweden did not develop as early a supply of free landless agricultural labor. But such labor did exist,

even in the time of the provincial law codes.!48 The national law of Magnus Eriksson, which does not recognize slavery, provides in detail for the regulation of free wage labor. Anyone who had less than three

marks in property was required to hire himself out on an annual basis.!49 As Nevéus points out, many penal provisions about free land-

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 153 less people in the national law are similar to those for slaves in the provincial laws.!5° Anyone who was without fixed abode could not make oaths or perform jury service. By contrast, the tenant had the full rights of a free peasant.!5!

The restrictions on the rights of the free landless laborer and the resemblances between the provisions in the national law about this group and those in the provincial laws about slaves might indicate that these workers were largely former slaves. 152 This is not necessarily the full explanation: the laws could be a legacy from the days of slavery without the individuals involved being the descendants of slaves. Many or most treed slaves may have become landless workers, but it does not follow that most landless workers were freed slaves.

The availability of other forms of labor—both tenants and hired workers—was probably the major factor in the end of slavery in Sweden

as in the other Scandinavian countries. The accumulation of land by large proprietors also played a part. If, as is likely, most slaves had been

held by small proprietors who used them in household-based agriculture, the economic decline of the peasant vis-a-vis large landowners would have meant less demand for slaves as well. The move in all the Scandinavian countries from an agricultural system based partly on demesne slaves or on large households including

a number of slaves to an agricultural system based on tenant farming would not necessarily require that slaves be freed or that unfreedom as a category disappear from the society. Elsewhere in Europe, as discussed in chapter 1, slaves were domiciled and gradually became serfs who still had restricted legal as well as economic freedom. The end of slavery in Scandinavia, however, did not give rise to anything that could be called “serfdom,” and the reasons for this have to do with new ways in which Scandinavians viewed their society and classifications within it. CHANGES IN SCANDINAVIAN SOCIETY

Economic factors alone do not explain the end of slavery in Scandinavia.

In societies where slavery was transformed into serfdom, the change was basically economic and the society’s system of classification did not change; in Scandinavia, however, the change from slavery to freedom was not mainly an economic phenomenon. None of the Scandinavian countries was a slave economy. Whatever the number of slaves, only part, if any, of surplus agricultural production was provided by the large-scale direct exploitation of slave labor, at least in the period for which the laws and other documents provide evidence.!53 And even if slavery had been economically significant at the peasant household level this does not explain why after a shift to tenancy the tenants were not considered unfree.

: In Scandinavia slavery ended because those who created the cultural

1$4 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM categories stopped classifying people as unfree. Slavery ended not be-

, cause things changed for the slaves but because things changed for the people who created the classifications. Slavery was primarily a social construct having to do with the absence of freedom and personal honor; these were related to particular economic structures and situations, but the economic aspects were not fundamental. Slavery was socially significant because of its cultural meaning as the opposite of freedom. The existence of slavery had allowed freedom to develop as a concept: everyone who was not a slave was free. When this type of freedom no longer was necessary to the construction of Scandinavian culture, slavery was

no longer necessary as a concept.!4 Other European societies in the Middle Ages constructed a dichotomy between free and unfree. Yet this was not the only sort of meaning they could give to the concept of freedom: at the same time that they treated freedom and slavery as absolutes, they also spoke of many specif-

ic freedoms that were relative. They would have recognized as we do that the term had many meanings. I do not wish to imply that they understood the term in just the ways we do today—their notion of political freedom, for example, was quite different from ours—but I suggest that the range of meanings was quite similar even though the distribution along that range was different.!55 In most of Europe the end of slavery did not mean freedom, but in Scandinavia there was no unfree

serfdom to replace slavery. Landless people might have severe legal disabilities and freed people went through a stage of dependence, but there was nothing that could be called serfdom. The dichotomy freeunfree ceased to have meaning. It was no longer necessary for slavery to exist in order that all nonslaves could think of themselves as free.

Scandinavian Freedom and European Serfdom

The economic change that accompanied the demise of slavery in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe was the division of large landholdings among tenants, but the process was quite different in Scandinavia

than elsewhere. Roman landowners often retained sizeable demesnes and levied corvées on the tenants to provide demesne labor. If Scandina-

vian landowners kept part of their estates as manor farms it was only enough to feed their immediate families, and the land was worked by a few hired laborers rather than with labor dues from the tenants. Rent in Scandinavia was in kind or in cash, not in labor, except in the case of some Danish inquilini or cottagers. The greater freedom of the Scandinavian tenant as compared to the European serf could be due to a number of factors. It would have been to the landlord’s advantage to have the tenants’ mobility restricted, but the Scandinavian states, unlike Rome, did not have such an interest. Both in

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 155 Scandinavia and elsewhere the group of tenants comprised former landless freemen, former slaves, and former peasant proprietors who had turned over their land to a large landowner because of the tax burden or

for some other reason. It is likely that in Scandinavia the latter class made up a much larger proportion of the tenants than it did in the societies discussed in chapter 1. These people had more choice than former slaves as to whether or not to become tenants. Tenants in the Scandinavian countries were in a better bargaining position than those elsewhere, and their freedom could not be so easily defined away.

The polyptychs of the Carolingian empire show that domiciled slaves still shared the disabilities of unfreedom and that holders of servile mansi owed much heavier burdens than holders of free mansi. In Scandinavia, there is no evidence of some groups of tenants being considered less free than others. Freed slaves may have remained clients of their emancipators, but this did not affect their relation to the land or the dues they owed their landlord. Even where a client relation did exist, in only one Norwegian province does it seem to have lasted (at least in law} beyond the lifetime of the individual who was freed. !5° The juridical status of the freed person, intermediate between slave and free, did

not affect economic position; personal and tenurial status did not become confused as they did elsewhere. The question is why the domiciled slave in Scandinavia was always freed and why he moved into the same legal, social, and economic status

as any free tenant or hired worker. Part of the answer is simply that Scandinavian landlords, except in Denmark, tended not to retain any demesne and therefore had no need of labor services from their tenants. Still, in Denmark, where labor dues existed, inquilini or cottagers (possibly the descendants of slaves} were distinguished from coloni or ten-

ants by the size of their holdings and owed more labor dues than the coloni, but they were not apparently considered less free or subject to any servile payments. Throughout the Middle Ages Scandinavia had a high proportion of peasant proprietors, who lived in villages with tenants, who socialized and intermarried with them, and who also retained more political power in relation to the ruling elites than did peasants elsewhere in Europe. If the burden of taxes forced some peasant proprietors to give up their land and become tenants, they would not be likely to give up their freedom along with it. They did no labor service, only paid rent, and it may have been easier administratively if all tenants did the same. Peasant proprie-

tors paid an annual tax to the Crown, tenants an annual rent to the landlord; the similarity in type if not in amount of dues paralleled the similarity in juridical status between the two groups.!57 This contrasted with the situation of many European serfs, whose heavy obligations

| were Originally labor services although many were converted to money

156 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM payments. The existence of a large number of peasant proprietors who participated in local assemblies and retained their legal rights helped prevent the enserfment of the Scandinavian tenant. Slaves may have been freed—given a new legal classification—once they became domiciled because they were too few in number to make it worthwhile to attempt to extract special dues or charges from them. It might be that not many Scandinavian slaves were actually domiciled, that slavery ended mainly through attrition, and that most slaves who were manumitted became wage laborers rather than tenants.

It cannot only be the insignificant number of former slaves as a proportion of total tenants that made Scandinavian society consider tenants as free. The case of England, for example, shows that formerly juridically free tenants could come to be considered serfs if the society chose to define them so. And the fact that the number of slaves was small does not automatically mean that they would merge in with the free or even that they would have to be emancipated when domiciled. Streamlined estate administration, converting everything to grain or cash rents rather than requiring labor dues, would not necessarily mean a change in juridical status. Religious scruples or consistent relations with tenants are not particularly compelling motives for abolition; they would have been cause enough for masters to free their slaves only in the absence of any advantage to keeping them in servitude. The society had previously had compelling reasons for classifying some people as unfree, and slavery was disappearing at the same time that those reasons were losing their importance. Scandinavian society in the high Middle Ages underwent a fundamental change in systems of classification.

The Ending of a Dichotomy The earlier system was based on the slave-free dichotomy. It divided society into two groups: there were the free and independent warriors (with kings, jarls, or other magnates merely first among equals) and the

slaves. I do not suggest that this system of classification accurately reflected power relations within early Scandinavian society. There were great differences in wealth, power, status, and degree of independence

among the free. Recent work on the Viking Age in Scandinavia has shown that it was not primarily a society of independent peasant-warriors. Royal power and central authority wielded through local royal officials were strong at an early date. In Denmark, where the evidence is

clearest, runestones show that much of the land was in the hands of large landowners rather than yeoman peasants. The archeological investigations of villages have not revealed a society of equal peasant-warriors.!58 The situation in Sweden may have been similar, and in Iceland

the system of godar was not the representative democracy it is some-

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 1§7 times made out to be.!59 The view that all early Germanic societies were peasant democracies, a notion based upon Tacitus and upon romantic and nationalist ideas, does not describe how society operated. But that view has been so pervasive in nineteenth- and even twentiethcentury scholarship precisely because it does find some support in the laws: power relations may not have worked out that way but the society’s system of classification did. The small landowner or bonde, best translated as peasant although there was great variation in wealth and prosperity among individual bonder, may not have been, as Peter Foote and David Wilson suggest, “the staple of society.” Better is Peter Sawyer’s formulation that “the apparent uniformity of the free class in the greater part of Scandinavia may be somewhat deceptive.’”’!©° Though deceptive, the seeming unifor-

mity of the free class derives from sources that reveal the society’s conceptual categories. No law or myth ever stated that all free men were

equal, but they did imply that all shared a fundamental similarity because they were free.!6! The conceptualization of society in which the typical Scandinavian was a free peasant-warrior and a full participant in the political process implies the existence of the idea of slavery. If those at the bottom of the

social and economic pyramid are considered completely unfree it is much easier to grant freedom and full political rights to those who remain. It was not in economic terms, as some Marxist scholars would have it, that the existence of slavery made the peasants free: Perry Anderson suggests that Scandinavian peasants never became serfs because the landed nobility could extract surplus labor from foreign slaves without forcing indigenous peasants into feudal dependence, but, as we have seen, even in the Viking Age slaves do not seem to have been the main source of surplus labor, and there were peasants who were economically dependent although juridically free.!%2 It was in conceptual terms that slavery made the free peasant free. Because of the slave-free dichotomy in social classification, a peasant or laborer, no matter how dependent economically, was free simply by virtue of his not being a slave.

The Scandinavian laws present slavery and freedom as direct opposites, taking freedom and unfreedom as absolute rather than as relative terms. In passages referring to situations where the slave is compensated for with the same or less compensation than a nonslave, or where a

slave injures or is injured by a nonslave, the law codes refer to the nonslave as free or a free man (frials or frzls) rather than by other status

terms.!63 In addition to the most common word, thrall, and words im- | plying possession or subjugation (like mansmador or anndpugher), a common term for slave in the Svear laws is unfree (see chapter 2). As the adjective free is used in the Scandinavian provincial laws, its main meaning is “the opposite of slave,” not “economically indepen-

158 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM dent” or “not subject to a given obligation.”16+ No medieval laws define the term free or set out the rights of a free man as such, free is, rather, a

limiting term, used to indicate that a particular provision does not include slaves. The origin of the word may have a specific connection with

the meaning nonslave. The West Norse form of the word, frjdls, has been interpreted as coming from fri hals, tree neck, and has been connected with the manumission ceremony in the Frostaping law, in which the slave pays to the master his halslausn (neck ransom).!°> This ety-

mology indicates that freedom originally meant only the absence of slavery, the absence of chains around one’s neck, but the Norse form of the word is.already contracted by the time it appears in writing and we cannot say that it had the connotation “free neck” among Norse speakers; the etymology may not have been obvious. Freedom in the Scandinavian laws meant “absence of slavery,” but it could also have the connotations of “freedom of action,” “right to full wergeld,” or “membership in the community.” In the law of Ostergotland a woman who stole and did not have enough money to pay the fine

had “lost her freedom by the theft.” It is not clear what thirteenthcentury people would have understood as the most important element of that forfeited freedom. The woman became a penal slave, losing her freedom of movement, her ability to control her actions, and her legal status. The practical aspects were probably more important than the

status: another provision of the same code, reading “Now a man or woman steals and forfeits himself,” implies that it was not the status but the control over oneself that was important. !° When aslave was freed, the Norse languages used not a verb meaning to free but the verb to give with the noun freedom. The law codes of all four countries use the phrase “to give freedom,” although they use redeem (leysa, I6sa) when the freedom is not a grant of the owner but a

purchase by the slaves themselves or their relatives.!6”? The word leysingr (redeemed or released) was used in Iceland and Norway for a freedman. The phrase “to give freedom” implies granting something, not just releasing from something, and indicates that freedom was a concept in itself, not just nonslavery; still, the concept of freedom cannot be understood without the concept of slavery. Freedom was a commodity granted by a master to his slaves or purchased for slaves by themselves or their relatives. It was not the only abstract quality granted in that transaction. A slave was not only “redeemed to freedom” by his relatives but also “into men’s law” and “to kin and the law of kinsmen,” after they “lay personal immunity (mannhelgp) on him.’”’168 This personal immunity is equivalent to the right to be fully compensated. According to the Frostaping law a slave had helgi, sacredness, under certain circumstances, when injury to him had to be compensated as for a free man, and in Icelandic law anyone, free or slave,

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 1s9 who committed a crime for which he could be killed with impunity was said to have made himself oheilagr, forfeited his immunity.!6? Along

with freedom the slave received personal immunity and the right to compensation (though that compensation might still be less than for the freeborn); these qualities were intimately connected with freedom. The laws regarding the giving of freedom imply that freedom meant

basic personal worth. Freedom, according to the laws, was a state in which a person had full legal capacity, was a full member of the community, and was compensated at the full rate if injured. Freedom also appeared as the opposite of slavery or the absence of the disabilities connected with slavery. It would appear that the essential feature attributed to slaves by the drafters of the laws was the absence of full legal capacity. However, this standing did not apply only to slaves; they were the only

ones who lacked full legal capacity by virtue of their membership in a sociolegal class, but others might lack it by virtue of age, sex, or insanity. !70

There is no extant material on which to base speculations about the

psyche of Scandinavian slaves; we cannot know whether it was the specific conditions of their situation or their lack of membership in the community that mattered more to them. It is clear from the laws that in the view of the redactors, in the cultural construct they created, the specific disabilities of the slave are important but secondary to the essential fact of unfreedom. To the Scandinavian laws the slave is a slave because he lacks the basic human attribute known as freedom, and carries the taint of servility. To say that “freedom” was understood as the opposite of slavery and “slavery” as a state of lacking freedom is not to argue in a circle but to approach from two different directions the idea of a slave-free dichotomy. Slaves were marked by certain legal disabilities that aid the scholar in identifying them, but society defined them as lacking freedom, which connoted personal worth and political rights; free people had those rights but their essence was that they were not under the legal domination of another.!”7! What is suggested here is not that all nonslaves were in fact economically independent with full political and personal rights but that the prevailing ideology defined them so. Many juridically free people were economically dependent. They can have exercised few of their legal rights without powerful patrons. The most likely explanation for the social relations depicted in the laws, in which independent peasants meet in assemblies and make decisions, is that they represent a conceptual ideal that practice never approached. The existence of slavery as a juridical institution was necessary to perpetuate the construct of peasant freedom. Rigspbula is an example of the myth of the innate difference between slave and free. Such literature glorified the poor and economically dependent peasant by contrasting

160 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM him as a free person with the dirty, unwashed, and menial slave. The theoretical dichotomy between slave and free need not have represented a practical difference. In much of Scandinavia free people and slaves did the same sort of work. That the laws and literature contained the sharp

differentiation shows that the existence of slavery was an important part of the ideological basis of the social structure. Slavery was necessary to the polarized conceptualization of Scandinavian society. It disappeared as a construct when it was no longer necessary. Social changes in the Scandinavian countries in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries meant that the slave-free dichotomy was no longer so central: increasing social differentiation among the free meant that no longer were all free people placed in the same category. There was a shift of power from magnates with local bases to a new class of royal administrators or service nobility.1”72 Many scholars have assumed that this process meant a “feudalization” in which free peasants lost a good deal of power that they had wielded in the tenth and eleventh centuries.!”3 Whether they lost actual or only notional power, their position in the scheme of society changed. The change from local aristocracies to an administration from the top down, one might say toa state, did not necessarily make such a major difference to the bulk of the population, but it did make a difference to how the societies defined and constructed themselves. Social Differentiation among the Free and the End of Slavery Slavery was no longer conceptually necessary when society and law developed to the point that they recognized distinctions within the free group, to the extent of depriving non-landowners or non-nobles of certain rights or of political participation. The social leaders had someone

to look down on without the slave. Until the thirteenth century there was no legally defined nobility in any of the Scandinavian countries, but from the late twelfth century on there began to develop a clear hierarchical structure among the free in all four countries, as royal power grew in

the three continental countries and some form of state administration and military organization was established and the nobility were exempted from taxes and obligations.!”4 In fact, the word freedom took on a different meaning, the absence of specific obligations, and free began to refer to a narrower group than all nonslaves. Under the dichotomy all nonslaves were free; now some were freer than others. The word frz/s

had meant free but came in the fourteenth century to mean noble; in modern Swedish “fralse och ofralse,” the same words that in Old Swedish meant “free and unfree,” mean “nobles and commoners.”!75

The nobility as a legal class in Sweden was created by the Alsné

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM I61I ordinance in 1279—80, which exempted from land-tax those who provided mounted knights in the levy.!”6 They were freed from a specific obligation and the general term for “free” came to apply to them alone. That this shift took place indicates that no longer in Scandinavian society were all free men, all nonslaves, in the same legal category. The difference in social structure between a situation in which all free men in theory were equal and could participate in the community and the political process and one in which there was a legally defined hierarchy and the lower levels of free men wielded no power may have been primarily a change in the prevailing ideology rather than actual power relations; what shifted was not the locus of power but the way in which people envisioned their society.!77

The existence of slavery in the Scandinavian countries had not meant that all nonslaves were economically independent; there had been other forms of dependent labor but not juridically unfree serfs. The dichotomy was not between slaves and peasant proprietors but between slaves and a general class of free people. As more and more free people

became economically dependent—because the population increased and new land was not available, or because taxation forced peasant proprietors into tenancy—that class of free people became legally and conceptually differentiated. The bonde was not the typical peasant and did not represent the majority of the population; the term meant peasant landowner, not just peasant.!78 And even the bonde did not have all the rights or freedoms of the noble. The meaning of freedom in Scandinavian culture was shifting from an absolute toward a relative concept. The tenant was free because he was not a slave, but in terms of a freedom-dependence spectrum he had fewer freedoms than a noble or a peasant proprietor, although his dependence was economic and not symbolic or juridical. The laws recognized

distinctions among the free at the top level, putting the nobility in a separate category, and recognized distinctions at the bottom level too by

excepting those who did not own their own land from certain legal responsibilities and rights. Tenants were legally subordinate because they had fewer rights than landlords, though they were not bound to them by personal or jurisdictional ties. When slavery existed, when those at the low end of the social spectrum were considered unfree, it was possible to consider all those above them as free in an absolute sense. Even if a poor peasant or tenant had no economic or political power and little standing before the law unless he had the backing of a powerful patron, he could still be considered independent and in theory a full member of the community because he was free in the sense that his status fell above the dividing line between free and slave. His legal status was the same as that of the magnate because he was not a slave. If the slave-free dichotomy were purely a legal con-

162 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM cept, if it derived from the imposition of Roman law categories on medieval situations where they did not really fit, slavery would be an imaginary construct hardly worth discussing. Even if Roman law did heavily

influence Scandinavian laws on slavery, however, this does not make them meaningless or the institution nonexistent. Slavery’s implications for the lower levels of free society were not only economic but also ideological. It allowed the myth of the independence and full rights of all free men. The Scandinavian law codes’ picture of this group of rightless people may or may not be an accurate reflection of how society actually treated slaves, but it does indicate that the lowest social classes could be

categorized.as largely rightless property that belonged to, not in, the community. By making slavery a clearly marked status, the law codes threw into relief the peasant’s legal and political freedom, his freedom from personal dependence even when he was economically dependent, and his full membership in the community even if he wielded no effective power. The slave-free dichotomy in the laws made the nonslave free.!79

By the thirteenth century it was becoming less necessary to pretend that all nonslaves were in the same class. The hereditary nobility was exempt from taxes. Many former peasant proprietors, while remaining juridically free, had lost their land. It was clear that they were not all independent and equally free and it was no longer necessary to emphasize that they were by declaring those at the low end totally rightless. Freedom had come to mean the possession of specific privileges and the

absence of specific obligations. Peasant or commoner, not slave, was coming to be the opposite of free (fra/s}, so slavery as a legal institution was no longer necessary to give meaning to the concept of freedom. !80

Increased social differentiation among the free was a cause, not a result, of the end of slavery as a juridical category and as an abstract concept. The Church did not promote the abolition of slavery, though it may have encouraged manumission; landlords may have preferred other forms of labor to slaves or found that domiciling slaves increased their

profits, but these economic factors need not have led to the ending of slavery as a juridical status. Economic forces did play a role: without an

economic need for direct exploitation slaveowners would no longer have opposed religiously motivated manumission. As unfreedom was no longer necessary to the exploitation of labor—as landowners divided the land among tenants, who could just as well be free as unfree, or as households hired free labor—it also became unnecessary as a juridical

institution. In terms of actual control over their lives, the slaves may have been no worse off than poor free people who could assert none of their purported rights without the backing of a powerful person. Yet, while some ways in which free people were free had no practical effect, they still

SLAVERY AND FREEDOM 163 could live their family life as they wished, they could not be bought or sold, and they could seek a new employer or landlord. Although everyone in medieval Scandinavian society, as elsewhere in medieval Europe, was dependent in certain ways so that all freedom was relative, law and social attitudes did draw a dividing line and placed the slave alone below it as a uniquely rightless person, allowing the nonslave to remain more free in the sense of abstract personal worth than elsewhere in Europe. Once not being a slave no longer automatically meant that one was fully free and independent, the institution of slavery became obsolete.

Conclusion

Because slavery is not a system of organizing production—it is a way of categorizing and defining the powerless that can be combined with various modes of production—the question of why it existed in any given society cannot be answered by pointing to the low cost of slave labor. We

must move beyond economic considerations to ask why a society categorized its bottom class of dependent laborers as slaves. When slav-

ery comes to an end in a society the question to ask is not why the relations of production changed but why the system of categorization changed. When the relations of production changed in France, for example, slavery shifted into serfdom, but the social conception of the serf as absolutely unfree was the same as that of the slave. For slavery to change to freedom, not just economic but cultural change is necessary.

The problem of slavery comes down ultimately to the question of

how the dominant culture chooses at a given time to construct the identity of those in an economically and socially dependent position. The historian of the Middle Ages does not have the luxury of a wide variety of sources and has no way of determining what slavery meant to the slaves. We are limited to an understanding of what slavery meant to

the dominant culture, the culture that created the sources that have survived. The categorization of some people as slaves may tell us more about the labelers than about the labeled, but since this was, after all, the group that created and defined the whole social structure as we are able to know it, we can reach an understanding of what slavery meant to the whole society. It would be easy to say that the attitudes ot the upper classes toward the slave have no relevance to the historian who wants to understand society as a whole but particularly the lower classes. If what is important is how labor was organized and surplus product extracted, the attitudes of those who extracted the labor are not relevant and do not help us get any closer to the concrete reality. But slavery is much more than a way of exploiting laborers and extracting a surplus product. The way the

culture defines its social relations consists of more than just the attitudes of individuals. The codification into law of particular conceptions 164

CONCLUSION 165 of society may not have had a direct practical effect—we do not know to what extent the law codes were enforced—but it certainly had an effect in passing on the conceptions of society, now enshrined in written form and accorded validity for that reason alone, to those with access to the text. The texts, both literary and legal, reveal to us the basic assumptions people made about their world. The way in which one categorizes things or people varies both from culture to culture and within a culture depending on social position, yet we can observe patterns of change in the meaning of freedom and therefore in the construction of the slave’s identity, in several quite different societies. Freedom in ancient Rome did not mean the same thing as it did in the Middle Ages, where in addition to the state of not being a slave or serf, it meant the absence of specific disabilities or the grant of specific privileges. In Rome it meant the opposite of slavery if taken in the strict juridical sense, but another meaning referred to those engaged in the “liberal” professions. Since all trade was somehow demeaning those engaged in it were somehow seen as unfree (at least by Cicero and his class} despite their legal treedom.! It was because any labor, especially labor for another, was connected with servility that the society had to make so much use of slave labor: those classified as free would not do servile labor and the exploiters of labor had to turn to those who could be compelled because they were defined as rightless. The end of slavery as the basis for the economy came when categories shifted, when the so-

ciety recognized more differentiation among the free and more nonslaves became dependent workers. The process in Scandinavia was sim-

ilar. Changing economic relations between primary producers and landlords did not bring about the decline of slavery; rather, changes in the meaning of freedom did so. The lowest social and economic group in Scandinavian culture was categorized as slaves. They were assigned the same disabilities as slaves

under Roman law. Their ability to participate in a culture based on blood-feud was denied, because they lacked honor. They were treated as

different, outsiders, tainted by their status, which affected them as if from birth even if they were not actually born slaves. Slavishness could be inborn or it could be acquired by the act of enslavement; all slaves became part of the unfree kindred. Scandinavian society had a need to categorize a group of people in this way. It allowed this group of people to be subordinated not just to those who controlled their labor but also to those people who might not

be in an economic position to exploit slave labor, indeed who might have their own labor exploited in much the same way as the slaves, but who possessed that intangible commodity called freedom. There were of course many meanings of freedom in the Middle Ages, in Scandinavia

as in the rest of Europe, but the word could, at the same time as it

166 CONCLUSION described one’s relation to a specific obligation, also express an absolute state, the quality of not being a slave. Dependence might be relative but

slavery was not; it was a fixed conceptual category. The existence of slaves, though not necessarily of a slave economy (the argument would hold just as true for serfdom or any other variety of unfreedom]}, allowed

even the most dependent nonslave to participate in the dominant culture in a way, to be a member of society. It allowed the theory, the pretense, that all nonslaves were equal at least in rights if not in wealth Or power.

Slavery in Scandinavia was disappearing as a construct at the time when the assumption that all free people were participants in the political community was breaking down. The culture was now constructing formal categories among the free; the nobility were becoming a clearly defined class, not merely those among the free who had managed to acquire power. The economic position of individual slaves did not necessarily benefit from their being freed, nor did their social position; the lowest of the free were now quite different trom the independent peasant proprietors of the earlier conception of society. But the newly emerg-

ing categories removed the necessity for the society to construct an identity of “slave.” European society would continue for centuries to consider any manual labor, or any labor on behalf of another—any form of economic dependence—as a sign of servitude or lack of freedom.2 The economically dependent might suffer juridical liabilities like the lack of the right to vote (a right that we still call the franchise, meaning freedom). These were specific freedoms that they lacked, however, specific liberties or franchises granted by some authority or constitution to certain groups. They were not understood as the natural state of all men who were not for some reason classified as unfree. The unfreedom of servants in early modern Europe was relative and not absolute. Scandinavian

peasant proprietors in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, too, lacked specific freedoms, like the nobility’s exemption from taxation; tenants lacked even more. But with the end of slavery and of serfdom the absolute categorization of free and unfree as a way of organizing a society’s conception of itself had ended.

APPENDIX

Note on the Use of Sources

A work that depends as much as this one does on the interpretation of long-

known but problematic sources must make its assumptions about those sources explicit. My approach to the main sources, legal and literary, is implied in my discussion of them throughout the text, but since the proper use of these materials by the historian is a matter of some dispute among specialists, it is appropriate to present an overview of the problems that arise. Many of these are common to the sources for the history of medieval

Europe in general, especially early medieval Europe, but there are some peculiarities in the Norse material. The purpose of this appendix is twofold: to provide the nonspecialist with an outline of the available sources and the ways scholars have traditionally interpreted them, and to allow the specialist to evaluate my use of them based on explicit as well as implicit discussion. Law codes and literature are not the only types of sources on which this

work has relied, but they are the ones most in need of an explicit methodological discussion. The text discusses problems in the interpretation of other kinds of sources as they arise.! LAW CODES

The dispute over the origins of the Scandinavian law codes and their relation to social reality has not yet become as heated as that over the Icelandic sagas, but the trend of modern scholarship is similar to that for the sagas as well as to that for the Continental Jeges barbarorum. Modern scholars are moving toward a view of the laws as artifacts of the time at which they were written rather than as survivals of a Germanic past. The question of how much oral-traditional material the extant written codes contain is still open but the prospects of being able to answer it accurately seem dimmer than ever. There are extant vernacular law codes from Iceland and from provinces

in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden dating from the twelfth through fourteenth centuries. For decades scholars saw these codes as transcriptions of ancient law that had been transmitted orally over the generations: either official compilations sanctioned by authorities in an attempt to move from 167

168 APPENDIX oral to written law or else unofficial compilations, written by a lawspeaker to help him remember or teach his successor or by a private individual for a resource in preparing cases or out of antiquarian interest.? In the traditional

view, the vernacular law codes “preserved legal relations with primitive features, which lingered in the various Swedish provinces centuries after they disappeared from the more southerly Germanic peoples.”3 Elsa SjGholm has effectively demolished this view, pointing out for example that resemblances between Swedish law codes and the early medieval Lombard

laws, once taken as indications of the primitive Germanic nature of the Scandinavian laws, may be due to the exposure of medieval Swedish students at Bologna to later versions of the Lombard laws.4 Even if the old view were correct and the codes did record ancient law, or at least some ancient features, they might not accurately reflect that law. The compilers could have omitted some provisions found in the traditional law or introduced new material, because the authorities wanted to change the law or because the individual compiler focused only on topic areas that

were important to him and the intended reader of the code. Not many scholars now hold that the law codes merely record ancient law; rather, most think that the law codes as written were at least reformed if not created by the circumstances of their time.® Scholars have long accepted that the laws draw some influence from

Roman law and especially canon law, yet most still believe that despite foreign influences the laws include many traditional provisions. They do not often acknowledge that it may simply be impossible to identify those provisions, especially if the basic structure of the codes as recorded drew on foreign models.’ Sj6holm has forcefully pointed out that the provisions a given scholar identifies as archaic or uses to prove the traditional nature of the law code as

a whole depend upon his or her particular notions about what primitive Scandinavian society was like. To the extent that these notions do not come from Tacitus or from national mythology, they come mainly from the law codes themselves. The proof of the law codes’ archaism is circular. Scholars have built theories of the internal development of the law based on preconceptions about what kinship patterns are primitive.® Besides preconceived notions about what kinds of kinship or inheritance structures characterize primitive societies, linguistic historians have also used the language of the law codes as evidence that the laws are traditional,

primitive, and Germanic. Peculiarities of style, including alliteration, rhythm, and narration, have been cited as evidence of the antiquity of certain passages.? Even before considering the possibility of conscious archaizing one should question whether these peculiarities show an antiquity of content or merely of form. As scholars since the beginning of this century have noted, it would be easy to retain alliterative phrases from an oral stage of the law without retaining entire provisions.!° Legal language tends to be unchanging and formulaic, and conservative and formulaic phrasing does not necessarily denote a very old law; it may be an affectation of those with a

NOTE ON THE USE OF SOURCES 169 legal education.!! In fact, Harald Ehrhardt has shown that later law codes show a greater degree of alliteration than earlier ones (for example, Magnus Hakonarson’s national law is more alliterative than the Gulaping and Frostaping laws} and that the alliteration appears most frequently in passages

dealing with land division that must be innovations rather than ancient custom.!2 He argues that the use of alliteration, which also occurs in vernacular charters, was actually an imitation of Latin rhetorical forms. Even if one could identify particular provisions as coming from an oral tradition, this would not mean that the codes had to have existed as codes in oral form or that if they did they need have been very old. Customary law may be rather flexible and need not necessarily represent ancient traditions. The act of writing down the law implies the fixing of tradition at a point in its development, but it often means much more.!3 It involves a selection among customs, and the political and social environment inevitably influences such a selection.!4 Written law may signal major changes in a culture’s conception of the role of law in society: royal power, forexample, may be extended into areas of life where it had not before been a factor. The act of redaction was not merely transcription, either from an oral tradition or from a literary model. It allowed the opportunity for innovations to enter the law codes, if not the social and political life of the various provinces. The compiling authorities probably combined innovation with ancient customary law, even if these two levels are not now identifiable. The question still remains of the law codes’ relation to reality: were they ever effective or did they simply represent someone’s ideal of what the law should be? The features of the law codes that indicate a learned origin may or may not have agreed with the interests of the authorities who had to enforce them. Sjoholm has proposed a new approach to the Swedish provincial law codes and to those of the other Scandinavian countries as well. She argues that one cannot use them at all as evidence of social relations before the time they were written, and only with great care as evidence for the time at which they were written. Because they are drawn to a very great extent from a literary or scholarly tradition—for example, the version of the Lombard law used at Bologna or the Mosaic law—only the points on which they differ from that tradition are possible evidence as to particular conditions of their time of redaction.!5 Although Sjéholm is right that one cannot read the laws backward to reveal anything about legal relations in the Viking Age, the social situation at the time they were compiled probably played a major part in determining what elements the redactors took from both scholarly and oral tradition and how they altered these elements. One may therefore say that the law codes

reflect the societies that gave rise to them. This does not mean that the social reality was as depicted in the laws, but that conditions in society caused the law-givers or law-writers to approach problems in particular ways. The fact that the law codes were not merely compiled but were also copied and reworked indicates that they did have relevance for some group of people. That relevance could have been mainly scholarly, but it does

170 APPENDIX seem that the laws were used or were intended to be used as guidelines, if not as strict ordinances, even ata later period, especially in Denmark, which

had no national law code until the fifteenth century. A look at the individual codes will make clearer the problems in interpretation. For none of the law codes does an original manuscript survive. Certainly each code is at least somewhat earlier than its earliest known manuscript, but Sjdholm’s work has cast doubt on the grounds for the traditional early dating of the Swedish laws, and her reasons apply as well to the other countries.

Norway The territory of Norway was divided into four regional things or assemblies. Of the laws of the two eastern regions, the Borgarbing and the Eidsivaping, all that survives is the section of each code dealing with the Church, each in several recensions. The earliest redaction of each is generally dated to the eleventh or twelfth century, although the earliest manuscript of each is from around 1300.!” For the Gulapbing in the southwest of Norway, three redactions of the law code survive, the earliest attributed to the late eleventh or early twelfth century with a fragmentary ms. from the late twelfth century (AM 315 F fol.), the second to between 1164 and 1184 with fragmentary mss. from around 1180 and around 1240, and the third to around 1200,

incorporating both earlier redactions. An entire manuscript of this latter text survives, the Codex Rantzovianus written around 1250.!8 Few of the provisions dealing with slaves have survived in the fragments of the earlier

redactions, so it is impossible to say how early these provisions are or whether they changed from one redaction to the next.!9 The law of the Frostaping, in the northwestern part of the country, survives in several thirteenth-century fragments; the redaction whose entire text survives is usually thought to be mostly twelfth-century material, but the only full manuscript is a late paper copy from the mid-thirteenth century Codex Resenianus, destroyed in 1728, which contains an introduction with enactments from 1260.20 Magnus Hakonarson (Magnus Lagabeter or Law-Improver, 1263-80) issued a national law code, which combined provisions from the existing provincial codes.?! It is the Gulabing and Frostaping laws that are important for this work. Though the resemblances in many areas between the two codes are quite strong, they differ both in outline and in content. Each covers topics the other has left out, and topics they both cover are often treated differently. It is not likely that they came from the same national issuing authority, and to

argue that they go back to a common root in primitive Norwegian law would be purely speculative, but the similarities may indicate that the Crown had an influence on both codes or that one code influenced the other. These Norwegian codes as we have them are probably not official com-

NOTE ON THE USE OF SOURCES I7I pilations of the provincial laws.22 A comment in the Gulaping law, “Now we have set down in writing our defense law, although we do not know

whether it is right or wrong,” indicates that that code at least contains passages not originally part of an official compilation.23 A passage in the Frostabing law, however, implies that the law book was for official use by judges: “The men who are named to the law court shall judge the law in those cases that are properly appealed to the assembly according to what the law-book says. ... In all that the book does not determine, the result in each case shall be that which all the men of the law court agree upon and which is most right before God.”24 The extant versions of these two laws reflect a tradition that has changed over time: for example, the Frostaping law provides for the building of roads as a good deed rather than the former practice of manumission of a slave by the community, and the Gulabing law on manumissions notes that the law had been different under different kings.25 This need not mean that the two law codes existed as formal written or oral codes at a very early date. Such passages could have been additions or changes to an already formally structured code, but they could also be comments by a compiler on the laws he was selecting and organizing. The compilers of the written Gulapbing and Frostaping laws may have believed that they were writing down the law of the land as it stood, but they no doubt systematized, restructured, added, subtracted, and emended ac-

cording both to learned tradition and to the interests of groups in their societies. The laws may contain provisions that had lost their practical effect or that never had a practical effect: laws issued by a king or other authority but never fully accepted, laws dealing with situations that were generally handled by private conciliation, or material the compiler drew from foreign sources. The elaborate ceremonies for the freeing of slaves discussed in chapter 5, for example, may be relics of ancient rituals of manumission, but they could also be products of the imperfect memory combined with the imagination of the compiler, or recent innovations as manumission became more common and the community sought a more formal recognition of the freed person’s acceptance into it. Given that the Gulabing and Frostabing compilations circulated, were copied, and were eventually incorporated into the national law of Norway, it seems that they had come to be accepted as the laws of the provinces as they stood in the twelfth or early thirteenth century. Law and practice were not always the same, however, and even if the compilations as a whole were fair reflections of the law of the things this need not be true of individual provisions. There is no valid rule for determining whether any given provision comes from a tradition earlier than the redaction of the law.2© The provisions on slavery, in particular, have been considered older than the

written law on the grounds that slavery was obsolete by the time of the written law; since it is mainly the law by which we can date Norwegian slavery, however, the argument is circular.

172 APPENDIX Iceland Narrative sources refer to codifications of Icelandic law that have not survived. According to Ari Pérgilsson’s Book of the Icelanders (Islendingabok), Icelandic law was based upon the Gulapbing law as imported by a

man called Ulfljot in the Settlement Age and modified by the Icelanders. This story may not be an accurate historical account of the legislative process but rather an attempt to give validity to law by connecting it to a dimly known past.27 In 1117, according to Ari, the assembly delegated Haflioi Masson and a committee to write down the law, instructing them to “make new provisions wherever in the law they seemed to them better than in the previous law.” The assembly then adopted the resulting book.2® Haflidi’s law code does not survive. The law code that does survive from Iceland is usually given the name Gragas, but this name refers to two very different redactions, each of which survives in one manuscript: the Codex Regius (Konungsb6k), a manuscript of around 1260, and Stadarholsb6k, a manuscript of around 1280.29 They contain much of the same material, but in a very different order, and each also contains material the other does not. No doubt they share a common source, but each draws on a different variety of scattered material as well.9° Though many scholars assume that much of the material in Gragds dates from the twelfth century, for the dates of the redactions we have only the dates of the manuscripts themselves. These different codices of Gragds, or the sources on which they drew, may be the books to which the text of Grdgas refers: “It is also prescribed that in this country that which is found in books is to be the law. And if books differ, then what is found in the books which the bishops own is to be accepted. If their books also difter, then that one is to prevail which says it at greater length in words that affect the case at issue.’’3! Gragds may have drawn on the oral legal tradition but the varied compilations probably contained much material from learned sources with little relation to practice. The law presented in Grdgas differs, especially on

matters of procedure, from that which appears in some of the sagas. An elaborate scheme for dividing up compensation among the relatives of someone who is killed, for example, differs greatly from the practice described in the sagas.32 It is entirely possible that neither code nor saga accurately reflects what actually took place, and there seems no reason to assume a priori that one is a more reliable source than the other. The text of Gragds has scattered references to slavery but no systematic treatment. Some important issues discussed in other law codes—for example, the status of a child of a free man and his own slave, a free man and someone else’s slave, or the slaves of two different masters—do not appear in Gragds.33 This lack of systematic treatment could mean that slavery was not very important at the time of Grdgds, or the law of slavery could have

been a casualty of what the translators call a “hasty and hungry effort to

NOTE ON THE USE OF SOURCES 173 amass material’’34 that led to incompleteness and disorganization in many areas of law. There are two other thirteenth-century law codes from Iceland. One, Jarnsiéa (“Tronside,” possibly from its binding), was adopted by the Alping

(National Assembly) in 1271-73 after the submission of Iceland to the Norwegian crown. It was compiled in Norway for Iceland and followed in plan the Norwegian laws of Magnis Lagabeter, though it included some Icelandic material as well. Magnus later replaced Jarnsida with another compilation, /onsb6k, adopted by the Alping in 1281. /6nsbok was based on Magnus’s Norwegian national law code, the Gulabing law, Jarnsida, and a version of Grdgdas that probably differed from both the known redactions.35 The king issued and the Alping ratified both these law codes, so whatever their practical effect they were officially the law of the land.

Denmark In Denmark, Jutland had an official law code while other provinces had private compilations that may have achieved semiofficial status. The earliest Danish law code is that of Skane (including Halland and Blekinge}, compiled between 1203 and 1212. It exists both in Old Danish and in Latin.36 The Latin paraphrase, not a direct translation, is attributed to Andreas Suneson, archbishop of Lund.3” Some have argued whether the Danish or Latin version came first or whether both are reworkings of an earlier text, but Skov has shown that the Latin version contains very little substantive matter that does not also appear in the extant Danish version. Andreas adds a phrase here and there about how certain matters are not subject to secular justice, but most of his changes from the Danish text consist in reorganizing the provisions and including information on earlier laws, definitions, or rationalizations for various laws.38 Andreas probably did know the same Danish version that survives today, which was perhaps the work of a member of the chapter at Lund.?9

Andreas Suneson himself may actually have initiated the Danish codification of the Skane laws. Andreas came from one of the most important aristocratic families in Denmark. He had studied at Bologna before returning to Denmark to serve as chancellor to Knut IV; he became archbishop of Lund upon the death of his uncle Absalon in 1201. There is little evidence that his study in Bologna made him a great jurist, but he did retain a lifelong interest in the law, as indicated not only by his Latin paraphrase of the laws of Skane but also by the books he left behind at his death: mostly theological works, but also a corpus of canon law (“librum honestum et multum utilem,” presumably Gratian’s Decretum), and seven unspecified lawbooks.4° If Andreas did initiate the codification of the Skane laws in Danish one may suppose that he intended revision, not just transcription, of traditional law. For example, the law of Skane is one of the two Scandinavian codes to

174 APPENDIX apply the rule of partus sequitur ventrem in deciding the status of children of a mixed slave-free union.*! It is possible that this reflected traditional law or that the compilers arrived at the principle independently, but it is more

likely that it comes directly from the Roman law principle, possibly as found in the canon law.42 The statement of the general principle appears only in Andreas’s paraphrase, not the Danish code, and the principle might be a borrowing even if the specific application is not. Other general principles, and even specific provisions, may also have crept in from Roman and canon law. The law of Skane, though a private compilation, exists in enough manuscripts of the Danish version to indicate its widespread use. Even if only legal scholars used it, rather than courts, it still influenced the other Danish law codes and some of the Swedish ones as well. It might have been close enough to the traditional laws of the province to be acceptable to people who knew those laws, but it could still have been deeply affected by influences imported by Andreas.

For the Danish province of Sjzlland there exist two law codes, both private compilations although they wrongly bear the names of kings with whom a later age associated them. There are several redactions of Valdemar’s Sjzlland law. The earliest redaction, the “Arvebog og Orbodemal,”’ may have been used in Skane, as it survives only in manuscripts from there. It is only a partial law code and does not have many provisions about slavery. The two other redactions are both dated to the first half of the thirteenth century, though the second one may possibly be later than the Jutish law of 1241. The older survives in fragmentary manuscripts of the fourteenth century but the first full one is from around 1400; the later redaction is known from a number of manuscripts of around 1300. The earlier redaction has a separate section on slavery and one on theft, attached at the end. The later redaction incorporates these separate sections in the main text. They probably constitute later material that appears separately in the rather late extant

manuscript of the earlier redaction because a copyist took from the later redaction sections not included in his master copy of the earlier redaction.‘ The other Sjzlland law code, “Erik’s Sjzlland law,” probably also dates

from the first half of the thirteenth century. The compiler seems to have known Valdemar’s Sjzlland law and may have intended Erik’s Sjzlland law as complementary. This code survives in manuscripts along with the later redaction of Valdemar’s law, four of which are from the fourteenth century, the earliest around 1300.44 The same cautions apply with the Sjzlland laws as with other private compilations. In the many places where these codes copy almost verbatim

the laws of Skane, the redactors could have copied language to express principles that were already similar, or they could have copied provisions wholesale merely because they existed in the law of Skane. Jutland had an official lawbook, which probably also applied to Fyn, Langeland, and other islands. Valdemar II issued the Jutish law in 1241 and

NOTE ON THE USE OF SOURCES 175 an assembly of notables accepted it. It exists in two Old Danish redactions as well as Latin and Low German translations from the fourteenth century.*5 The Jutish law draws on the laws of Skane and the canon law, among other sources. The influence of Gratian appears particularly in the introduction:

The land should be built with law. But if everyone would be content with his own and let others enjoy the same rights, there would be no need for law. No law is as good to follow as the truth, but

where there is doubt as to what is the truth, the law should point to the truth. If there were no law in the land, he would have the most who could seize the most. Therefore the law should be made in the interests of all, so that the righteous and peaceful and unoffending can

enjoy their peace, and the unrighteous and wicked may fear that which is written in the law and therefore not dare to carry out the evil

which is in their mind. It is also right that, if someone cannot be turned to the good by fear of God and love of the right, the fear of the authorities and the penal law of the land should keep him from doing ill and punish him if he does so.

The law should be honorable and righteous, not burdensome, according to the land’s custom, suitable and useful and clear, so that all may know and understand what the law says. The law should not be made or written for the advantage of any man, but in the interests of all who live in the land. Nor shall any man judge contrary to the law which the king gives and the land accepts, but the land shall be judged and governed according to the law. The law which the king gives and the land accepts, he may not change or abrogate without the will of the land, unless he openly acts against God.*6

The introduction then discusses the relation of the king and nobles to Pope and church: it differs from the viewpoint of the canonists in suggesting

the king gets his power directly from God, not via the church. In some specific provisions, the law adopts the canon law position: for example, unlike the Skane law, it allows inheritance by a child born out of wedlock whose parents subsequently marry.4” The law shows church influence in

provisions that clearly were not part of the traditional law, such as the freeing of monastic lands from royal taxes.

In this law given by the king there is much that does not come from traditional, orally transmitted law of Jutland, even though there may be much that does.48 One cannot assume that any particular passage in the code represents Jutland’s ancient tradition. Nor should one assume that this royal issuance codified all the law that was valid in the province in the midthirteenth century. There may have been issues with which the king and his advisors did not wish to concern themselves, preferring that they be treated privately.

176 APPENDIX The laws of the Danish towns, beginning in the thirteenth century, were also royal issuances. The king granted the towns where colonies of Hanse merchants settled the right to their own laws, among other privileges. Most of these town ordinances in Jutland copied those of Liibeck; in Skane they were based on the thirteenth-century bizrke ret, which was probably compiled for Lund.49 Sweden

The provincial law codes of Sweden fall into three groups. That of Got-

land stands by itself. The other two groups correspond to the two tribal groups of the Svear (the law codes of Uppland, S6dermanland, Halsingland, Vastmanland, and Dalarna) and the Gotar (the laws of Vaster- and Ostergotland). The law of Gotland, like the Danish laws, consists of individual chap-

ters, without the division into large sections (balkar} characteristic of the Swedish laws.°° The codification of the laws of Gotland was long attributed

to the influence of Andreas Suneson, who visited the island in 1207 and perhaps on other occasions, but the famous letter about episcopal visitations in which he asks that the laws be written down is probably a forgery.°!

Scholars now date the law a good deal later than the date of 1220 traditionally assigned to it.52 The concluding paragraph of the law code implies that the compilation was Official: “It is agreed that that is law which is written here. All men shall keep it. If any cases arise which are not found in here, they shall be disposed of according to the decision of the judges. And they shall swear that it is according to the law of the Gotlanders. And afterwards it shall be written here.”53 At any rate the code was important enough that it was translated

into German in 1398—1408 when Gotland was under the control of the Teutonic Order, and into Danish about 1550. In 1341-44 Magnus Eriksson issued a code for the Gotlandic town of Visby, at least half of whose population at that time consisted of German merchants. The text is in Low German, and the sources include German municipal law codes.>4 Besides the Gotland law code, which is probably not as early as the date traditionally assigned to it, the oldest of the Swedish provinciahaw codes is that of Vastergotland, which survives in two redactions. The earlier is tradi-

tionally thought to date from the first half of the thirteenth century and connected with Eskil, a lawman in the 1220s who had close connections with Norway.®5 The later redaction’s provisions on slavery are not much different from the earlier one; the main difference seems to have been systematization.5¢ The text of the older version uses much rhythm and alliteration. It is very concise, whereas the later is expanded. The formulaic nature of the earlier text has led scholars to claim that it lies quite close to an oral

tradition, but many have questioned the use of such literary methods of dating legal provisions.5” Despite its archaic or archaizing qualities, this code relies a good deal on canon law.58

NOTE ON THE USE OF SOURCES 177 Though the compilation is not official, the marginal notations and addi-

tions in the one surviving manuscript of the older redaction show that someone actually used it and tried to keep it up to date. Wessén suggests that the manuscript may have belonged to the official lawman of the province. The extant manuscripts of the later redaction and of the Ostergotland laws are of much better quality as manuscripts but have no annotations and may have been copied at the monastery of Skara for the monastic library.59 The law code of Ostergétland, dated to the late thirteenth century, is one of the best organized and most complete. For many provisions it gives the name of the issuer. It may have been an officially issued code.© Official sanction is clearer for the laws of Svealand than for those of Gotaland. Of these the earliest extant is the law code of Uppland.®! It contains an introduction and a letter from King Birger Magnusson to the lawman Birger Persson, dated 2 January 1296, asking him to head a commission to codify the laws of Upper Sweden: “So we have commanded Lord Birger

the lawman, named above in this letter, that he, together with the most knowledgeable men of each folkland [of Uppland], should strive to establish both what the old law has been and what should be established in the new law, and put it together.”©2 The question remains to what extent the royal commissioners incorporated the law as it then stood and to what extent they created an entirely new codification. They claimed to have taken much from tradition: “The creator of the laws was Viger the wise, a pagan in pagan times. What we find in his law that is to the advantage of all, we include in this book; what is not useful or reasonable, we have wished to omit.’”©3 As with traditions about other law codes, this may have been an attempt to validate new law by connecting it with a mythical tradition.®4 Certainly much in the Uppland law clearly reflects the circumstances of its time and much is foreign in origin and influence.®© The law codes of Vastmanland, S6dermanland, and Halsingland contain many provisions that agree verbatim with the law code of Uppland. The law code of S6dermanland was confirmed in 1327 by Magnus Eriksson but may have existed much before then.® It agrees very closely with the Uppland laws, as does the HAalsingland law code, dating to the second quarter of the fourteenth century.®” This agreement could conceivably be due to an original agreement in the traditional laws of the provinces but is more likely due to the dissemination of the Uppland code. The law code of Vastmanland also largely agrees, but there are major exceptions that Wessén attributes to the inclusion of archaic portions and refusal to accept innovations brought in by the compilers of the Uppland law. In some of the instances where it differs from the Uppland code, the Vastmanland law agrees with the law code of Dalarna. For example, both require that a child have been baptized in order to inherit, as neither the Uppland law nor canon law requires.®® The law code of Dalarna has the most archaic style of the Svealand law codes and shows less influence from the Uppland laws than the other Svear codes. Its language is rhythmic, it uses an epic narrative style, and it contains many proverbs and wisdom-sayings.©? Although the oldest manu-

178 APPENDIX script dates from the middle of the fourteenth century, and there is no evidence for the existence of this code earlier, Wessén claims that it represents the older stage of the Svear laws, before the royal and foreign influences that came with the codification of the Uppland law. The other Svear compilations would then represent varying compromises between the Uppland law and the earlier written law or custom, or between the Uppland law and other interests.”° Utterstr6m has pointed out, however, that Dalalagen in its present form contains a large number of German loanwords and other late usages. Other scholars have found that at least some of the penal law provisions in the Dalarna code do in fact come from the Uppland law, so at least the extant redaction of Dalalagen must be fourteenth-century.7! There exist several medieval Swedish law codes besides the provincial laws: the town law from around 1300, possibly compiled for Stockholm,

and, more importantly, the national law code of Magnus Eriksson. The commission that compiled this law sometime before 1347 relied principally on the laws of Uppland and Ostergétland. Several years later Magnus also issued a general town law.’2 The mixture of influences on the Scandinavian law codes makes it impossible to read backward from them to determine the content of earlier, orally transmitted law. As Sjdholm has found in her study of inheritance law, many of the very provisions that scholars have taken as archaic may actually be innovations in an attempt by a central authority to restructure Scandinavian society.’”3 This may also hold true for laws involving slavery,

and since there are so few other sources there is nothing with which to corroborate hypotheses about earlier and later stages of legal development. I have assumed that the provisions about slavery in the provincial law codes represent what someone or some group in authority, making a selection among traditional and learned law and new suggestions, thought the law should be. In using law codes as evidence for the nature of slavery one must consider possible sources of particular provisions and possible reasons for their inclusion other than their presence in an oral tradition. NORSE LITERATURE AND OTHER NARRATIVE

Iceland preserved a body of material, the family sagas, that is unrivaled in medieval European literature as a depiction of everyday life. The problem for the historian is that a vivid depiction, realistic in tone, may nevertheless not be an accurate one. Many scholars have understood the question of whether the sagas are historically accurate as the question of whether historical events actually took place at the time and in the manner that the sagas depict.”4 In response to this understanding of the question Erik Lonnroth asserts that “together the sagas and Saxo are Scandinavia’s literary contribution to the so-called renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but as sources to the history of the heathen ages of Scandinavia they are absolutely useless.’”’”5

While not all historians would agree with Lonnroth’s categorical state-

NOTE ON THE USE OF SOURCES 179 ment, anyone familiar with modern source criticism must acknowledge that the task of identifying the core of historical fact in a work of literature may be nearly impossible. Certainly everyone now recognizes that the sagas

are not contemporary chronicles of events (not that contemporary chronicles are always accurate}. For purposes of the present work, however, the value of literature as a source for historical events in a nonliterate period is not relevant. We must consider the validity of the literature for the history of social patterns rather than of political and military events. This section will discuss the various schools of thought on the origins of the sagas, which certainly have a bearing on their historical accuracy. The basic problem is that the sagas were written down several centuries after the events they purport to describe. It is clear now that the sagas were creations of the thirteenth century and not mere transcriptions of old tales; the question is to what extent the authors of the thirteenth-century works preserved older traditions. Old Norse literature, especially poetry, may once have existed in all the Scandinavian countries, but it survived only in Iceland. Much of the surviving material has its roots in the other countries, especially Norway, but most of it, at least the prose, concerns the activities of the early settlers of Iceland. The Icelanders were avid genealogists and preserved or constructed the tales of their ancestors. Medieval Icelandic literature includes both prose and poetry. The poetry includes Eddic (tales of gods and heroes, wisdom poetry) and Skaldic (mostly written in honor of people or events, composed with particular metrical and

stylistic devices). The monuments of prose literature are the sagas, generally classified into four categories: kings’ sagas, Icelandic family sagas (sometimes referred to as “sagas of Icelanders,” a more direct translation of the term Islendingaségur), heroic sagas (sometimes called “sagas of times past,” from fornaldars6égur), and romantic sagas (riddarasogur, translations or reinterpretations of chansons de geste or Arthurian literature). The latter two categories do not need much discussion here: depictions of slavery in these works may be relevant to the attitudes of those who wrote or read

them but obviously cannot be connected to actual social structure at a particular time in the past. It is the family sagas, and to a lesser extent the kings’ sagas, whose relation to history has been fiercely disputed. The discussion here deals only with the family sagas, but where the the kings’ sagas are relevant to the issue of slavery, the same considerations apply.’6 I have also made use of the romantic and legendary sagas, but only as evidence for the kinds of literary slave characters the Icelanders were writing about, not for social reality. Scholars discovered the sagas in the sixteenth century and treated them as works of history. As sophisticated techniques of textual criticism developed, people realized that the sagas were written hundreds of years after the events they describe and contain anachronisms and internal disagreements.

Great dispute raged for most of the past century between the adherents of two schools of thought on the origins of the sagas and their relation to the

180 APPENDIX time at which they were either composed or transcribed: the “bookprose” and “freeprose” theories. Freeprose is somewhat of a misnomer for the theo-

ry that the sagas were first composed close to the time of the events described and transmitted orally, verbatim, from generation to generation. The opposing bookprose school argued that each saga is an individual composition: the style of the sagas did not derive from an oral origin but was a conscious attempt to imitate oral style, and the thirteenth-century person who wrote them down can be dignified with the title of author and not just scribe. The theory attributed much of the impetus for the writing of the sagas to the importation and influence of foreign works, and it emphasized written sources. The sagas, according to this theory, contain little authentic tradition and are worthless as historical sources.”7” The bookprose view of the “Icelandic school,” as exemplified in introductions to individual sagas in the Islenzk fornrit series, has tended to dominate scholarship since the 1930s, though scholars vary in the importance they assign to oral tradition as a factor in the author’s composition.78 Although most discussions of the historicity of the sagas have understood history to refer only to events and genealogies, what matters for present purposes are not the events recorded in the sagas—it does not matter whether a particular marriage or feud took place—but the social backdrop presented, whose accuracy may be independent of that of the events. The thirteenth-century authors may have accurately preserved a picture of the tenth-century social milieu; they may have imposed the social patterns of their own time on their material; or the social patterns depicted may be totally irrelevant to Icelandic history.”° Leading scholars of Icelandic literature have expressed a wide variety of views on the accuracy of the social backdrop of the family sagas. Sigurdur Nordal, using the example of Njdls saga, claimed that while the central events of the saga are probably historically true, the details leading up to the main events need not be, and the characters were developed by the author to suit the narrative. He pointed particularly to the Christian spirit imposed on the saga. Yet, though he found the sagas unhistorical in details of events, he claimed that anachronisms in social conditions were rare. Walter Baetke took the opposite point of view, suggesting that the sagas get their tone of realism from their presentation of background detail about the social milieu

and that this is the least likely aspect of the saga to come from an oral tradition. More likely to Baetke was the possibility that the authors were depicting a milieu from their own time. Einar Ol. Sveinsson pointed out that the sagas in their written form date from a time of great turbulence in Iceland, the Sturlung Age, and their particular audience, the lay chieftains, may have a good deal to do with the nature and focus not only of their plots but also of the world they depict. Jesse Byock, in challenging the distinction between the Saga Age and the Sturlung Age in Icelandic society and culture, proposes that the events of the sagas may not have been historically true but they were certainly realistic. The Saga Age did not differ radically from the

NOTE ON THE USE OF SOURCES I8I Sturlung era, and people would not accept stories about that age unless they were vraisemblant.8° Accepting that the society the sagas describe was not totally dissimilar

to that of the audience does not mean that the stories must have been entirely accurate in the description of the social milieu. As Jochens remarks in words applicable to the issue of slavery, the sagas “can tell us what the thirteenth-century authors wanted their audience to hear about past behavior in these matters.”8! The authors may have imposed on the Saga Age a picture of Icelandic society in their own day, a picture which could be very inaccurate while appearing plausible to the sagas’ audience.82 Since slavery no longer existed in Iceland by the thirteenth century (see chapter 5) the authors cannot have imposed the situation in their own time

on their depiction of slaves, but this does not mean that they accurately depicted the situation several centuries earlier. The view of slavery presented in the sagas had to be one that a thirteenth-century audience would

have found believable, but an aristocratic thirteenth-century audience could have found believable many stereotypes about slaves that did not reflect an earlier reality. That slaves rarely play heroic roles in the sagas and often have no name given, for example, does not necessarily mean that they were considered nonpersons at the time they lived; thirteenth-century Icelanders wanted to hear tales focused on their ancestors, not on slaves. The fact that slavery existed in the ninth through the eleventh centuries may be considered part of the oral tradition on which the sagas built, but there is no

evidence to justify the assumption that the particular ways in which the sagas depict slaves come from an accurate oral tradition. There are a number of possible explanations for the roles slaves play in the sagas besides the hypothesis that the incidents involving them reflect an authentic oral tradition. Foote suggests that “labour and poverty were real problems in the thirteenth century, and it may have been attractive to think of unpaid help at beck and call, much as people nowadays may lament the passing of the domestic servant of a century ago.” The idea of purchasing a concubine who might even turn out to be a princess would have been particularly appealing. Foote also points out that “the idea of slavery made the freeman freer: personal freedom is more precious when its loss is notionally or actually possible.” People may have enjoyed hearing slaves mentioned because it emphasized their own free status, which for many people may have been their only valuable possession. Foote argues that the sagas do not always show slaves in a negative light; many times slaves appear brave and loyal. Some thirteenth-century Icelanders, of slave descent, would surely like to see slaves depicted not only with these positive characteristics but also with royal ancestry.® To Foote’s reasons for the appearance of slaves in the sagas one might add their usefulness as a literary device. The beginnings of a feud might be attributed to slaves, as in Viga-Glums saga where slaves of Glim’s mother Astrid are accused of theft.84 Slaves’ expendability could come in handy in

182 APPENDIX the creation of episodes like that in which the aged Egil Skalla-Grimsson, annoyed at his family, has slaves carry away and then hide all his silver. He then kills the slaves so the secret of the hiding place will die with him.85 A saga writer could use slaves for such purposes without having to name them and give their genealogies as he would with a free person; it was easier to create a fictitious slave than a fictitious free person. That the slaves did not

have to be named reveals something about attitudes toward them in the thirteenth century and perhaps in the tenth as well, but the functions these nameless slaves serve in the narrative do not permit conclusions about the status of slaves. That Egil kills the slaves who hide his treasure hardly indicates the low status of slaves, considering the number of other people he has killed in the course of the saga since he attained the age of six.8° It may

be more justifiable to see relics of a time when slavery was prevalent in passages where slaves appear in the background only—working in a field or

numbered in the household—than in incidents where slaves play a major

role. The less significant the slave in the narrative, the less reason the author had to create him or her as a character, and therefore the more likely that the slave is there because the author thought he or she belonged in an accurate picture of the ninth, tenth, or eleventh century. Still, this need not mean that the slave as insignificant background detail was present in the oral tales on which the saga drew. All one can conclude for certain about depictions of slaves in the Icelan-

dic family sagas is that they represent a thirteenth-century idea of what slavery was like. A saga would not introduce a totally implausible slave character for the purposes of the narrative; incidents involving slaves developed in ways that the thirteenth-century audience would have found cred-

ible. Plausibility or verisimilitude to an audience two hundred years removed from the action does not, however, require strict authenticity in representation of a milieu. Before drawing any conclusions about the status

of slaves from an incident, one must ask whether there is any apparent narrative reason for the author’s inclusion of slave characters. The depictions of slaves in the sagas may be very useful to the historian in balancing the picture derived from laws which themselves may not reflect social reality, but such depictions may reveal more about thirteenth-century attitudes toward an obsolete institution than about the institution itself in its heyday.8” Modern categories of truth and fiction may not be relevant to the intentions of saga authors, but using literary material as evidence for social or cultural history does not require that it be historically accurate in its depictions. Whether or not the sagas are accurate reflections of social relationships, they can be evidence for conceptual relationships and cultural values.88

The same cautions that apply to the family sagas hold true for the use of

other narrative sources: Landnamabok, Saxo Grammaticus’s Gesta Danorum, and the kings’ sagas, including Snorri Sturlusson’s Heimskrin-

gla. Scholars have traditionally tested the accuracy of particular family sagas by comparison with Landnadmab6k’s account of events and gen-

NOTE ON THE USE OF SOURCES 183 ealogies, but in recent years scholars have come to recognize that Land- | namabok is not necessarily more reliable than the sagas. The text that served as a model for the extant versions was composed in the twelfth or thirteenth century, possibly based on earlier written material.8° It is not a contemporary source for the Settlement Age any more than are the sagas. While the various editors of Landndmab6ok did not have the same literary reasons that saga authors might have had for altering traditional material, an editor like Hauk Erlendsson could have inserted material based on what he knew from the sagas. In addition, if the purpose of Landnadmabok was not to record the original settlement of Iceland but to provide historical information on land ownership, the compilers would have had another

motive for altering tradition. The distribution of landownership in the twelfth century might have dictated the size of the different land claims recorded.?° The authors, compilers, or editors might have altered the information about slavery, since freeing one’s slaves and granting them land was

an important part of the process of settlement Landnadmabok describes. Modern scholarship on Saxo Grammaticus resembles that on the Icelandic sagas in that Saxo’s work, at least the first nine books where slavery is

most often mentioned, is now treated not as historical but as a literary construct, based to some extent on oral tradition and to some extent on Latin literature like Paulus Diaconus’s History of the Lombards.?! His depiction of social relations depends much more upon the time in which he wrote and upon his personal attitudes than upon any accurate tradition of

what the situation was at the time he describes. One cannot assume that any of these narrative sources accurately depicts the social milieu at the time it describes. Nor, since they claim to describe an earlier situation, can these sources be taken as accurate reflections of social relations at the time they were written. They represent the attitudes of thirteenth-century authors or editors toward slaves, and perhaps what they believed the status of slaves to have been.

ry

Abbreviations

Abh Bayr Akad Abhandlungen der koniglichen bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, philosophisch-philologische Klasse.

Acta Arch Acta Archaeologica Scandinavica.

Add Additamenta.

AVgL Aldre Vastgdtalagen, SGL, vol. 1.

AEVSjL Valdemars Sjzllandske Lov, A.ldre Redaktion, DGL, vol. 8.

AM Arnamagnean.

ANF Arkiv for nordisk filologi.

Arf Arfbezer balkeer.

ASun Andreas Suneson’s Latin paraphrase of Skanske Lov, DGL, vol. 1.

Bar Bardaghe BpL Borgarpingslov, NGL, vol. 1.

Byg Bygninga balker.

C Codex, CICiv. CCD Corpus codicum Danicorum medii aevi.

CCI Corpus codicum Islandicorum medii aevi. CCS Corpus codicum Suecicorum medii aevi.

Celt Celtic. CICiv Corpus Iuris Civilis.

Cleasby-Vigfusson Richard Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An Icelandic-English Dictionary.

CTh Codex Theodosianus. D Digest, C/Civ. DD Diplomatarium Danicum.

DGKL Danmarks gamle kobstadslovgivning.

DGL Danmarks gamle landskapslove. DHT Historisk tidskrift (Copenhagen).

DI Diplomatarium Islandicarum. DL Dalalagen, SGL, vol. 5. 185

186 ABBREVIATIONS

Dr Drapa balkeer.

DS Diplomatarium Suecanum.

EdTh Edictum Theoderici Regis. Egh Eghna salu. EI Encyclopedia of Islam (2d ed.}.

ESjL Eriks Sjzllandske Lov, DGL, vols. 5-6.

Ep Epzsore balker.

EpL Eidsivapingslov, NGL, vol. 1. FHT Historisk tidsskrift for Finland. Forn Fornemix balker. FrL Frostapingslov, NGL, vol. tr.

Ger Modern German. Gesetze Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen. Gipt Gipta balkeer. GL Gutalagen, SGL, vol. 7.

Go Gothic. Gr Ja and Ib Gragas, Islandernes lovbog i fristatens tid.

Gr Il Gragas efter det Arnamagneanske haandskrift nr. 334 fol., Stadarholsbok.

GuL Gulapingslov, NGL, vol. tr. HL Halsingelagen, SGL, vol. 6.

H Hauksbok redaction of Lnb.

IF Islenzk fornrit.

Inst Institutes, C/Civ. Iord lordber balker.

JL Jyske Lov, DGL, vols. 3—4.

KLNM Kulturhistoriskt lexicon for nordisk medeltid.

Kop K6pmala balker.

Kr Kristnu balker.

LAlam Leges Alamannorum. Lat Latin LBav Lex Baiuvariorum.

LBurg Leges Burgundionum. LEI Laws of Early Iceland: Gragas, vol. I.

LFris Lex Frisionum.

LHP Leges Henrici Primi.

LLomb Edictus ceteraeque Langobardorum leges (Edictus Rotharii unless otherwise noted}. Lnb Landnamabok. LRib Lex Ribuaria. LSal Lex Salica.

LSax Leges Saxonum.

LThur Lex Thuringorum (in Leges Saxonum und Lex Thuringorum).

LVis Leges Visigothorum. M Melabok redaction of Lnb.

ABBREVIATIONS 187 Mandr Af Mandrapi. Manh Manhelghis balker.

ME Middle English.

MELL Magnus Erikssons Landslag, SGL, vol. tro. MESL Magnus Erikssons Stadslag, SGL, vol. 11.

MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica.

MGH Fontes Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Fontes luris Germanici Antiqui in Usum Scholarum Separatim Editi.

MGH LL Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Leges. MGH SS Rer Germ Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum in Usum Scholarum Separatim Editi.

MGH SS Rer Merov Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores Rerum Merovingicarum.

MHBL Magnus Hakonssons Bylov, NGL, vol. 2. MHLL Magnus Hakonssons Landslov, NGL, vol. 2.

MScan Mediaeval Scandinavia. NAR Norwegian Archaeological Review. NGL Norges gamle love indtil 1387. NHT Historisk tidsskrift (Oslo).

Nov Novels, CICiv.

OD Old Danish. OE Old English. OED The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

OgL Ostgotalagen, SGL, vol. 2.

OHG Old High German.

Olc Old Icelandic. OS Old Swedish.

Pactus Pactus legis Salicae.

PGme Proto-Germanic. PIE Proto-Indo-European. PON Proto-Old Norse.

Re Refsta balkeer. Retl Retlose balker. S Sturlubok redaction of Lnb. Seer Szrz malum. Saga-Book Saga-Book of the Viking Society for Northern Research.

Scand ECHR Scandinavian Economic History Review. Scand ] Hist Scandinavian Journal of History.

SdmL S6dermannalagen, SGL, vol. 4. SGL Corpus Iuris Sueo-Gotorum Antiqui (Samling af Sweriges gamla lagar).

SHT Historisk tidsskrift (Stockholm).

188 ABBREVIATIONS SkL Skanske Lov, DGL, vol. 1.

SS Scandinavian Studies. SSRD Scriptores Rerum Danicarum. Ping Pingmala balker.

Piuf Piutva balker. Tr Trelleretten.

Uap Uaba mal. Uin Uinsorpa balker.

UL Upplandslagen, SGL, vol. 3.

Utg Vt gizrpz balker.

VmL Vastmannalagen, SGL, vol. 5.

VSjJLAO — Valdemars Sjzllandke Lov, Arvebog og Orbgdemal, DGL, vol. 7.

Wip Wipberbo balker.

YVeL Yngre Vastgotalagen, SGL, vol. 1.

YVSjL Valdemars Sjzllandske Lov, Yngre Redaktion, DGL, vol. 8.

ZRGGA Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung flir Rechtsgeschichte, Germanische Abteilung.

ZRGRA Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung fiir Rechtsgeschichte, Romische Abteilung.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. The political boundaries involved are roughly the same as today except that the southern provinces of modern Sweden were part of Denmark, culturally as well as politically. The terms Norse and Old Norse refer to all four countries; the Old Norse language is divided into East and West Norse branches (Danish/Swedish and Norwegian/Icelandic respectively), although “Old Norse” is also commonly used simply to mean “Old Icelandic” since most surviving Old Norse literature comes from Iceland. Finland is not included, except in the context of Swedish colonization

there, because documentary evidence does not appear until later. On slavery in Finland see Kustaa Vilkuna, KLNM, s.v. “Trel.” For the historiography of medieval Finland in general, see Suvanto, “Medieval Studies in Finland.” 2. Swedish periodical articles in 1935 (e.g., Ahnlund, “Traldomens dédsar”}, noting the six-hundredth anniversary of the Skara ordinance that decreed an end to

slavery in several Swedish provinces, brought it to the attention of some of the general public. 3. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, passim; Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 58.

4. One of the oldest works on Scandinavian slavery, Calonius, De prisco in patria Svio-Gothorum servorum jure, used the same word (servus} for Scandinavian as for Roman slaves; most later writers have not followed this practice. In a recent work, Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldommen,” the English summary (178-79) uses the words treldom and trels. Skyum-Nielsen, Kvinde og slave and “Nordic Slavery,” is notable in using the word slave. 5. See, for example, Wallentin, Svenska folkets historia, 31-34; Adrian and Mortensen, Fra slave til feestebonde, 125-28; Silvén-Garnert and Sdéderlind, Ett annat Sverige, 16. 6. Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, 65-78; see also Sawyer, Kings and Vikings, 39—42, which is more cautious in the use of evidence. 7. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhalle; Foote, “Prelahald 4 Islandi”; Krag, “Treller og trellehold”; Sandnes, “‘Tolv kyr, to hester og tre treler’”; Iversen, “Trelldommens betydning”; Lunden, “Treletida”; Krag, “Trelleholdet”; Lunden, “Trzl og 4armann”; Skyum-Nielsen, “Nordic Slavery.” A brief summary by the leading scholar on slavery in each country is found in KLNM, s.v. “Trel.” 8. For Iceland, A. Palsson, “Um lok preld6ms” and Agnarsdéttir and Arnason, “Przlahald”; for Norway, Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldommen”; for Sweden, Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan”; Henning, “Traldomens f6rsvinnande”; Landtmansson, “Traldomens sista skede.” Though the main focus of Landborna i Norden 189

19O NOTES TO PAGES 2~—5 is not on slavery, Thomas Lindkvist has discussed the factors that led to the assimilation of slaves into the status of tenant farmers in all the Scandinavian countries (129— 39).

9. Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei auf Island; Herdal, Trellene i Norden; Wergeland, Slavery in Germanic Society; Lind, “The Ending of Slavery in Sweden.” 10. Calonius, De Prisco in Patria Svio-Gothia Servorum Jure; Gjessing, “Trezldom i Norge”; Estrup, Om Treeldom i Norden; Sommarin, “Traldomen i Norden”; Eriksen, “Om traeldom hos Skandinaverna.”

11. Unfortunately, Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death, has relied exclusively on Williams for his information on Iceland; he thus not only repeats Williams’s errors of interpretation but also misinterprets points on which Williams was unclear (for instance, making Bryndhild [sic] an Icelandic princess, 220}. Even on those points where Williams qualified his statements, Patterson repeats the state-

ments without qualification. For example, on the number of slaves in Iceland, Williams says “there could not have been more than some two thousand held in thraldom at any one time” (36), a sentence which Patterson, citing Williams, recasts as “the slave population at any one time during the period of settlement was about two thousand” (459n). 12. I will refer to the whole period covered here as “medieval,” and to the postViking period as “the high Middle Ages.” This is contrary to Scandinavian usage,

which calls the post-Viking period up to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century the “early Middle Ages.” I have preferred to follow the periodization most generally used by English-speaking historians of Europe. 13. The best, indeed almost the only, work in a non-Scandinavian language that covers all the countries and goes beyond the Viking Age into medieval Scandinavia is Musset, Les peuples scandinaves (now somewhat outdated). See also Derry, History of Scandinavia, although this work devotes only a few chapters to the Middle Ages. 14. The standard college history textbook in Sweden is Carlsson and Rosén, Svensk historia. Rosén considers the succession of Magnus Eriksson in 1319 to represent the “unification of the kingdom.” On recent historiography, see Lindkvist, “Swedish Medieval Society.”

15. The best general textbook on Danish history is Christensen et al., eds., Danmarks Historie. See also Paludan, “Conceptions of Danish Society.” 16. Two volumes in the textbook series Handbok i Norges historie cover the medieval period: P. S. Andersen, Samlingen av Norge and Helle, Norge blir en stat. The titles reveal their political focus. For a contrasting view in another textbook series, see Lunden, Norge under Sverrextten. Recent historiography is discussed by Helle, “Norway in the High Middle Ages.” 17. Sveinsson, The Age of the Sturlungs, 107—11. This traditional conception of Icelandic history is presented in the standard textbook, J. Johannesson, [slendinga Saga. Several scholars have recently challenged the standard periodization, arguing that the level of violence and lawlessness in Sturlunga saga, the main source for the period, was no more than that in the Saga Age, that the roots of the concentration of power in a few families in the Age of Troubles lie much earlier, and that the pacifying effect of Christianity is assumed on the basis of biased clerical sources. See Byock, “Cultural Continuity.” CHAPTER I SLAVERY AND SERVITUDE IN MEDIEVAL EUROPEAN SOCIETY

1. It is not merely fortuitous that various ways of understanding slavery coincide in the New World. Since this is the best-known modern example of a slave

NOTES TO PAGES 6-9 I9I society, it has provided a starting point for the creation of definitions. Certainly the leading students of slavery as a global phenomenon (David Brion Davis, Orlando Patterson} take their starting point in studies of New World slavery. The author of the classic article on slavery in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Moses I. Finley, is a specialist in classical slavery. 2. See Finley, Ancient Economy, 64. 3. The word servus is translated as slave, servant, or serf depending on the context; see below for discussion of the distinction between the concepts of slave and serf. It can only be assumed to have the juridical meaning “slave” when contrasted with some other term of status (like colonus, litus, or aldius), when equated with mancipium, or when the context unambiguously indicates the meaning. See Bloch, “How and Why,” 7, and Bloch, “Personal Liberty and Servitude,” 34, 64, and passim. 4. For discussion of the meaning of freedom in the Middle Ages, see Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 193—98; Schmelzeisen, “Frei wovon?—frei wozu?”;

Irsigler, Freiheit und Unfreiheit im Mittelalter’; Grundmann, “Freiheit als Postulat.” See also the various articles collected in Makdisi, Sourdel and SourdelThomine, eds., La notion de liberté au moyen age. 5. Finley, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, s.v. “Slavery,” 307-08; Finley, Ancient Economy, 67. 6. Finley, “Between Slavery and Freedom,” 247—48. 7. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13, 17-34. 8. For example, the editors of a leading collection of essays on African slavery have felt compelled to put the word slavery in quotation marks because the term has specific connotations for Westerners that are misleading in an African context. They see their purpose as “to present to the reader a series of studies examining the various African institutions that have been referred to as ‘slavery.’” Kopytoff and Miers, “African ‘Slavery,’” 3-12, 76—78. 9. Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 6, includes three “necessary conditions” in his definition of slavery: the slave’s position as property (in the Roman legal sense}, the master’s unlimited rights over the slave, and the slave’s role as outsider in the slaveholding society. He mentions, however, that there are some exceptions to the third “necessary condition.” For a scholar to be able to classify an institution as slavery or a group of people as slaves even though they do not fit the previously established “necessary conditions” indicates that his classification depends not on whether they match a formal definition but on a more general and flexible understanding of the term and an acceptance of the way others have used it. The point is not that Phillips’ classification of slavery is flawed, but that his selection is based not on a fixed definition but rather on a general consensus of scholars. 10. Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, 10. 11. The discussion of slavery and serfdom is relevant to rural rather than urban life; the problem of definition is somewhat easier in towns with active slave markets. For the wide variety of status terms in one Italian town, and a system in which slaves had to register officially as such, see Stuard, “Urban Domestic Slavery,” 161-62. 12. Beaumanoir, Coutumes de Beauvaisis, 1452; Bloch, “How and Why,” 29. 13. Patterson, Sociology of Slavery, 217-21. 14. Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Formations,” 40—41, distinguishes slavery from serfdom by five criteria, four of which do not hold for medieval Europe. The serf may have some power vis-a-vis his lord, but only by custom not law, and this could be equally true of slaves. If the serf’s lord is a protector rather than a ransomer (the slave’s owner, in Patterson’s view, is the latter), this was a juridical fiction. The serf is capable of owning property, but only in practice, not in theory, and as for marriage,

192 NOTES TO PAGES 10-13 the Church defended the slave’s and the serf’s right to it in exactly the same terms. The serf is excluded from the community governance and political rights just as is the slave. To the extent he is considered in practice a member of the community, this has to do with the differing economic position. Patterson’s soundest argument for the distinction is that serfdom is primarily an economic institution while slavery is not. 15. Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 9, in discussing the work of Marxist scholars, equates a “slave mode of production” with Finley’s notion of a slave society. Finley, Ancient Economy, 179, criticizes the notion that ancient society was based on a “slave mode of production,” since “large sectors {in both time and space) of the Graeco-Roman world never employed productive slave labour on any significant scale,” and chattel slavery could be part of various modes of production. Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Formations,” 47—5§2, argues that a “slave mode of production” is not meaningful because slaves can be used in any mode of production. Those societies generally labeled as slave societies or slave economies are those with plantation or latifundia-type agricultural slavery, and this is how most people use the term slave mode of production. 16. Bak, “Serfs and Serfdom,” 10, notes that it is no accident that Engels, Marx,

and others chose, in designating a particular social class, a term with particular juridical meanings. Still, the term denotes different groups of people if we use it ina purely socioeconomic and not a juridical sense. 17. On this point in England in particular see Postan, “Legal Status and Economic Condition,” 278—89; Postan, Medieval Economy and Society, 160~65; and Hatcher, “English Serfdom and Villeinage,” 3—19. 18. Inaslave mode of production workers neither own nor possess the means of production, while in a feudal mode of production the serfs possess but do not own the means of production and the landlord appropriates their surplus. See Marx, Capital, 3:917—25. This is not the full definition of, nor the only difference between, the two modes of production. Other of Marx’s writings on the subject are conveniently excerpted in Marx, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, see Hobsbawm’s introduction, 42. 19. Traditional scholarship saw these classes as characteristic of “primitive Germanic society,” an entity which remained basically unchanged for a millenium. See, e.g., Wuhrer, “Die schwedischen Landschaftsrechte.” As a useful corrective, see Thompson, The Early Germans, vi and passim. 20. Tacitus, Germania 25; Thompson, “Slavery in Early Germany.” 21. Graus, “Die Gewalt,” 75, suggests that the acquisition of slaves was a major motivating force in raids and warfare in Merovingian Francia. 22. Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht zwischen Antike und Mittelalter, 123-31, 160—82, 260-73, 361-76; Rothenh6fer, Untersuchungen zur Sklaverei, 12-24, 61-70, 95— 100.

23. Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht zwischen Antike und Mittelalter, develops in detail the comparison between Germanic and Roman law on slavery, particularly the idea of noxal liability. Unfortunately Nehlsen’s projected second volume (dealing with the laws codified in the Carolingian period) has not yet appeared. See also Levy, “Reflections on the First ‘Reception.’” 24. Verlinden, L’esclavage, 1:61—102 on the Visigoths, 1:637—728 on the Franks, 2:30—96 on the Ostrogoths and Lombards; Thompson, The Goths in Spain, 267—74

and passim; King, Law and Society, 159—79. See also Claude, “Freedmen in the Visigothic Kingdom.” 25. Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht zwischen Antike und Mittelalter, 363.

NOTES TO PAGES 14-17 193 26. Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading,” 104—05; Graus, “Die Gewalt,” esp. 72—81.

27. Verlinden, L’esclavage, 2:114—282; Origo, “The Domestic Enemy”, Heers, Esclaves et domestiques, 109—63; Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 97—106; Stuard, “Urban Domestic Slavery,” 155—71. 28. Onslavery in Islamic countries in general, see R. Brunschvig, Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed., s.v. ““Abd”; Miller, “Sklaven.” 29. Lombard, The Golden Age of Islam, 198; Ibn Khurradadhbih, Kitab alMasalik wa’l-mamalik, 114—15; Verlinden, ‘Wo, wann und warum?”, Latouche, The Birth of Western Economy, 162—64. 30. Phillips, Slavery from Roman Times, 67—70 and 107-13; Verlinden, L’esclavage, 1:103—248; Verlinden, “L’esclavage dans le monde ibérique.” 31. Verlinden, L’esclavage, 1:290—545. 32. Saunders, Black Slaves and Freedmen, 59. Verlinden points out that bringing slaves from Africa to cultivate sugar in the New World followed the pattern set in medieval colonization of the Atlantic islands: L’esclavage, 1:546—632; “L’esclavage dans le monde ibérique,” 283—448; “L’esclavage dans la péninsule ibérique,” 591; “Medieval Slavery,” 39—51; “Le probléme de la continuité.” 33. Shtaerman, “Die ideologische Vorbereitung,” 225~—26. As Levy, “Libertas und Civitas,” 166, concludes, in Roman law one could be free without being a citizen. In common parlance, however, the two were often equated, just as Romans habitually referred to other types of unfree labor using the vocabulary of slavery. De Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 39 and 138. 34. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 81-82, 90; Finley, Ancient Economy, 40—42, 73 (citing Cicero’s view of all wage labor as slavish); Skydsgaard, “Non-Slave Labour,” 67; De Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 52—54. There were exceptions to the rule that no free man was under the control of another, but these exceptions themselves may well have led to the degradation in status of the lower classes among the free. The idea that no free man could be employed by another (tenants did not count as employees before they were bound to the soil and forced to work the Jandlord’s demesne land too) required the existence of slavery and promoted the polarization of society into two status groups separated by a wide gulf, regardless of the distinctions within each group. 35. On contemporary descriptions of the villa see Martin, ‘Familia Rvstica.” For other parts of the empire that were not slave economies see e.g. BiezunskaMatowist, “L’esclavage” and L’esclavage; Daubigney and Favory, “L’esclavage en Narbonnaise et Lyonnaise”; Whittaker, “Land and Labour”; Whittaker, “Rural Labour,” 76~86; Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 79. 36. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, 1-15. 37. Westermann, The Slave Systems, 1o1—02; see review by Brunt, 166. 38. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 128—29; Jones, “Slavery in the Ancient World,” 9—11; Finley, Ancient Economy, 86; Treggiari, “Questions on Women Domestics,” 187-88. By “breeding” I do not mean a systematic program but merely the encouragement of slave reproduction. Harris, “Towards a Study,” 118— 19, while not denying the importance of home-born slaves, doubts whether the slave population as a whole could have been self-reproducing. See Biezufiska-Matowist and Matowist, “La procréation,” on the general problem. 39. Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves, 106—07; De Ste. Croix, “Slavery,” 58; De Ste. Croix, Class Struggle, 231-32.

40. This assumes that landlords would have been capable of making these calculations about profit, which Finley doubts; see Ancient Economy, 83-84.

194 NOTES TO PAGES 17-20 41. On the origins of the colonus, see Ganshof, “Le statut personnel”; De Neeve, Colonus; Johne et al., Die Kolonen. 42. Finley, Ancient Economy, 86—88, 92—94, 103; Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 141-44; Hopkins, “Slavery in Classical Antiquity,” 170-71. 43. Shtaerman, Die Krise der Sklavenhalterordnung, 89—106, sees the colonate as arising not through the parceling out of large domains to tenants but through the acquisition by large landowners of scattered holdings. She sees the decline of slavery as due not to the relative unprofitability of slave labor per se but rather to the relative unprofitability of the size of estate that could conveniently be worked by slaves. See also Shtaerman and Trofimova, La schiavitu, 325-26. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 133-38, disagrees. 44. Jones, “The Roman Colonate,” 1; Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 16—17. There was, of course, a great deal of variation among regions. 45. Finley, Ancient Economy, 92—93; Jones, Later Roman Empire, 2:796. The law of 332: CTh 5:17:1. See also Westermann, The Slave Systems, 139—49; Jones, “The Roman Colonate”; Collinet, “Le Colonat,” 88—106; Segré, “The Byzantine Colonate.” 46. Jones, “The Roman Colonate,” 4—5; Dockés, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, 81-83. 47. Bloch, “How and Why,” esp. 5—6, provides the classic description of this process. See also Jones, Later Roman Empire, 795. Jones, “The Roman Colonate,” 6, notes that when agricultural slaves became tied to the land like coloni, masters were no longer allowed to sell their slaves apart from the land. 48. Latouche, The Birth of Western Economy, 19; Jones, “Slavery in the Ancient World,” 14—15; Westermann, The Slave Systems, 142—46; Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 16—17; Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 123-25; Dockés, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, 83—84. Seyfarth, Soziale Fragen, 55—67, gives asummary of the views of several Soviet scholars concerned with the question of whether the colonate represents the slave or the feudal mode of production. Other summaries in Western languages of Russian works on the subject of ancient slavery (some hostile to Soviet scholarship) include Heinen, “Neuere Sowjetische Ver6ffentlichungen”; Prachner, “Zur Bedeutung”; Mehl, “Die antike Sklavenhaltergesellschaft.” Dockés, I11 and passim, argues that masters domiciled their slaves because of the decline in the coercive power of the state, which alone protected the masters against the slave revolts that are an inevitable part of the class struggle. His use of evidence leaves a

good deal to be desired.

49. Fourquin, “Le premier moyen age,” 317—19; Latouche, The Birth of Western

SO.

Economy, 63-72; Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 34-36. 50. See Latouche, The Birth of Western Economy, 68—71. As Dockés, Medieval

Slavery and Liberation, 262n, points out, “the fact that nondomiciled slaves were regarded as movable property, generally not included as part of a man’s fortune, has led to their numbers being underestimated.” But even if we recognize that documents may underestimate them, we have no way of knowing to what extent they do 51. The free mansi are called ingenuiles but the presumably free people who held them are called coloni. The coloni do not figure as a legal group in the Carolingian laws; as with the Roman colonate the classification had to do with their economic position in relation to the landowner, while their personal status remained in theory free. See Kuchenbuch, Bdauerliche Gesellschaft, 63, on the classification of mansi at Priim in Lotharingia in the Carolingian period.

NOTES TO PAGES 21-22 19§ 52. Duby, Early Growth, 84; Bloch, “How and Why,” 9—10; Bloch, “Personal Liberty and Servitude,” 54—55; Lognon, introduction to Polyptyque de l’Abbaye de Saint-Germain des Prés, 88. 53. Dockés, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, 95-96. 54. Kuchenbuch, Bduerliche Gesellschaft, 79. For some other examples of free tenants with household slaves, see Duby, Rural Economy, 37—38. 55. Latouche, The Birth of Western Economy, 182; Capitulare de Villis, MGH LL 2, 1:82—91. See Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 40—42, on the dating and interpretation of the capitulary. 56. Latouche, The Birth of Western Economy, 193—98; Fournier, “L’esclavage en Basse-Auvergne,” 367-75; Dubled, “Etude sur la condition”; Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 55-56; Perrin, Recherches, 626—32; Duby, Rural Economy, 38. Dollinger, L’évolution des classes rurales, 277—78, estimates that small estates in Carolingian Germany probably had about 15 percent prebendal slaves (servi quotidiani). Ninthcentury polyptychs from Staffelsee and Niederaltaich from the ninth century show 25 and ro percent respectively. 57. Perrin, “Observations sur le manse,” 42; Polyptyque de l’Abbé Irminon, ed. Guerard, 1:892—96. 58. In intermarriage the woman was more often of higher status than the man. Coleman, “Medieval Marriage Characteristics,” explains this on the basis that chil-

dren inherited the status of their mother; men therefore had an incentive to marry up, to improve the position of their children, while women did not. 59. Dockés, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, 233, suggests (with no evidence, merely an assertion that “all historians are agreed,”) that there was a resurgence of demesne slavery in the Carolingian period. He links this to the restoration of a strong

state, which provided the masters with the necessary assistance in keeping down slave rebellion. He further suggests, 237—38, that the decline of slavery in the ninth century was due to slave rebellions; his evidence for this is a quotation from Jean

Bodin. |

60. Mayer, “Adel und Bauern,” 10, gives a clear statement of this school of thought (which he rejects}. The view comes originally from Tacitus, who describes a society of free warriors and slaves (the principes to whom he refers are the leaders of the warriors but do not seem to be a hereditary nobility) in which the whole community makes major decisions. Tacitus, Germania 11—13. See Lutge, “Das Problem der Freiheit,” 5, on social classes in Tacitus.

61. For presentations of this view, see A. K. G. Kristensen, “Frie bonder”; Kristensen, ‘“Danelaw Institutions,” 33-42; Dannenbauer, “Die Freien im Karolingischen Heer”; Mayer, “Konigtum und Gemeinfreiheit”; Mayer, “Bemerkungen

und Nachtrage”; Dannenbauer, “K6nigsfreie und Ministerialen”; Dannenbauer, “Hundertschaft, Centena und Huntari”; criticism in Liitge, “Das Problem der Freiheit,” 18—36, Miiller-Mertens, Karl der Grosse, 89—92, Schmitt, Untersuchungen zu den Liberi Homines, 110—36, and Irsigler, “Freiheit und Unfreiheit,” 3-4. Scholars sometimes refer to these people as “half-free” or their status as “unfree freedom,” but these terms do not appear in the sources. Mayer, “Adel und Bauern,” 10-11; Bosl, “Freiheit und Unfreiheit,” 183-85. 62. Mayer, “Die Konigsfreien und der Staat,” 35—38. On the freedom of the nobility see Irsigler, “Freiheit und Unfreiheit,” 3. 63. Bosl, “Freiheit und Unfreiheit,” 188—93. See also Mayer, “Die K6nigsfreien und der Staat,” 38—46; Bosl, “Staat, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft,” 722-24. 64. See Schulze, “Rodungsfreiheit und Konigsfreiheit,” 540—50.

196 NOTES TO PAGES 23-26 65. Bosl, “Gesellschaftsentwicklung 500—900,” 155-57. 66. Kuchenbuch, Bduerliche Gesellschaft, 356, on different systems of terminology; Miller-Mertens, Karl der Grosse, 60—92, and Schmitt, Untersuchungen zu den Liberi Homines, 245, on the heterogeneity of the liberi. 67. See Fourquin, “Le premier moyen age,” 365. 68. On individuals seeking manumission, see Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom. 69. Bloch, “Personal Liberty and Servitude,” esp. 34, 51, 61, and 72—73; Verriest,

Institutions médiévales, 171-219. The dispute is discussed in Fourquin, Lordship and Feudalism, 174-75; Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 154—74; Perrin, “Le servage,” 216~—19; Patault, Hommes et femmes de corps, 2—4.

70. See Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom, 20-26, for the jural characteristics of servitude in one French region. Fossier, La terre et les hommes, 534 and 555—64, argues that the essential dichotomy was not between free and unfree but between those subject and those not subject to seigneurial jurisdiction. 71. Perrin, “Le servage,” 214, 220, 227, and 270; Petot, “L’origine de la mainmorte”; Bloch, “Personal Liberty and Servitude,” 70. 72. Verriest, Institutions médiévales, 168—70; Fourquin, “Le temps de la croissance,” 476-82, 493—94. See Evergates, Feudal Society, 16-24, on dues as concomitants of tenure, not personal status; Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom, 20—26, on dues as measures of personal jural status. 73. Patault, Hommes et femmes de corps, 5~7. She argues that the term homme de corps does not apply to all serfs but only the descendants of Carolingian demesne slaves; the rest were considered “serfs of free origin” and often identified by their subjection to specific obligations rather than by total subjugation. As Patault concludes (10), “Thus one could admit, with L. Verriest, the long survival of distinctions

in status between free and unfree people, without in so doing contradicting the erudite analysis of M. Bloch concluding that servile condition was applied, in the medieval seigneurie, to dependents of free origin, no doubt more numerous than descendants of slaves. All, enserfed or hommes de corps, the former attempting to perpetuate the memory of their status in public law, were the serfs of the lord.” 74. At times of labor shortage, legal restrictions might be more necessary from the landlords’ point of view in order to assure a labor supply, but at the same time they were impossible to enforce: witness the erosion of serfdom in England in the century following the Black Death, despite the desperate rearguard actions by Parliament and landlords trying to restrict the mobility of labor. See Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages, 54-73. 75. Bloch, “Personal Liberty and Servitude,” 34—35, 48—64; Patault, Hommes et femmes de corps, 103—04 and 107ff. The term homme de corps may have come into use because of the ambiguity of the word servus. Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 161, and

others claim that jurists substituted the term homme de corps for servus because they recognized the difference between the serf and the Roman slave. In fact, however, the practical difference stems entirely from the serf’s more independent economic position. Any rights the serf had, like that to hold land, were customary but entirely dependent on the lord’s respect for custom: the lord “could not transgress without abuse of power,” but even in theory no one had the right to call him to account for such an abuse. 76. Bloch, “The Colliberti,” 100—or.

77. Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 159, notes that by the thirteenth century in the south of France holding a servile tenure was an admission of serfdom.

NOTES TO PAGES 27-30 197 78. Bloch, “Personal Liberty and Servitude,” 66-68. 79. Bloch, “Personal Liberty and Servitude,” 89; Perrin, “Le servage,” 230; Bosl, “Freiheit und Unfreiheit,” 202.

80. On the latter, see Schulz, “Zum Problem der Zensualitat”, Dollinger, L’évolution des classes rurales, 332—82; Bosl, “Die altesten Volksrecht,” 149; Irsigler, “Freiheit und Unfreiheit.” 81. Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 187—200; Perrin, “Le servage,” 235; Wunder, “Serfdom in Germany,” 255—59; Dollinger, L’évolution des classes rurales, 485-87. 82. Bosl, “Staat, Gesellschaft, Wirtschaft,” 755-57; Perrin, Seigneurie rurale, 279-331; Molitor, “Uber Freibauern in Norddeutschland”; Litge, “Die Unfreiheit,” 62—63.

83. Cited in Dollinger, L’évolution des classes rurales, 211n. 84. Bosl, “Freiheit und Unfreiheit,” 196; Dollinger, L’évolution des classes

rurales, 264n. : 85. Dollinger, L’évolution des classes rurales, 210, 311-15, 322—24, 330-31. 86. Litge, “Die Unfreiheit,” 58—59. See most recently Arnold, German Knighthood, 53-75, and Freed, “Origins of the European Nobility”; also, Dollinger, L’évolution des classes rurales, 485—86; Bosl, “Das ius ministerialium,” 282—83.In France, by contrast, officials, even if dependent, were not generally recruited from the unfree. Bloch, “A Problem in Comparative History,” 99—103. 87. Bosl, ‘Das ius ministerialium,” 288—93, but cf. Irsigler, “Freiheit und Un-

freiheit,” 11-12. ,

88. Bosl, Die Reichsministerialitat, 27—28; Bloch, “A Problem in Comparative History,” 1o5—o6; Molitor, Der Stand der Ministerialen, esp. 49~-81; Bosl, “Die Reichsministerialitat als Element,” for a detailed discussion of imperial ministeriales. 89. Rudolf, Grundherrschaft und Freiheit, 42. 90. Faull, “The Semantic Development”; Pelteret, “Slavery in Anglo-Saxon England,” 119-20. The Celtic lands had their own indigenous slave systems, as witnessed by their detailed legal classifications of personal status. On Wales see Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, 64~67; Bromberg, “Wales and the Medieval Slave Trade.” On Ireland see Mac Niocaill, Ireland before the Vikings, 67-78; O CorrAin, Ireland before the Normans, 45—48. g1. Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading,” 99—114; Pelteret, Late AngloSaxon Slavery. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 47—48, discusses the liminality of the slave in Anglo-Saxon society but uses as evidence only one character in Beowulf. The evidence that this is a slave is the word peow at |. 2223, but the word does not actually appear in the manuscript; it is Klaeber’s emendation from the single letter b. Other editors have emended it as begn, “retainer, soldier,” and recently a cogent argument has been made for peof, “thief” (T. M. Andersson, “The Thief in Beowulf,” 493—96). For a recent discussion of slavery in the context of other

economic developments in Anglo-Saxon England, see Loyn, “Currency and Freedom.”

92. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England, 349-50; Harvey, “The Extent and Profitability,” 53—60; Lennard, Rural England, 339—44; Finn, Introduction to Domesday Book, 122—23; Hilton, The Decline of Serfdom, 14. Specific examples of estates

worked by demesne slaves are discussed in Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 33. On the development of the manor, including demesne and tenant holdings, see Aston, “The Origins of the Manor,” and Aston, “The Origins of the Manor—A Postscript.” 93. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 27, called servi “serfs” but ex-

198 NOTES TO PAGES 30—34 plained that he did so only because the term is cognate with servus and that he in fact considered the servus of Domesday “a slave, one who in the main has no legal rights.” See Pelteret, Late Anglo-Saxon Slavery, Appendix, for the Anglo-Saxon terminology. 94. Finn, Introduction to Domesday Book, 122—23; Lennard, Rural England, 339-44; see chart of Anglo-Saxon status terms in Finberg, Agrarian History, 1:2:508. See also “Rectitudines singularum personarum,” Gesetze 1:444—53, and discussion in Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England, 187—95, and Finberg, Agrarian History, 1:2:512—15. Of course, to call the Domesday villanus free may beg a number of questions about

the relation between economic and juridical freedom, to be discussed below. See Titow, English Rural Society, 56—57; Hatcher, “English Serfdom and Villeinage,” 28—30.

95. Pelteret, Late Anglo-Saxon Slavery, 301, 327-57. Domesday Book may misrepresent the proportion of slaves. The absolute number of slaves is easy enough to determine, so it is possible to calculate their number as a percentage of householders,

but many slaves may not have had families, or more than one member of a slave family may have been counted where only the head of a free peasant family would be counted. Clarke, ‘Domesday Slavery,” 37—46; Finn, An Introduction to Domesday Book, 118-22; Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England, 350—53; Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 27. 96. Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond, 33. 97. This would not have been out of moral scruple: according to Smith, Medi-

eval Sicily, 15, the Normans who conquered Sicily in 1071 did sell women and children into slavery. Sicily’s international market for slaves to be sent overseas did not exist in England. 98. Lane Poole, From Domesday Book to Magna Carta, 40; Pelteret, Late Anglo-Saxon Slavery, 327-28. 99. Pelteret, “Slavery in Anglo-Saxon England,” 123-31. 100. S. P. J. Harvey, “The Extent and Profitability,” 63—90; Titow, English Rural Society, 43; Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 62; Miller, “La société rurale,” 120, 129; Miller, “England in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.” 101. Postan, “The Famulus,” 7~—13; Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 97. 102. Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, 132. 103. The two major scholars who have reached this conclusion have very different explanations for the process: see Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage,” and Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 221—65. See also Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 103-05. 104. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 226—37; Hyams, “The Action of Naifty,” 328.

105. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage,” 6—8; see also Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 104.

106. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 223.

107. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage,” 13—15; Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 104—05.

108. Milsom develops this argument in The Legal Framework of English Feudalism. 109. See Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 221—65, particularly 240. 110. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage,” 6; Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 241-42. 111. P.D. A. Harvey, “The English Inflation,” 22. 112. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 48; Hilton, “The Decline of Serfdom,” 16. 113. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free, 61; Kosminsky, Agrarian History, 201-02.

NOTES TO PAGES 34-41 199 114. Hatcher, “English Serfdom and Villeinage”; Kosminsky, Agrarian History, 203—07; Dyer, Lords and Peasants, 106. 115. On the confusion between tenure and status, see Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 107-19. Hyams, “The Proof of Villein Status,” 721—24 and 730, notes that mixed marriages made personal status hard to prove and lords often chose to claim that a tenant held in villeinage and therefore owed villein services rather than claim that he was a villein by personal status. 116. Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, 43-137; Pollock and Maitland, History of English Law 1:356—83, 1:412~—32.

117. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 82—89; Thorne, introduction to Bracton, 3 :xiii-lii.

118. Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage,” 6. | 119. Vinogradoff, Villainage in England, 48, 127—28. 120. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 81.

121. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 1-79. Smith, “Some Thoughts,” 114, argues that villeins were so protected by custom that they could be said to have a fee simple interest in their land. 122. Hyams, King, Lords and Peasants, 89—107, 125—60. That a villein could complain and seek redress for his lord’s treatment of him does not, of course, mean that there would be much likelihood of his winning, but it does differ from Roman and other slave law under which there might be limits on what a master could do to his slaves but any fines for infractions went to the state or other authority rather than to the victim. 123. This view of the serf protected by custom is put forward by, inter alia, Bloch,

“Personal Liberty and Servitude,” 61-63; Hatcher, “English Serfdom and Villeinage,” 23—24; and Smith, “Some Thoughts.” 124. Finley, “Between Slavery and Freedom,” 234, discusses analogous issues in ancient Greece. 125. Onthe canon law’s application of Roman slave law to the serf, see Gilchrist, “Medieval Canon Law,” 274-75; A. Dumas, Dictionnaire du droit canonique, s.v.

“testament.” 126. See Mayer, “Adel und Bauern,” 17; Rudolf, Grundherrschaft und Freiheit, 34-35. 127. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 193; Schmelzeisen, “Frei wovon?” 153; Rudolf, Grundherrschaft und Freiheit, 35; Irsigler, “Freiheit und Unfreiheit,” 15; Hilton, “Freedom and Villeinage,” 3—5. 128. Gurevich, Categories of Medieval Culture, 172. CHAPTER 2 THEIDENTITY OF THE SLAVE IN SCANDINAVIA

1. Hereafter the English derivative thrall will be used for the Old Norse forms preell, trell, etc. 2. See Prakash, “Terms of Servitude,” for a discussion of how terms from their own language applied by conquerors to agrarian groups in a colonized culture can construct a new version of social reality. 3. Throughout this work, whenever I have quoted or cited a source referring to slaves, I have noted what term appears in the original if (1) the meaning is at all ambiguous or (2) the meaning is unambiguous but the term used is unusual. 4. Slavery still existed in Sweden at the time of the Old Swedish Pentateuch. Though it was not current in Norway by the time of Stjorn, the terms used there still indicate what statuses Norwegians equated with Latin terms. Servus is rendered

200 NOTES TO PAGES 42-43 more consistently as pre! there than in the Swedish text, but sometimes it seems that the translator felt he had to explain: in 2 Kings 4:1 (Stjérn 612) “til bianar oc bionkanar oc breldoms” for the Vulgate’s “ad serviendum” indicates that thrall might have lost some of its specific meaning. Belsheim, ‘“Bibelen paa norsk-islandsk,” has collected Biblical citations from other texts but few of them are passages dealing with servitude. 5. Michalsen and Stech, “Det slaviske ordet ‘otrok,’” 235; Hellquist, Svensk

etymologisk ordbok, s.v. “tral”; Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, s.v. “thrall”; Holthausen, Woérterbuch des Altwestnordischen, s.v. “prell”; Falk and Torp, Norwegisch-Danisches etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v. “trzl”; Marstrander, “Trell”, De Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v. “prell.” De Vries also suggests the possibility that the word goes back to a PGmc *pranhila, with a meaning of “forced,” but the evidence of the cognates argues against this. 6. For threl, e.g., Gen. 9:25 (Svenska medeltidens Bibel-arbeten 1:173; Stjdrn,

63, has prell ok pionustumadr); for thiznisto swen, e.g., Gen. 24:35 (Svenska medeltidens Bibel-arbeten 1:205, though Stjérn, 137, has prela ok pionustukonur); for man, Exod. 12:30 (Svenska medeltidens Bibel-arbeten 1:311, where Stjorn, 281, has bionustumenn). For mercenarius, Exod. 21:20 (Svenska medeltidens Bibel-arbeten 1:336; Stjorn, 302); Lev. 25:6 (Svenska medeltidens Bibel-arbeten 1:372). 7. Innocent III to Andreas Suneson, Archbishop of Lund, 13 January 1206, DD

108, 1:4:213-I4. !

8. L.-A. Norborg, KLNM, s.v. “Landbo”; H. Bjorkvik, KLNM, s.v. “Leiglend-

ing.” g. See Riis, “Villici og Coloni,” 1—20, for the use of these words in documents from Denmark. See also chapter 3. 10. On Saxo’s use of this term to mean female slave, see Steenstrup, “Saxo Grammaticus,” 106. Glossarium til medeltidslatinet i Sverige, s.v. “ancilla,” gives only the meaning tjdnarna (female servant), but offers no citations (except for ancilla dei), ignoring testamentary manumissions of ancillae. An Icelandic reference to Ps. 123:2 uses ambatt for the Vulgate’s ancilla: Heilagra Manna Sggur 2:215. 11. Brugmann, “Zu den Benennungen,” 381 and 390; De Vries, s.v. “ambatt”; Uhlenbeck, Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v. “andbahti”; Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, s.v. “Amt.” 12. Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. “Aanaudigr’”; De Vries, s.v. “naud”; Schlyter,

Ordbok, SGL 13, s.v. “anngpogher”; Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 5:43 n. 40; G. F. V. Lund, Det eldste danske skriftsprogs ordforrdd, s.v. “annepogher.” It appears as a nickname in Lnb, $351, where a man is called “Ormr Aanaudgi” (which Palsson and Edwards, Book of Settlements, 133, translate as “Orm the Unfree”} although he does not appear to be a slave. There may be a story behind his name that Landndmab6ok does not tell. 13. Exod. 21:7 in the Vulgate reads “si quis vendiderit filiam suam in famulam non egredietur sicut ancillae exire consuerint” (“If someone sells his daughter as a famula she shall not go out as the ancillae do”). Svenska medeltidens Bibel-arbeten 1:335 uses annoedogha for famula and ambot for ancilla. Stjérn, 302, has “if a man sells his daughter as an ambatt she shall not go out as other ambattir do.” Both Norse texts suggest that they did not make the fine distinction the Latin did between types

of servants; all were conceived of as unfree, so the same terms could be used to

translate all. |

14. Wills are found throughout DD and DS. For municipal law codes, see that of Tonder (1243, based on that of Lubeck), 10, DGKL 1:217.

NOTES TO PAGES 44-46 201 15. Postan, “The Famulus.” 16. Gen. 24:2 (Svenska medeltidens Bibel-arbeten 1:203; Stjérn, 134, here uses radmaor). On the term in Icelandic sources see Krag, “Trelleholdet,” 366—67. 17. DD 32, 1:4:62. 18. Lev. 25:40 (Svenska medeltidens Bibel-arbeten 1:375). 19. Johannesson, Die Stellung der freien Arbeiter, 100; Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei auf Island, 48—52. 20. Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei auf Island, 51; Krag, “Treller og trellehold,” 210n.; Sandnes, “‘Tolv kyr, to hester og tre treler,’” 81. See also Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. “man.” 21. VmL Manh 24:8; VmL Manh 6:4; VmL Arf 17. 22. The Uppland law prohibiting the sale of a Christian slave and the S6dermanland law that followed it use thrall. UL K6p 3 and SdmL K6p 3. UL Arf 19, recognizing the marriage of two slaves, uses unfree; this is repeated, also using unfree, in VmL Arf

14 and SdmL Arf 3:2, though DL Gipt 4 uses thrall; UL Manh 6:5, providing for identical compensation for the killing of a slave and a free man, uses unfree, as does UL Arf 22, on the penalty for unlawful intercourse being the same. The S6dermanland laws setting levels of compensation for slaves and free people, different in some instances but the same in others, also uses unfree. SdmL Byg 24:1, and S€dmL Manh 26:8.

23. UL Manh 15:1. 24. Charles Verlinden, “L’origine de sclavus” and L’esclavage 2:999—I1010. 25. Pelteret, “Late Anglo-Saxon Slavery,” 51 and 480~84; Bosworth and Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “wealh.” Wealh may originally have meant “foreigner” before it came to mean “Celt.” Faull, “The Semantic Development,” 38 n.

Some scholars have suggested that the word est in later Old Swedish and early Modern Swedish came to mean slave or serf, and that this development is a relic of a

trade in Estonian slaves. Lindroth, “Estnisk bosattning,” 196-98, points out the many Swedish place-names beginning with Est- and suggests that these settlements derive their names from Estonians originally brought to Sweden as slaves. The earliest use of Est for serf or slave apparently comes from the sixteenth century (Svenska Akademien, Ordbok 6fver svenska sprdket, s.v. “Est,” cites examples from 1523 and 1569}. Itis nota relic of medieval slavery; rather, it is due to the fact that Sweden took over Estonia in the early modern period at a time when the landlords were German and the peasants (serfs) Estonian. 26. Rosén in Carlsson and Rosén, Svensk historia, 1:76, Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, 200, and Skovgaard-Petersen, “The Coming of Urban Culture,” 8—10, exemplify the many modern scholars who refer to this slave trade but are unable to give many specifics. 27. laccept here the equation of the Rus’ with Scandinavians (at least there were Scandinavians among those referred to as Rus’), but this identification is not universally accepted. There is dispute over the meaning of both this term and “Varangian.” The Russian Primary Chronicle, 59—60, tells of the Varangian Rus’ coming to rule at Novgorod in the ninth century. The controversy, known as the Normannist debate, over the origin of the Rus’ became entangled in fierce polemic. For discussions in English of the origin of the name, of the historical worth of the Primary Chronicle,

and of the whole controversy, see Riasanovsky, “The Varangian Question”; Riasanovsky, “The Embassy of 838”; V. Thomsen, The Relations between Ancient Russia and Scandinavia, 37—86; Vernadsky, The Origins of Russia, 174—209; Paszkiewicz, The Origin of Russia, 1o9—81; Cross and Sherbowitz-Wetzor, introduction

202 NOTES TO PAGES 46-47 to The Russian Primary Chronicle, 38—50; G. Jones, A History of the Vikings, 244— 50; Boba, Nomads, Northmen and Slavs, 102—32; Pritsak, The Origin of Rus’.On the archeological side, much of the recent material from excavations in the NovgorodSmolensk-Lake Ladoga area has not yet been fully published, and even less is avail-

able in Western European languages. See Stalsberg, “Scandinavian Relations with Northwest Russia.” For a summary of recent work in Russian, see Dejevsky, “The Varangians.” See also Avdusin, “Smolensk and the Varangians,” and comments by Klejn, Lebedev and Nazarenko, and Bulkin; the papers in Rahbek Schmidt, ed., Varangian Problems; and for an older summary of the archeological material, Arbman, Svear i Osterviking. On the arrival of the Swedes in Grobin (Latvia], see Nerman, Grobin-Seeburg, 199. 28. Besides Ibn Fadlan, discussed below, other Arabic sources mention the Rus’ as traders in different commodities: furs, swords, honey, wax, skins, tin, lead, mercury, and slaves. These sources, collected in Birkeland, Arabiske kilder, are by no means all eyewitness accounts—they date from as late as the fourteenth century— nor are they all independent. 29. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings, 123—25, denies that these coins arrived via the slave trade, or indeed any trade. See also Sawyer, “The Viking Perspective.” On the

dirham hoards in Russia and the Ukraine, see the series of articles by Thomas Noonan. On the coins found in Sweden itself see Noonan, “When did Islamic Coins First Appear?”; Hovén, “Ninth-Century Dirham Hoards”; Herschend, “Om vad silvermynt kan vara uttryck f6r’; Rasmusson, “An Introduction to the Viking-Age Hoards.” The dirhams from Scandinavia—86,o00 in all, of which 80,000 are from Gotland—have not yet been studied in detail to determine whether the patterns of distribution among various mints are the same as those found in Russia (this would indicate whether the coins were arriving in Scandinavia via Russia or directly from the Islamic lands without circulating on the way). Such a study will have to await the completion of Malmer et al., ed., Corpus Nummorum Saeculorum IX-XI. In the meantime, the best summary is Stenberger, Die Schatzfunde Gotlands. See also Granberg, Forteckning 6ver Kufiska myntfund. 30. The passage for which Ibn Fadlan has become famous among archeologists and Beowulf scholars is his description of the ship burial of a Rus’ chieftain accom-

panied by a female slave. See chapter 3. )

31. Ibn Fadlan, “Reisebericht,” 85—86. My English translation is based on the German translation. Amin Razi’s Encyclopedia, a sixteenth-century work containing an epitome of Ibn Fadlan’s report that may possibly be a witness to an older text than the existing manuscript, omits any mention of slaves in this passage. ”Ibn Fadlan’s Account,” trans. Smyser, 97. 32. Ibn Fadlan describes in detail the sexual use of the girls the Rus’ bring with them (Ibn Fadlan, “Reisebericht,” 83); it is not explicit in the Arabic that they are slaves (John Boswell, pers. comm., Dec. 1983), although the fact that they are to be sold certainly indicates this. For another example of Ibn Fadlan’s interest in sexual]

matters relating to the Rus’, see Ibn Fadlan, “Reisebericht,” 93, an account of customs he does not claim to have witnessed, which reveals a good deal about his method and approach. 33. Birkeland, “Arabiske Kilder,” 16—17. Birkeland notes (136n.) that others have suggested that it is the women who are made slaves, but actually the word in this instance has a masculine ending. 34. One late Icelandic legendary saga refers to a slave eunuch belonging to the

NOTES TO PAGES 47-78 203 daughter of the King of Permia (Bosa saga ok HerrauO6s 13). This does not mean that

Scandinavians had any eunuchs—there is evidence for castration as a punishment for slaves, but no references to it as anormal occurrence—but it indicates that by the thirteenth or fourteenth century they did connect slaves with eunuchs when writing about exotic lands. In Spain the Arabic word siklabi, “Slav,’”’ came to take on the meaning of eunuch. R. Brunschvig, EI, s.v. ““Abd.” There is no reason to think that male Slavs were not also sold along the Volga to traders from the Muslim East, but the trade route via Germany and France to Umayyad Spain was quite distinct from the route via the Volga and the Caucasus to Iran. Of over 62,000 Muslim coins found in Scandinavia from the Viking period, only thirteen were from Spain. Linder-Welin, “Spanish-Umaiyad Coins found in Scandinavia,” 15. 35. There is evidence of Slavic influence (metalwork and pottery) in the Viking Age level of the settlement at Eketorp on Oland, as well as in a few other excavations,

but this can be best explained by trade or a group of Slav settlers. Stenberger, “Eketorp,” 18.

36. Alcuin, Vita Willibrordi 9; Rimbert, Vita Anskarii 15; Vita Rimberti 17. The ransom of captives was a literary topos in Merovingian saints’ lives and may have been taken over into later vitae, so it is well not to rely too much on saints’ lives for evidence of when slavery was common. Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading,” 105. For chronicles, see, for example, Annales Bertiniani, s.a. 842; Annales Fuldenses, s.a. 840 and s.a. 885; Annales Xantenses, s.a. 845; Annales Vedastini, s.a. 879, 880, 881, 884, and 885; d’Haenens, Les invasions normandes, 89-90. Most accounts of Viking raids refer to burning and killing, not capturing of slaves. 37. Snorri Sturluson, Haralds saga Sigurdarsonar 19, and Oldfs saga Tryggvasonar 6—7.

38. SkL 129. The Latin paraphrase makes it even clearer that the text refers to the victim of a raid. ASun 75. 39. DD 32, 1:4:63. It may be that “Christianus” was a description and not a proper name and that his enslavement was “unjust” because he was a Christian.

40. Vita Sancti Wilhelmi Abbatis et Confessoris 17, in Vitae Sanctorum Danorum, 328. 41. Adam of Bremen, Gesta 4:6. Krag, “Treller og trellehold,” 215, argues that this is a moral comment on Adam’s part and not a reflection of the actual situation. 42. Henry of Livonia, Chronicon Livoniae 1:5, 11:5, 11:6, and passim. 43. Henry of Livonia, Chronicon Livoniae 13:4 and 10:7. On slaves and captives, see Skyum-Nielsen, “Saxo som Kilde,” 175. 44. DS 1656; Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhalle, 137. Karelus in this document need not be a proper name. In the original will (Svensk Riksarkivet, Pergamentbrevsamlingen) there are no initial capitals on proper names. It could be a misspelling: the will also refers to a priest by the name of Karulus, and it may be that these are both variants of Karolus. The possibility that Karelus is an ethnic distinction used as a name is tantalizing indeed, but we cannot make too much of it. 45. DS 2418 and Finlands medeltidsurkunder 313. The Swedish translation found in a copy from 1537 includes slaves, but a Swedish version in the same hand as the Latin (preserved in a fifteenth-century copy) has tiznara (servants) instead of trala. 46. They may have included Novgorodians as well as Finns. The former, of course, were Christian, but Orthodox rather than Catholic, and the Swedes might

not have considered them coreligionists. On conflict between Sweden and

204 NOTES TO PAGE 49 Novgorod, including the religious aspects, see E. Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 171-91. The distinction between Christian and non-Christian slaves appears in some of the Svear laws: UL Kop 3 and SdmL K@6p 3.

47. Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh, trans. Todd, 43; Bromberg, “Wales and the Medieval Slave Trade,” 264; Pelteret, “Slave Raiding and Slave Trading,” 106—10; Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan und Isold, ll. 2149-2757; Lnb SH6, $84 (H72) and

S123 (Hg5). | 48. Lnb §278; Droplaugarsonar saga 1; “POérsteins pattr uxaféts” 7, in Fjortiu

Islendinga-pexttir, 452; Pattr Rognvalds, Oldfs saga Tryggvasonar 243, Flateyarbok 1:320. In the stories of Arneid and Freystein, the high birth of the slave is recognized and the slave is freed and marries a free person. This could be indicative of the special treatment accorded to slaves from good Norse families, or the high lineage could be a creation of the storyteller to account for the fact that a former slave married a free person. 49. The Celtic genotypes are expressed in the phenotypic distribution of A and O blood types, which differs greatly from that on the Scandinavian mainland and more closely resembles the distribution found in Ireland and Scotland, although, as Steffensen, “The Physical Anthropology of the Vikings,” 92—95, points out, looking at a high frequency of the O gene as a Celtic trait “would amount to saying that the Icelanders had more Celtic blood than the Irish and the Scots.” Bjarnason et al., “The Blood Groups of Icelanders,” 448, suggest that the blood-group data show the proportion of Norwegian genes as below 25 percent, even taking into account the high O frequency in the Trondelag (Western Norway) from where many of the Icelanders

came. More recently and cautiously, Constandse-Westermann, “Genetical Affinity,” 161—63 and 176, concluded from other traits as well as the ABO system that

“we might very tentatively postulate the existence of a genetic tie between the populations of Scotland, Ireland and Iceland.” Other measures besides blood types have been used as well. Saugstad, “The Settlement of Iceland,” uses the frequency of the gene for phenylketonuria to suggest that the Norwegian element was around 25 percent; comments by Berry, Edwards, Rafnsson, Steffensen (suggesting a maximum of 40 percent for the Celtic population), and Thompson, and Saugstad’s reply, follow. Potts, “History and Blood Groups,” and Sunderland, “Comment,” discuss the methodology of population history by blood groups. A. C. Berry, “Non-Metrical Variation,” 355—56, uses physical anthropology to determine phenotypic patterns and concludes that there are strong resemblances between the Hebrides and Orkneys and Iceland. Steffensen, “Knoglerne fra Skeljastadir,” argues that cranial differences show a much larger component from the British Isles in the Icelandic population than is indicated by Landnamabok. Thompson, “Icelandic Admixture Problem,” 69, suggests that, based on gene frequencies, the Icelanders were “of a wholly Irish origin,” very different genetically from Norwegians, Danes, and Swedes. Her mathematical model comes up with a 2 to 7 percent Norse component (p. 79). Obviously this would apply to free people as well as to slaves. While there is plenty of room for disagreement both about the quality of these data and about their interpretation, it seems established that there is a strong Celtic component in the Icelandic population even if the evidence is not conclusive enough to put a percentage on it or to state that the Celtic component outweighed the Norwegian. 50. The source for the origins of the settlers is Landnadmabok; its value for

computing percentages of Icelanders of Norse and Celtic origin is defended by Steffensen, “Toélfredilegt mat.” See also J. Johannesson, /slendinga Saga, 15-24.

NOTES TO PAGES 49-51 205 51. Examples from Landnamab6k: S20 (H20}; H21; $83 (H71)}; $366 (H321); S392.

52. Smyth, Scandinavian Kings, 159-64. 53. “Ogmundar pattr dytts,” 108. Glum’s son Vigfts also refers to Ogmund’s ancestry, accusing him of taking after the slave kindred more than after the people of Pvera, Glim’s kinspeople (107). 54. OgL Gipt 29. This whole law uses the terms fostre and fostra and so applies only to home-born slaves, who could possess some property (see discussion of this group in chapter 3). The Scandinavian laws on the subject may be compared with Roman law, where if the two parents belonged to different masters the child belonged to that of the mother. There was no legal recognition of the parents’ relationship, so the father or his owner could have no claim (CTh 12:1:6). There were, however, exceptions; Constantine laid down rules about the division of property providing that slave families were to be kept together. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 78; CTh 2:25:1; C 3:38:11; Inst 3:6:10; Nov 22:9:10. The Lombard law also provided that the child of a female slave was a slave but did not state it as an explicit principle that the child of a mixed union followed the status of the mother. LLomb 156; similarly EdTh 65. (Cf. LHP 77:1—2a, where the compiler seems to be confused as to whether a child of a mixed union follows the status of the father or the mother; this confusion continued throughout the history of English serfdom.) The Visigothic law, on the other hand, provided that the child followed the lower of the parents’ statuses—the opposite of the Swedish laws. Verlinden, “L’enfant esclave,” 110; LVis 3:2:3 and 3:3:9. 55. DLGipt 4; UL Arf 19; VmL Arf 14; SdmL Arf 3:2. It is clear from the Swedish

laws that “the better half” refers to the parent of higher status. The canon law has a different rule: Gratian, Decretum, Pars II, Causa XXXII, Q. IV, c. 15, states that the child shall take “the worse part.” This was sometimes interpreted as meaning that the children followed the parent of lower status, the exact opposite of the Swedish law (for example, Rufinus, Summa Decretorum, 487, took this interpretation, as did much German custom, using the phrase “der argere Hand”). Where there was no legal marriage, however, as Gratian said in the next sentence, the child followed the status of the mother. Under Roman law, where one partner was a slave there could never be a legal marriage, so in any case of mixed marriage the child automatically followed the mother; see Watson, Roman Slave Law, 10-12. Some decretists interpreted “deteriorem partem” to mean the mother, so that the rule would agree with the Roman law rule. Stephanus of Tournai, Die Summa, 244, explained that the woman was always the inferior part of a marriage, so the sentence meant the children always followed her. See Gilchrist, “Medieval Canon Law,” 293. Ivo of Chartres had the rule that a child follows its mother’s status, apparently whether or not the parents are married: Decretum 16:185. 56. UL Arf 19. 57. Uplandz Laghen, fol. 21r-21v, also edited in Upplandslagen enligt Cod.

Holm. B199 och 1607 drs utgdva, 101. Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 1:2:85n., think that the 1607 edition must be in error. On the dating of the texts in the mss. and printed edition, see Henning, “Upplandslagens redigering,” 146;

Stahle, “Nagra fragor,” 91-139. Three of the mss. were used in Schlyter’s edition (SGL). The other two have been edited separately: Upplandslagen efter Angs6handskriften, 47, and Upplandslagen enligt Codex Esplunda, 52. Another medieval fragment of the inheritance section, “Ett fragment af Upplandslagens Arfdabalk,” is

2.06 NOTES TO PAGES 51-52 missing the page with this provision. The inheritance section of UL also appears in

the only extant ms. of HL (Ups. B49], from the fourteenth century, and has the provision that the child shall be free (fol. 771).

58. Ups. B53, fol. 39v. See Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 1:2:85n. 59. The second provision would not be wholly redundant, because it also states that the slave woman who marries a free man with her owner’s permission may go free along with her children. 60. Hasselberg, ‘Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 60-65. The clearest reason for believing that the reading “that child is free” is not original lies in the treatment of the law by the other two codes that draw heavily on the Uppland law, those of Vastmanland and S6dermanland. Had the original reading been “that child is unfree” it is easy to

explain why it might have been omitted in the other codes: it could well have been seen as redundant. If, however, the reading were “that child is free,” one could explain why Vastmannalagen did not take it up, but it is much more difficult to explain about S6dermannalagen. The Vastmanland law is in general much harsher on slavery than the Uppland law: for example, it does not copy the provision that a slave shall be compensated for in the same way as a free man, but has low levels of compensation similar to those in the other Scandinavian laws. (UL Manh 6:5; VmL Manh 24:8.) The reason for the harsher laws on slavery despite the Vastmanland law’s overall reliance on the Uppland law may not be a difference in the older, unwritten laws of the two provinces, but rather that the Uppland law was an issued code, whose redactors, including churchmen, were probably more interested in creating social changes than the private compiler of the Vastmanland law. The Sddermanland law is also an issued law, confirmed by Magnus Eriksson in 1327. It takes up some of the improved conditions for slaves from the Uppland law (the prohibition on selling a Christian slave: UL K6p 3; SdmL KO6p 3). That it omits the phrase from the Uppland law about the child of a marriage between two slaves would be surprising if the original reading were “that child is free”; the redactors of the law of Uppland in 1296 would hardly have been ready to take a major social step that their counterparts

thirty years later were not willing to take. The most likely interpretation is that the reading “that child is free” is later than 1327, after the redaction of the S6dermanland

laws that rely on the Uppland laws. It is probably a deliberate change, not scribal error. 61. ASun 73; AVSjL Tr 14. 62. FrL 2:1; Grla118. The Grdgds provision says not that such a child is free but that it cannot inherit; since slaves could not inherit anyhow, the provision would not be necessary if the child were not free. Grdgds does refer in passing to the child of two slaves being a slave: in referring to penal slavery, it says that a thief shall be a slave as if he had been born of two slaves (Gr Ib 229}. 63. GuL 223 (male slaves over 15 years of age, raised at home, may be given in payment of wergeld); AVgL Piuf 17 and YVgL Piuf 52 (if a slave has been stolen, the

owner claims it by saying he has nourished it and brought it up). 64. GuL 57; Frl 2:6. 65. FrLb 2:2.

66. The lack of references to slave children in law codes and sagas does not, of

course, mean that they did not exist. Exposure of female children has also been suggested as a possible explanation for the lack of unmarried women in sagas, but in this case as well as with slave children it may merely be that saga authors took no

NOTES TO PAGES 52-55 207 interest in them. Frank, “Marriage in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Iceland,” 475.

67. Ari Porgilsson, [slendingabok 7. See Boswell, “Expositio and Oblatio” and The Kindness of Strangers, for the general context of the practice. Foote, “Prelahald 4 Islandi,” 62, points out that when the continuation of the practice of exposing children was sanctioned as one of the conditions for the acceptance of Christianity, it

probably referred to free children, because the right of the slaveowner to kill his slaves was not in question (see chapter 4). 68. Palsson, “Um lok preidéms.” 69. AVgL Arf 22; OgL Arf 17; SkL 131; ASun 77. 70. FrL 10:40; GuL 259; GuL 16; GuL 266. The fact that a penalty for working on Sunday appears only for foreign slaves might indicate that by the time Christianity

appears in the laws slave and foreign were linked concepts. In an Icelandic text quoting Gal. 3:28, that there is “neither slave nor free” in Christ, the phrase is “né utlendr brell né frelsingr,” “neither foreign slave nor free.” (Leifar, 1.) This does not necessarily imply that all slaves were foreign or that in the twelfth or thirteenth century when this was written they were imagined to be so, but in emphasizing the contrasts that come together in Christ, the phrase does indicate the connection of slave and foreigner. 71. On penal slavery in Roman law, see Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 277-78. In LVis enslavement is the punishment for several crimes: e.g., LVis 7:2:13, for theft; similarly, LBurg 47; LBav 7:4. See Thompson, The Goths in Spain, 137.

72. OgL Arf 11: “and [one may] not give oneself as a voluntary slave, because Birger Jarl abolished that”; OgL Dr 17:2; UL Kép 3:3; SdmL K6p 3. 73. OgL Uab 4, 35 and 38; UL Ping 7:3, echoed in VmL Ping 15; GL 16:2; AVgL Piuf 3:1; YVgL Piuf 27. 74. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 32—33. The word comes from OS flat, Olc flet, the benches on which guests or followers sat, as opposed to the householder’s high seat. Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 5:144n. Provisions for the flatféring are found in AVgL Iord 3:1; YVgL Iord 5. OgL has the

same sort of status, though it is not called flatforing. It is clear that these people received their keep in return for their property, not for work (OgL Arf 12). Similarly, DL Gipt 16; VmL Iord 17; UL Iord 21; HL Iord 15. All these laws provide for indigent people to be taken care of by their relatives first, and since the stress is on the sick or incapacitated these people can hardly have been slaves. 75. JL1:31—32; ESjL 1:38—41; SkL 42—43. All these laws show great concern for offering the heirs the first chance to undertake the support of the dependent, which indicates that the laws did not envision the dependents as penniless. 76. DD 66, 1:3:1:100. See Skyum-Nielsen, review of Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdalle by Nevéus, 358—59. 77. SkL 151; ASun 95; SkL 130; ASun 76; YVSjL 87:8—10. 78. DD 32, 1:4:62. 79. GuL 71. This text is also found in a fragment of about the same time as the Codex Rantzovianus: NGL 1:15—117.

80. Grla 96; Grla 118. 81. GrIb 128-43. 82. Svarfdcela saga 13. It does seem that at times slaves and debt slaves are equated in Icelandic law though different terms are used: e.g., Grla 44, dealing with

208 NOTES TO PAGES 55~—61 law cases about harboring them. See Maurer, “Die Schuldknechtschaft,” for a full discussion. 83. He is to become a slave “as if his father was a slave and his mother a slavewoman and he was born on earth a slave.” Gr Ib 229. 84. GuL 198; EpbL 1:45; FrL 3:14. The latter provision is repeated in the so-called King Sverre’s Christian Law, which actually dates from the late thirteenth century, so the punishment may have remained in force until that date, although the later law more likely just copied obsolete provisions from the earlier ones. This law cannot antedate the establishment of female monasticism in Norway in the twelfth century. 85. Saxo, Gesta Danorum 2:2:5, trans. Fisher, 44. Cf. the Icelandic Hrolfs saga kraka 23, in which Helgi falls in love with Yrsa, who has been brought up by peasants but is (unknown to either of them) his daughter. She tells him she is a peasant’s daughter and he responds that she does not have the eyes of a slave. 86. Saxo, Gesta Danorum 2:6:18—20, trans. Fisher, 88—89. 87. Saxo, Gesta Danorum 6:7:11—13, trans. Fisher, 182. 88. Laxdcela saga 12—13 and 21; more briefly, in Lnb, Sto5. Other examples of royal slaves are Erp and Muirgeal, son and wife of Jarl Meldun of Scotland: Lnb S96 (H83). Royal women of Norse origin were also enslaved in Ireland and Scotland: Lnb S84 (H72); Lnb $278. 89. Brennu-Njals saga 47—49; “Draumr Porsteins Sidu-Hallssonar,” 321-26; Foote, “Prelahald 4 Islandi,” 59. The latter incident is noteworthy not only because the slave is Irish but also because this is the only literary reference to castration of slaves in Iceland, and because this incident, which supposedly took place around 1055, is the latest event including a slave described in the family sagas. go. Examples from Landnadmabok: S95—103; S135; S350 {H309, M14}; $390 (H345).

gi. FrL 4:5—6; Gul 61. 92. Gjessing, “Treldom i Norge,” 215, suggests that the penalty was lighter for

the foreign-born slave because he would not be familiar with local custom; this explanation is not convincing, as theft is considered wrong in most societies. 93. Lnb, $113 (H86); a fuller version in “Geirmundar pattr Heljarskinns” 2, Sturlunga saga 1:5~—7. The story also appears in Halfs saga ok Hadlfsrekka 17:1-3, with a different mother for the boys. 94. Sveinsson, [slenzkar bokmenntir 1:287. 95. Rigspula, Edda, 281—82, trans. Jeffrey Mazo (unpublished). 96. Hill, “Rigspula,” 79-81, plumps for the former. 97. Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, 66; Hastrup, Culture and History, 108. 98. Gjessing, “Treldom i Norge,” 43. Dumézil, Gods of the Ancient Northmen, 118—25, pushes it even farther back, relating it to general Indo-European social structures. 99. Edda, 286. This is a talse etymology. 100. For an excellent summary see Harris, “Eddic Poetry,” 94—97. See also Anne Holtsmark, KLNM, s.v. “Rigspula.”

101. Sveinsson, [slenzkar békmenntir, 1:287—91; Snorri Sturluson, Ynglinga saga 17; Skjoldungasaga. See Bjarni Gudnason, KLNM, s.v. “Skjoldunga Saga,” on the dating. 102. Most recently Dronke, “Sem jarlar fordum,” has argued for an early date on the grounds of saga parallels to the description of Jarl. Even if one accepts the parallels, however, that does not mean the entire poem as it now survives must predate

NOTES TO PAGE 62 209 those sagas, nor need the date be pushed back to the Viking Age, only to the twelfth century. See comment by Von See, Edda, Saga, Skaldendichtung, 516. Nerman, “Rigsbula 16:8” and “Rigspulas alder,” attempts to prove an early date by archeological support for material objects described in the poem. Such dating, however, cannot be exact, for no one can rule out the possibility that the descriptions are old but the poem as it stands is not or that material conditions later correspond with it as well. Turville-Petre, review of [slenzkar bokmenntir by Sveinsson, agrees with Sveinsson that at least the tradition behind Rigspula predates Voluspd, composed just before 1000, that Rigs bula probably influenced Skjoldunga saga rather than the reverse, and that nothing in Rigspula proves that it is later than the ninth century. Heusler, Das altgermanische Dichtung, 97, claims that since neither Snorri nor Saxo used the myth of origins presented in Rigs pula, they must not have known it, and its composition therefore postdates 1230. There is no reason why Snorri and Saxo need necessarily have used it if they had known it, but it is certainly the sort of thing they would both have seized upon. Von See, “Das Alter der Rigspula,” 88—92, argues that Snorri knew of a Rig only in the context of royal genealogy and did not have a source relating him to mythology; he also argues that Rigs bula contains echoes of Volsunga saga and is therefore late. Heusler also argues, in “Heimat und Alter,” 270~81, that many words in the poem, some of them loanwords, are not attested elsewhere until the twelfth century and that other elements in the poem, such as the pagan custom of sprinkling a child with water in naming it, are deliberate archaisms. Holm-Olsen, “Middelalderens litteratur i Norge,” 282, also dates the poem to the thirteenth century, basically following Heusler’s arguments, and Krag, “Treller og trellehold,” 212, concludes that “the poem has no value as a source for the period when slaveholding was a social reality.” 103. Von See, “Das Alter der Rigspula,” 95, and “Rigspula,” 96, connects the poem with a particular king of Norway, Hakon Hakonsson, who received the title of king in his father’s lifetime in 1240 and who was called the “young king,” like konr ungr in the poem. 104. A. Bge, KLNM, s.v. “Jarl,” notes that the only evidence for the position of the jarl in the Viking Age, besides Rigsbula, comes from sources like Heimskringla written in the thirteenth century. The jar] is mentioned in the Norwegian law codes as one of several classes with high wergelds, but the position does not seem there to be hereditary. GuL 200. See von See, “Das Alter der Rigsbula,” 93, and Gurevich, Norvezhskoe obshchestvo, English summary, 314, and Svobodnoe krest’ianstvo, English summary, pp. 260—73. Gurevich and others may go too far in arguing for a free peasant society in the Viking Age—almost a “primitive democracy”—but, though kings and magnates certainly existed, a hereditary aristocracy was not clearly delineated as it later became. See also chapter 5 on social classes in medieval Norway. 105. Von See, “Das Alter der Rigspula,” 93. 106. Homiliu-bok, 33: “Our Father who art in Heaven. We come from a great family. Under this Father, slave and lord, king and knight, rich man and poor man are brothers.” For European analogues, see Hill, “Rigspula.” 107. Young, “Does Rigspula Betray Irish Influence?” 101, points out that the custom of a visitor sleeping with the wife of the household is not attested anywhere else in Norse literature. See Chadwick, “Pictish and Celtic Marriage,” 84, 94—96, on Celtic traditions of a child fathered by a god, 107—09 on the possibility of this as a royal ritual, and 111-15 on relations to Rigspbula. There are no Celtic tales, however, that are very close analogues, and in general the custom seems to be treated as a dishonor to the husband. Robin Chapman Stacey, pers. comm., Oct. 1983.

210 NOTES TO PAGES 62-65 108. Young, “Does Rigspula Betray Irish Influence?” 99. The Irish adds a “g” in some declined forms. 109. Young, “Does Rigspula Betray Irish Influence?” 1o6—07. See Hill, “Rigspula,” 87—88, for the suggestion that the poem is an Irish (or insular) gloss on the Noah story. 110. Rigspula, Edda, 282. t11. Similarly, in nineteenth-century Russia serfholders concocted a wholly fictitious theory of different racial origins for their serfs and themselves. Kolchin, “In Defense of Servitude.” 112. Saxo’s queen of England, mentioned above, behaves in a slavish manner because her mother was once captured: enslavement taints even noble blood. In Fridpjdéfs saga ins froekna 6:9 (a legendary saga, not about real Icelanders}, a man remarks during a storm at sea that he’d rather be at home bringing women breakfast in bed; Fridpjof responds, “It shows you are of slave kindred, when you wish to work preparing food.” The type of labor one does is here, in this late saga, connected with servile blood or family. 113. Kormdks saga 3; Fostbroe dra saga 11. Kormak is of course an Irish name, but the Korma4k of the saga is not an Irishman; because of intermarriage with Irish people, Irish names—for example, Njall—became common in Iceland in general. Tomasson, “The Continuity of Icelandic Names,” 282. 114. On the relation of looks and character in Icelandic literature in general, see L. Lonnroth, “Kroppen som sjadlens spegel,” esp. 24-31. 115. Havamal, Edda, 30. 116. “Ogmundar pattr dytts,” 108; Grettis saga 82. Grettir’s slave has just betrayed him to his enemy Porbjgrn gngul, and Porbjorn and his men abuse the slave for his faithlessness. The latter proverb is also quoted in Brennu-Njdls saga 49, in reference to someone whois not a slave, though a thoroughly unpleasant sort. Saxo, Gesta Danorum 5:3:5, also has the proverb. 117. Skyum-Nielsen, “Saxo som Kilde,” 178-79. As Skyum-Nielsen points out, even though it is only used as a metaphor, it is not accidentally chosen but a very powerful one. 118. Harbarzlid6, Edda, 82; this statement occurs nowhere else. The poem is a verbal duel between Odin and Por, and Odin may be saying this just to provoke Por. However, it was generally thought that slaves did not go to Valhalla: Gautreks saga 1 states that Odin would receive a slave if his master took him along. 119. Volsunga saga 39. Finally Hogni is killed and his heart is brought to Gunnar; Gunnar says that he can now die happy, since he can be certain that the secret of the treasure will die with him. 120. Gisla saga Surssonar 20. 121. Fostbroedra saga 23; Vilmundar saga vidutan 2 (this saga is later and falls into the category of legend, but it does indicate what Icelanders of the fourteenth century thought slaves could be like); Kormdks saga 4. 122. When asked to join in a game because his master’s party is short a man, the slave Svart grumbles because he has work to do; when he joins in the game, his shoes keep coming undone and the whole party laughs at him. This whole scene, in Havardar saga Isfirdings 17, has no function in the tale except comic relief. 123. Fostbroedra saga 9; Laxdcela saga 11 (Asgaut is later given his freedom for helping a kinsman of his master’s wife escape from his pursuers, and he goes to Denmark to settle); Viga-Glums saga 23. The slaves in this last incident are not even

NOTES TO PAGES 65-67 211 named in the list of people killed in the battle. The incident is not used in the saga to show bravery on the part of the slaves; Glum’s rival Mar uses it to ridicule Glam. 124. Foote, “Prelahald 4 Islandi,” 70-72. 125. Saxo, Gesta Danorum 6:7:11—13; Jomsvikinga saga 23; Lnb $72 (H6o}. In the Landnémabok tale, a man called Asmund is buried with a slave beside him. In one of the redactions it is not stated how the slave died, but in another the slave has killed himself out of grief at his master’s death. When people walk past Asmund’s mound they hear him singing a ditty about how he would rather be alone than in such bad company. Eventually the mound is opened and the slave’s body removed so that Asmund can lie peacefully. Cf. the provisions in the laws about slaves being buried in a different part of the churchyard: EpL 50; BpL 1:9. Archeology confirms the laws’ prescription: Gejwall, Westerhus, 77, reports that at this twelfth- and thirteenthcentury cemetery, in Jamtland (on the Norwegian-Swedish border), the women were

buried to the north of the church and the men to the south, as prescribed in the Norwegian laws, and also that the people buried closer to the church tended to be taller than those buried further away, suggesting that the latter may have been less well nourished, and therefore that they may have been slaves. 126. Lnb H296. 127. Gull-Poris saga 1; Cleasby-Vigftusson, s.v. “drit.”

128. Svarfdoela saga 15 says that Skidi “bar prels nafn” which Williams, Thraldom in Ancient Iceland, 36, translates as “had this name because he was a thrall,” but this should rather be translated “was known as a slave” or “was a slave.” See Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. “bera.” 129. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 181. 130. See Meulengracht Sgrensen, Unmanly Man, 25, fora comparison with other defamatory terms. 131. GuL 196. It is not included as a punishable insult in the Frostaping law: FrL 10:35. Gragas does not specifically list punishable insults: see Gr Ib 237. 132. Svarfdcela saga 13 shows the comparability of the insults of effeminacy and servility. Klaufi uses the term pre/1] of someone who has called him ragr (“coward,” with connotations of “effeminate, catamite”’). 133. In Brennu-Njdls saga 17, Glam calls his wife’s foster-father, Pjéstolf, who is a member of his household, a slave. Pjéstélf kills him, but it is clear from the story that he had in mind to kill him even before the insult. Calling servants slaves as an insult is reported even after slavery was no more in Iceland: e.g., [slendinga saga 28, Sturlunga saga 1:257. 134. YVgL Retl 7; YVgL Add 2:13; OgL Arf 24~—25; SdmL Manh 34; VmL Kop 3;

Lund municipal code (later than 1326) 21-22, DGKL 4:7; Helsingborg (before 1346) 22, DGKL 4:153; Halmstad (after 1322) 20, DGKL 4:258; Skanske Biarkerdat (provincial privilege as reissued in the fifteenth century} 23, DGKL 4:344. The inclusion of

skalk in this last law shows that another social class has begun to join or replace slaves as the lowest in status. See also MESL (early fourteenth century}, Radzstuffw balker 31. 135. On slavery as a metaphor in the New Testament, see Vogt, “The Faithful Slave,” 141-45. 136. Speculum Regale 42. 137. Speculum Regale 54. Ancilla here could mean “maid.” Except for the prayer, the text of the King’s Mirror is in the vernacular.

138. Saga Guémundar Arasonar 22; Codex AM 619 Quarto 14:4 and passim.

212 NOTES TO PAGES 67-71 This is a Biblical citation (1 Kings 8:28—29), but this does not make it less significant that the word prz/l is used. The King James version has servant, the Vulgate servi tui.

139. It survives in a fragment of a moral tract found in a twelfth- or thirteenthcentury collection of religious works: Leifar, 1. CHAPTER 3 THE SLAVE IN THE SCANDINAVIAN ECONOMIES

1. See Dovring, Agrarhistorien, 53; Norborg, Kdllor till Sveriges historia, 77. 2. Settlements are usually dated by pottery type, and for the Viking Age and early Middle Ages it may not be possible to date the pottery more precisely than within a range of several hundred years. Even if the settlement material were better dated there is still not enough for us to construct a picture of change over the course of the Viking Age. 3. Slaves contributed to their masters’ prestige though conspicuous consumption in other ways besides burial. The story of Geirmund Heljarskin’s slave Atli, who used the argument that he had been generous with his master’s goods so that everyone would be impressed with the wealth of a man who let his slaves dispose of such property (Lnb H120}, indicates one way in which a slave might have contributed to his master’s prestige. In the Eddic poems of the Sigurd cycle Atli is depicted as paying a dowry for Gudrun in female slaves, perhaps a way for the poets to show how much he values her. Gudrtinarqvida gnnor, Edda, 228; Atlamal in groenlenzco, Edda, 261;

Volsunga saga 38 (in which he says he has given thirty knights as opposed to the Atlamal, which has “thirty slaves”). This story is legendary and deals with events of Migration Period Europe, not medieval Scandinavia; nevertheless the motif of the slave as gift appeared in the versions known in Iceland, so Icelanders would have been familiar with it. 4. Thietmar, Chronicon 1:17; Adam of Bremen, Gesta, 4:27; Ibn Rusta, in Birkeland, “Arabiska kilder,” 17. 5. Havamal, Edda, 40; Dedekam, “Odins Tre.” 6. War captives may often have become slaves, so there is not necessarily a clear distinction, but there may have been a difference between the sacrifice of a recent captive, who could be considered a noble adversary, and that of someone who might originally have been an adversary but had been degraded by enslavement. 7. Guodrunarqvida in fyrsta, Edda, 206; Sigurdarqvida in scamma, Edda, 218; Volsunga saga 33. The story of Asmund, who could not rest in his burial mound because a slave was buried with him (Lnb S72 and H6o) has been cited as one example of slave sacrifice with a dead master, though in the S redaction it is not stated how the slave died and in M and H the slave is said to have committed suicide in sorrow at his master’s death. If in fact the slave had been sacrificed to honor the master or to serve him in the afterlife, Asmund would probably not have been so disturbed; the tone of the story implies that it was an unusual and shameful thing to be buried with a slave.

8. Ibn Fadlan, Reisebericht, 87—90. There is some dispute over whether both his male and female slaves or just the female slaves are asked to die with him. Zeki Validi, notes to Ibn Fadlan, “Reisebericht,” 89; Canard, notes to Ibn Fadlan, “La relation,” 124-25. 9. The Amin Razi version, an epitome found in a sixteenth-century encyclopedia but possibly going back to an older text than the existing manuscript. Zeki Validi, notes to Ibn Fadlan, “Reisebericht,” 95 n. 2; Canard, notes to Ibn Fadlan, “La relation,” 132; “Ibn Fadlan’s Account,” trans. Smyser, roo. Since he was using an inter-

NOTES TO PAGES 72-73 213 preter, the categories Ibn Fadlan supplies may be his own, so the confusion between slave and wife may not be indicative of her role in the Scandinavian society. 10. Shetelig, “Traces of the Custom of Suttee,” discusses a number of double burials of aman and a woman in Scandinavia from the Bronze Age through the Viking Age, both inhumations and cremations, but there seems to be no evidence that the women died by violence. In all cases the two individuals seem to be of the same social

status. The most likely interpretation is that the two died near the same time, possibly of disease. Of course, with cremation burials it is often impossible to tell how many individuals are buried, so if Ibn Fadlan’s story were true it might not show up in the archeological record. On suttee, see also Ellis, The Road to Hel, 50—58; Ibn Rusta, in Birkeland, “Arabiske Kilder,” 17, for a description of women among the Rus’ buried alive with their husbands; Arbman, Birka, 85—86. tr. Arnesson-Westerdahl, Slaveriet i vikingatidens Sydskandinavien, 32-43, lists a number of multiple burials. For some of them, conjectures about slavery stretch the evidence quite a bit. See her discussion, 44—46, where she recognizes many other possible reasons for double or multiple burials. 12. Andersen, “Hovedstaden i riget,” 25-29; “Skalks vejleder: Lejre,” 24; Skaarup, Stengade I, 56—58; Skaarup, “Rejsekammeraten”; Ramskou, “Vikingerne ofrede mennesker,” 81—86; Christensen and Bennike, “Kvinder for fred?” 13. Take, for example, a grave at Fjalkinge, Skane: Stromberg, Untersuchungen zur jlingeren Eisenzeit 1:42; two beheaded corpses at Tiss, Sjaelland: Bennike and Christoffersen, “Et hoved korter.” In the latter case, though the beheading resembles that in other presumed slave burials, there is no skeleton that could be that of the master. These are more likely the bodies of executed criminals. 14. Shetelig in Brogger, Falk and Shetelig, eds., Osebergfundet 1:209—16; Shetelig and Falk, Scandinavian Archaeology, 282. Shetelig, Osebergfundet, 1:214, explicitly states that we know from literary examples that the second body is that of a slave; he can have in mind only the Eddic poetry and Ibn Fadlan. The Danish reports cited above also mention Ibn Fadlan although they do not say that is their reason for interpreting the burials as they do. 15. Arbman, Birka, 87 (photograph, 77). Recent work has suggested that the crouched burial was later, but it is not possible to say how much later. Several multiple cremation burials at Birka could include sacrifices but this is only a conjecture. Arnesson-Westerdahl, Slaveriet i vikingatidens Sydskandinavien, 33—}4, Citing Anne-Sofie Gradslund, Birka IV. The Burial Customs. A Study of the Graves on Bjork6 (Stockholm, 1981), 36 and 74—75. Another example of supposed slave burials comes from Lousgaard on Bornholm: two graves, one of aman with weapons and one

of a woman with rich jewelry, each of which contains another body without gravegoods. The man’s grave contained a sacrificed horse, which led Vedel to interpret the secondary bodies as sacrificed slaves. Vedel, Efterskrift, 57. Such early excavations, of course, are not as reliable as modern ones. 16. Arnesson-Westerdahl, Slaveriet i vikingatidens Sydskandinavien, 32, 34— 36, citing several unpublished Swedish excavation reports. 17. She was buried with her arms raised; there was a hole in her skull made by a slashing blow. Bersu and Wilson, Three Viking Graves, 45-51, 90-—91. There were also two bodies in a grave at Balladoole but not enough evidence to say whether one was sacrificed. 18. In one of five graves a man of about thirty, with rich grave-goods including gaming pieces, weapons, and bone combs, was accompanied in the grave by a man of about sixty. Kaland, ‘“Westnessutgravningene,” 95—96.

214 NOTES TO PAGES 73-75 19. Gr Ila 112 provides that a man has a right to purchase a slave woman for twelve gras “for concubinage”; the word is karnaodr which may derive from the word for “bed.” Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. karnadr; De Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v. kor. 20. OgL Arf 13; OgL Arf 25:1-26. See also AVgL Arf 22. OgL Arf 4 and 8 provide

that the children of a free concubine could not inherit but could be given some property at an assembly with the heirs’ agreement. This law puts the children of a free concubine in the same position as those of a slave; free concubinage too was of a lesser status than formal marriage, not a sort of plural marriage as Ross, “Concubinage,” 5—6, and Goody, Development of the Family and Marriage, 75-81, have argued. 21. In the case of the priest Bjorn in particular it probably could not be. Not all

these manumissions of women with their children can be because of concubinage; one manumittor was a woman. 22. GL 20:14; Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 4:269n. The provision would not be utterly meaningless if it still meant “son of a slave woman,” for in Gotland’s law slavery seems to be temporary, for debt or perhaps crime, so there were probably many slaves who could claim Gotlandic ancestry. 23. SkL 63; ESjL 3:29, which refers to a case where someone is “descended from slaves so that he may not inherit,” without saying specifically what type of descent

would make this the case; AAVSjL Tr 14, providing that “slave children may not inherit”; JL 1:25, providing that a slave may not inherit (again, no reference to a freedman). These laws do not refer specifically to these slaves being the children of the master. Under the Jutland law the child of a free concubine could not inherit unless the father later married her; this principle of legitimatio per subsequens matrimonium comes from canon law. 24. By a law of Justinian, a free man was allowed to legitimate his children by a slave woman if he freed her and them. Buckland, The Roman Lawof Slavery, 79; Nov 18:11 and 38:2:1. However, neither in Roman law nor in any of the other Germanic

codes do children of free men by slave women receive the detailed treatment that they do in the Scandinavian laws cited above. LLomb 222 provides that if a man wishes to marry his own slave woman he should free her and their marriage could then be legal and her children could be legal heirs; it does not refer to the children of a master by his slave woman who is not his legal wife. LLomb Liutprand 66 states that if the woman had a husband still] living the master could not make his children by her his legal heirs. LVis 3:2:3 provides that if a free man marries a slave woman they shall be separated and if they persist in living together he shall be enslaved; this seems like an afterthought, however, to the law about a free woman marrying a slave man, and it does not refer to children of an extramarital union between a slave woman and a free man. Presumably if marriage between the two were treated so harshly the issue of an extramarital union between the two would have a hard time being treated as legitimate. 25. GuL 58; GuL 104; GuL 57; GuL 129; FrL 8:8; FrLb 9:1; FrL 9:17; FrL 6:10—45.

26. Ross, “Concubinage,” cites the passage in GuL 104 as evidence that the hornungr and hrisungr are different from the children of a slave concubine and therefore that a free concubine is of a different status; although they have different names, however, their rights are much the same. See also Eames, “Mariage et con-

cubinage,” 199. Hornungr comes from horn, “corner,” and hrisungr from hris, “woods.” De Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v. “hornungr,” “hris.”

NOTES TO PAGES 75-76 215 27. The only reference in Grdgas is in the section on wergeld, where the slaveborn or illegitimate son appears as an “atonement extra.” Grla 113. Hastrup, Culture and History, 114, reads Gr Ia 118 as saying that a slave-born son could not be his father’s heir; this may be assumed in the passage but it is not stated (what it actually says is that a child whose mother is freed between conception and birth is free but not an heir). It does not say anything about whether a man could make a slave-born son his heir by taking positive action. 28. For example, the eponymous hero of “Pattr Hro6mundar halta” was the son of Eyvind Serkvir (the Proud) and a slave woman; his wife Audbjorg was also the daughter of a slave woman. “Pattr Hro6mundar halta” 1. 29. St. Olaf’s queen, Astrid, was the daughter of King Olaf of Sweden and a Wendish earl’s daughter “who had been taken captive and called the king’s ambatt.” Snorri Sturluson, Oldfs saga helga 88. Astrid also refers to the mother of Olaf’s son Magnus as her ambatt. Snorri Sturluson, Magnuss saga ins g6da 7. King Hakon the Good was the son of Harald Fairhair and a woman who was called the king’s ambatt although she was of good family (Snorri Sturluson, Haralds saga harfagra 37}, so the term had clearly in some instances taken on a more general meaning than “slave woman.” Similarly, in the legendary Saga Heidreks konungs ins vitra 10, a king’s son by the daughter of another king is called “child of a slave woman” (pyar barni), implying that any concubine is automatically derided as a slave. 30. Lnb, S309. Einar is called a fridluson (“son of a concubine”) rather than ambdattarson, but his mother’s kin are clearly called slaves. 31. Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar 7, 9, and 56. 32. See Karras, “Concubinage and Slavery.” 33. Droplaugarsona saga Io. 34. Laxdcela saga 26. He asks them to agree to the lawful amount of twelve gras and then, playing on the fact that the ora represents a weight as well as a measure of value, gives Olaf twelve ounces of gold, eight times the value intended in the law. 35. Vatnsdeela saga 37. 36. Documentary evidence does not appear until quite late. The only register from before 1350 is the “Bergen Calfskin,” Registrum Prediorum et Reditum ad ecclesias diocesis Bergensis, possibly written around 1360 but probably based on an earlier model. F. Hadnebo, KLNM, s.v. “Bergens Kalvskinn”; Dybdahl, “Agrarkrisen,” 141—45. Scholars have discussed settlement patterns on the basis of later documents used retrospectively (e.g., statements about farms listed as abandoned in the sixteenth century, which are assumed to have been in use in the fourteenth} and of archeological material, often, however, looking only at settlement layout without actually excavating the site. Using these methods one cannot assign dates to changes in patterns. “Between the Viking Age and the fourteenth-century crisis” is often the closest approximation that can be made. 37. The Viking Age in Norway is much less well understood archeologically than the Migration Period. Most of the sites in Petersen, Gamle gdrdsanlegg, are from the Migration Period. On large farm complexes in Norway in the Migration Period (fourth to sixth centuries A.D.) see Myhre, “The Iron Age Farm,” “Agrarian Development,” 237—39, “Settlement of Southwest Norway,” and “Synspunkter”; Loken, “En ny type gardsanlegg.” An older but still worthwhile study is Hagen, Studier i jernalderens gdrdssamfunn. For comparable sites in northern Norway, see Johansen, “Jernaldergarder.” 38. Petersen, Gamle gdrdsanlegg, is the main source for this information, though

his main concern was with house plans and not farm structure. He discusses a

216 NOTES TO PAGES 76-77 number of Viking Age sites. See also Myhre, Gdrdsanlegget pd Ullandhaug, 327-70, “Gardshusenes konstruksjon,” 98—103, and “Bolighusets utvikling,” on house plans

from the Viking Age, summarizing the known excavations, including Petersen’s work; Lillehammer, “Garden pa Sorvestlandet,” esp. 36—37.

39. At one excavated site, Ytre Moa, dated to the ninth and tenth centuries, there are two main dwellings, similar in size so that neither may be labeled as dependent. They may not have been contemporary. Bakka, “Ytre Moa”; see also later plan in Myhre, Gardsanlegget pd Ullandhaug, fig. 197. Another site, Ullaland, which dates from the Merovingian period but may have lasted into the Viking Age, had one large house with three rooms, probably all dwellings, and a smaller house that may

have been a dependent dwelling (though it is not securely dated and may not be contemporary}. This site may represent farming on a larger scale. Petersen, Gamle gdrdsanlegg, 1:57—64. Myhre, “Synspunkter,” 116, suggests that most of the known

houses are of average farmers, not particularly prosperous ones or magnates. The more successful farms are the least likely to have been excavated because they were never abandoned. In “Settlements of Southwest Norway,” 211, he estimates that in the Migration Period the average holding had ten people living on it, asmall extended family of three generations and a few servants. 40. Hamilton, ‘“Jarlshof,” 212. This site, while not a huge estate, was definitely a prosperous farm. Hamilton, Excavations at Jarlshof, 111, comments on objects of

native (not Norse) manufacture in this building, suggesting that there were Celtic slaves. Other excavations include the following: for the Faroes, Andreassen, “Rann-

soku Vesturi { Horni,” Dahl, “Bustadur i Eingjartoftum,” and Dahl, “Vikingabustadur”; for the Isle of Man, Gelling, “A Norse Homestead”; for Greenland, An-

dreasen, “Langhus—ganghus—centraliseret gard”; for the Orkneys, Cruden, “Excavations at Birsay,” and for the Shetlands, Small, “A Viking Longhouse,” and Small, “Excavations at Underhall.” 41. Most of the published archeological material from the period has concentrated on house types. For medieval sites see Petersen, Gamle gdrdsanlegg, 2:71—-86; Martens, “Gamle fjellgarder,” 19-64; Randers, “@degarden pa Haybgen”; Myhre, “Bolighusets utvikling.” On the division of large holdings see H. Bjorkvik, KLNM, s.v. “Jordbruk.” For a dispute over the average number of bruk (small holdings) per farm (and hence the pre-plague population of Norway}, see Sandnes, “Garder, bruk,

og folketall”; Lunden, “Om gardtal og folketal”; Sandnes, “Garder, bruk og folketall—Replikk.” Such a determination must rest on the use of later evidence on

land division; on the problems in using such evidence, see Dybdahl, Stjgrdalen gjennom belgedalen, 81. Sandnes, Odetid og gjenreisning, 49, notes that the division

into small holdings can be observed at sites abandoned after the Black Death. Johansen, “Viking Age Farm Number,” has attempted to calculate population size in North Norway and has concluded based on the number of farms in the Viking Age, compared with named farms of the fourteenth century, that there was not a Viking Age/Early Medieval expansion; the farms were already thoroughly subdivided in the Viking Age or earlier (61-64). He recognizes, however, that this may not be typical for all of Norway. On expansion of settlement and the attempt to transform seasonal dwellings to year-round farms see Hougen, Fra seter til gdrd, 312. 42. Sandnes, Odetid og gjenreisning, 42. 43. Fladby, “Tida for 1500,” 94—101; Sandnes, Odetid og gjenreisning, 83. 44. Stenvik, “Sanddgldalen”; Lillehammer, “Lakabg.” The latter dwelling, a small farm in the Rogaland region, dated to 1000-1350, was quite small and could possibly be a subsidiary dwelling under a larger farm nearby, rather than an independent bruk. See also Lindanger, “Nzerbg.”

NOTES TO PAGES 77—79 217 45. Renneseth, Friihgeschichtliche Siedlungs- und Wirtschaftsformen, 87, has suggested that the changes in settlement patterns, which he identifies with a switch from extensive agriculture to intensive agriculture combined with much greater reliance on animal husbandry, did not occur gradually in the process of reclaiming land and establishing new farms, as has generally been held, but rather in a sudden shift in already existing farms, probably brought on by a higher authority than the farmers themselves. Myhre, “Anmeldelse av Ottar Ronneseth,” has vehemently denied the archeological basis of Ronneseth’s argument; criticism also in Lindanger, “Nerbe,” 57—65. On the dating of the change, based on legal evidence, see Ronneseth, “Gard” und Einfriedigung, 179—82. 46. Holmsen, “Gard, gardssamfund og grannesamfund,” 338—43; Solvberg, Driftsmdter i vestnorsk jordbruk, 76; Myhre, Funn, fornminner og edegdrder, 182— 86; Myhre, “Agrarian Development,” 239~—42; Salvesen, Jord i Jemtland, 79-81. 47. Bjorkvik, KLNM, s.v. “Jordeiendom”; Holmsen and Bjerkvik, ‘“Kven atte jorda?”, Lunden, “Mellomalder,” 236—39; Holmsen, “Landowners and Tenants,” 122. The percentages varied from region to region. Some of the landowning peasants might themselves have had tenants, and townspeople may also have owned land. When farms were divided into bruk, the farm remained an administrative unit; a large landowner and one or more peasants might each own part, so a peasant could be at the same time a proprietor and a tenant. Again, the documentary evidence on part ownership is later. 48. Oldfs saga helga 22—23. Snorri’s probable source for this passage, an older saga of St. Olaf, does not give a number for his slaves. Olafs saga hins helga 46. 49. Iversen, “Trelldommens betydning,” 249, suggests that Renneseth’s description of a phase of intensive cultivation with large farms would fit well with the sort of farm described in the saga. As discussed above, however, Renneseth’s argument about this phase is not generally accepted. 50. See Krag, “Treller og trellehold,” 220-21; Holmsen, “Bander og kongsmenn,” 76-81. 51. FrL Intro:20. It is possible that the law refers not to a shortage of labor within established households but to a lack of tenants for newly established small farms. Larson, The Earliest Norwegian Laws, 219n., suggests that this labor shortage may be attributable to the ending of slavery. 52. FrL 13:2. The law uses sveinum, which need not necessarily mean slaves, but its juxtaposition with free men gives it that implication in this instance. 53. FrL 4:44; Sandnes, Odetid og gjenreisning, 86; Sandnes, “Bondesamfunnet,” 50; Sandnes, “Tolv kyr, to hester og tre treler,”’ 81-82. According to an ordinance of 1293, sixteen gresbol was considered a full farm, but most of the bruk cleared in the early Middle Ages (before 1350) were smaller. The average of those farms cleared in the Viking Age was twenty oresbol. Fladby, “Tida fer 1500,” 101. Johansen, “Viking Age Farm Number,” 61, found that for northern Norway, the farms were more consistent with nuclear than extended families, about six persons per household. This would not allow for a large number of slaves. 54. FrL 2:33; FrL 7:7; GuL 299-300. Again, there is a possibility that svein in the latter law is not a slave. While slaveless peasants clearly did exist, the Frostabing law also reflects the existence of absentee landowners with slaves when it regulates the military obligations of those who live in town but have slaves in the country (FrL 8:11).

55. FrL 4:5. Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldommen,” 163, suggests that this passage supports the existence of large-farm agriculture because it envisions a group of slaves, but with the owner working with them it must be seen as household-level.

218 NOTES TO PAGES 79-82 BpL 1:14 and EpL 1:12 also refer to a man working with his slaves (in the context of penalties for working on Sunday). 56. GuL 198; FrL 11:21. The Frostabing law passage refers to the compensation

to be taken by a hauld, who was presumably better off than the average bonde. Lunden, “Treletida,” argues that by stating the compensation due for the best female slave of a freedman, GuL 198 implies that even a freedman would be expected to have several slaves. As Krag, “Trelleholdet,” 365, points out, however, the legal text does

not imply anything of the sort but was just an attempt to be complete in defining certain categories. The only other statement about the work done by female slaves is GuL 57, about paying the costs of supporting a new mother until she is able to carry water. 57. FrL 15:8; Gul 25. 58. Hyjorleif, ten slaves, Lnb SH6; Aud the Deep-Minded with twenty free men, Lnb S95. 59. Lnb, §113—15, H86—87. The word drmaor was used for a king’s official in Norway but was rare in Iceland: Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. “4rmadr”; De Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v. “armadr”; Krag, “Armannen.” 60. Vatnsdcela saga 22, even states by way of explanation for a householder’s

working, “It was the habit of the sons of powerful men at that time to have some occupation at hand.” This implies that such was no longer the custom at the time the saga was written. Similarly, Sorla pdttr, in Ljdsvetninga saga 5. This is no doubt criticism of the author’s contemporaries rather than an accurate statement of the situation in the Saga Age. 61. Eyrbyggja saga 26 and 37; Viga-Glums saga 19; Brennu-Njals saga 53; Olafs saga helga 33 (the men in the latter example are not necessarily slaves). 62. Hoensa-Poris saga, 1; Eyrbyggja saga 11 (they are called “frelsingia” but in Iceland this does not seem to mean freedmen); Brennu-Njals saga 113; Ljésvetninga saga 1. Once again, however, the numbers may merely be attempts by the authors to convey the impression that these were very rich and powerful men. 63. Brennu-Njals saga 36; Svarfdcela saga 15; Reykdcela saga 9. 64. Fridpjofs saga ins froekna 6:9; see also Saga Heidreks konungs ins vitra 7, where it is implied that a man who works in the kitchen would automatically be a slave. In that same saga, 3, a girl is told her father was “the lowest slave,” and she replies that she thought he was a hero “but now I am told he herded swine.” A slave swineherd also appears in Hjdlmpés saga ok Olvis 3. Dunging the fields is mentioned in Rigsbula, Edda, 282, and as a taunt in Kormdaks saga 4. None of these actually describes slaves working; they merely show what kinds of activities people who wrote literature connected with slaves. 65. The legend of Fenja and Menja, Grottasgngr, Edda, 297—301, also connects slave women with turning the mill, apparently an onerous task. 66. E.g., Egils saga 40; Brennu-Njals saga 39; Viga-Glums saga 17. 67. See, e.g., Ofeigs pattr 8 [14], in Lidsvetninga saga 14, where Gudmund sends a southerner staying with him on an errand of betrayal similar to those often performed by slaves in the sagas. 68. Kristjan Eldjarn, “Viking Archaeology in Iceland,” 29; for more on house

types in general, Agtstsson, “Den islandske bondegardsudvikling,” 255-61, and Magnusson, “Islandska boningshus.” It is always possible that slaves did not live ina

heated dwelling-house at all; by sleeping in the byre with the animals they might have kept from freezing to death. However, the most likely assumption is that they lived in a building with a hearth.

NOTES TO PAGES 82-84 219 69. Kristjan Eldjarn, “Viking Archaeology in Iceland,” 29-30. This type of house is known as the Pjérsardalur-type house. For example, at the site of Samsstadir in Pjérsardal, there were two longhouses, skdli and stofa, with a larder or dairy and a

latrine built alongside. A byre, a barn, and a storehouse were built farther away. There were, however, no traces of smaller dwelling-houses. Rafnsson, “Samsstadir i bjorsardal.” See also reports on other sites in Pjérsardalur, in Stenberger, ed., Forntida gdrdar i Island, 55-144 and 171-90; Agustsson, “Rekonstruktionen af Sténg”; Eldjar, “Athugasemd um fornar toftir”; Roussell, “Komparativ Avdelning”; Eldjarn, “Ber i Gjaskogum”; Eldjam, “Eydibyggd 4 Hrunamanaafretti.” These sites have been dated to the eleventh century based on the ash layers from the eruption of Hekla. 70. Magnusson, “Sdogualdarbyggo i Hvitarholti,” esp. 57—60. The sunken huts from Hvitarholt do contain hearths or ovens and may have been bath houses. 71. Pattr Rognvalds, Olafs saga Tryggvasonar 248, in Flateyjarbok, 1:321. A “brels huss” is also mentioned in an episcopal inventory of 1461 (DI 5:336}, but this is obviously much later than the period of slavery and there are many ways a building could have gotten this name. 72. Capelle, “Krisavik”; Gestsson, “Grof i Oreefum.” 73. B. Larusson, The Old Icelandic Land Registers, 29—31; M. Larusson, KLNM, s.v. “Jordeiendom.”

74. Becker, “Viking Age Settlements”; Stoumann, “Szdding”; Stoumann, “Vikingetidslandsbyen i Sedding”; Stoumann, “Szddinglandsbyen”; Bender Jorgensen and Skov, “Trabjerg. A Viking-age Settlement”; Bender Jorgensen and Skov, “Trabjerg. Resultaterne af 5 ars udgravninger”; Bender Jorgensen and Skov, “Trabjerg, en vikingetidsbebyggelse.” 75. The site at Vorbasse reveals two large-farm complexes from the eighth to tenth centuries; the pottery and other finds show connections with regions outside Denmark. Each complex had one large dwelling, a workshop, several smaller build-

ings with hearths (possibly dwellings for workers}, and sunken huts with loom-

weights. In the eleventh century the settlement moved to the west and there emerged three farm complexes. One was much larger than the others, containing twenty buildings, at least twelve contemporary with each other. In its five byres there would have been room for a hundred head of cattle. Hvass, “The Viking-age settlement at Vorbasse”; Hvass, “Fem ars udgravninger”; Hvass, “Vikingebebyggelseni Vorbasse”; Hvass, “Udgravningerne i Vorbasse.” The site at Omgard reveals a

large farm from the tenth century, similar to that at Vorbasse, but perhaps even wealthier; the excavator suggests that it is parallel to the “palace” sites from Germany and England. At its peak it occupied over 40,000 square meters, eight or ten times the size of the farms known from Sedding and Trabjerg, and had more than fifteen contemporary buildings including workshops. There were a total of 110 houses from three periods. There were imported Slavic ceramics in the main dwelling; pottery found in the subsidiary dwellings was of a simpler type native to Jutland. There were two byres, the larger one with room for seventy or eighty head. The smaller one may have been for horses, as there is a smithy on the site. The latest phase had a palisade and a gatehouse. Nielsen, “Omgard. A Settlement”; Nielsen, “Omgard—en vestjysk landsby”; Nielsen, “Landsby, reguleringer og grubehuse”; Nielsen, “Bebyggelsesformer og kontinuitet.” 76. Nielsen, “Stormend og bender,” 77—80. 77. Randsborg, The Viking Age in Denmark, 25-44; Christophersen, ‘“Drengs, Thegns, Landmen and Kings,” 123—26. Wilson, Economic Aspects of the Vikings, 10, based on recent study of the pottery, puts the later, large-farm phases at both Vor-

220 NOTES TO PAGE 84 basse and Omgard this late or later. The development of the basic unit of landholding in Denmark, the bol, may also point to a typical village organization in the Viking

Age consisting of several large-scale farms, which were later subdivided. C. A. Christensen, “Begrebet bol”; see criticism by Ulsig and Sgrensen, “Om begrebet bol.” 78. List in Nielsen, “Stormznd og Bender,” 73. See M. Orsnes, Reallexikon der germanischen Altertumskundée, s.v. “Bejsebakken”; Ramskou, “Lindholm Hgje,”

197—99, and Ramskou, Normannertiden, 292~94; S. Hansen, “Andersminde”; T. Skov, “En vikingetids bebyggelse”; Nancke-Krogh, “Seby”; P. B. Christensen, “Saby. ”

79. Only two of the fifty-four sunken huts at Loddek6pinge had hearths; half contained loom-weights, though not in large numbers. The finds in the huts do not support the idea that they belonged to people of low social class. Ohlsson, “The Loddek6pinge Investigation”; Ohlsson, “Vikingetid och medeltid”; Strémberg, “Grophus som indikation,” 47—48. At Gardl6sa, fifty-two sunken huts were found, dating from the Migration Period through the tenth century. Even the largest huts, eight or nine square meters, could hardly be the dwelling of a whole family if there was a loom in the hut as well; probably each farmstead consisted of several of these

huts, as only twelve of them had hearths. Stjernquist, “Das Problem der Grubenhduser”; Stromberg, “Grophus som indikation,” 48. At Valleberga there were

twenty-eight sunken huts from the seventh to the ninth centuries, twelve with hearths; they probably represented a range of functions (weaving-hut, smithy, boneworkshop}, but the ones with hearths have been interpreted as dwellings. Stromberg, “Grubenhdauser in Valleberga”; Stromberg, “Nya fund i Valleberga.” At Hagestad, a group of ten sunken huts from the ninth century seem from the nature of the finds to have been dwellings rather than workshops; only one had a real fireplace but others had scorched stones that could have been used in hearths. Stromberg, “Handelsstrak och vikingabygd”; Strémberg, “Eine siedlungsgeschichtliche Untersuchung,” 148— 50. At Ystad, sunken huts were similarly interpreted as dwellings; seven of the huts

had hearths or ovens, and there were no longhouses. Str6mberg, “En kustby in Ystad.” There are a few other smaller examples of settlements in Skane with sunken huts only: Rosborn et al, “Vikingatid och medeltid,” 34; Mandahl, “En puzzelbit”; J6nsson, “Rapport om grophus”; Holmberg, Den skdnska 6resundskustens medeltid, 37. 80. N. Thomsen, “Grubehuse i Esbjerg”; Vorting, “Flere grubehuse”; Bencard, “Grubehuse i Okholm”; A. Rasmussen, “Grubehuse i Vilslev.” These sunken huts from Jutland resemble in their structure sunken huts found at the urban settlements

of Arhus and Hedeby. Madsen, “Om grubehuse,” 19-20; Andersen, Crab, and Madsen, Arhus Sondervold, 40-62; Jankuhn, Haithabu, 102. At those sites at least some of the sunken huts were dwellings; others were clearly craft workshops, while some may have been both. At Hedeby and Arhus, they were probably not the dwellings of a dependent agricultural labor force, though whoever did live in them was no doubt toward the bottom end of the social spectrum. 81. Nielsen, “Feudalisieringsprocessen,” 123—24; Stromberg, “Grophus som indikation,” 51.

82. Stjernquist, “Das Problem der Grubenhduser,” 149-50. Tesch, “Forandringar i bosattningsmonster,” 109, points out that at least in the first half of the Iron Age there were settlements in Skane with longhouses as well as sunken huts. An analogy might be made to the situation in Anglo-Saxon archeology until the 1950s, when it was thought that sunken huts were the only house-form the Anglo-Saxons had. Ralegh Radford, “The Saxon House”; Rahtz, “Buildings and Rural Settlement,”

NOTES TO PAGE 85 221 51—52. Modern excavation technique has since revealed longhouses in England, however, but not in Skane, though the excavations mentioned have been carried out by highly trained and skilled archeologists. 83. See Ohlsson, “Om ostdansk boplatsstruktur,” 23—24. The dwellers in the sunken huts could have been a tribe collectively owning the land rather than dependents of one person who owned the land as private property; such an explanation is no more speculative than the explanation that they were slaves. 84. Kristensen, ‘Danelaw Institutions,” 73, suggests that “in Denmark, just as in Europe at large, freedom was for the most part reserved to the upper class and their guarantors, the soldier-colonists, while the majority of the remaining part of the population in serfdom cultivated other men’s land and had no political influence whatsoever.” The case is far from proven for Denmark, however, and even if the majority of the population were economically dependent, not owning their own land, this does not mean they had to have been unfree (cf. the Jandbo and leiglending of the thirteenth and later centuries). 85. Steensberg, Den danske landsby, 9-52, summarizes early patterns. Until recent years, not many Viking Age village sites had been found in Denmark. The generally accepted reason for this was that they lay beneath present-day villages, which implied that the settlement pattern visible today was in large part set in the Viking Age. Place-name studies showing that the names of many villages still existing today belong to type-groups from the Viking Age or earlier supported this view. For discussions of place-name methodology, as well as the various chronological groupings, see Hald, Stednavne og kulturhistorie, 7-12, V. Christensen and Kousgard Sgrensen, Stednavneforskning, vol. 1, and Dalberg and Kousgard Sorensen, Stednavneforskning, 2:23—45. Recently, though, excavations starting from villages known in the modern period and attempting to find the earliest traces of settlement have found that very few go back beyond the year 1000. Grongaard Jeppesen, Middelalderlandsbyens opstzn, 115—21; Kousgard Sgrensen, “Stednavnene og bebyggelsen,” defends the use of place-name evidence attacked in this work. Grongaard Jeppesen also presented his conclusions about settlements on Fyn in a preliminary report and several articles: Landsbyens opsten, ‘‘Oldtidsbebyggelse-middelalderbebyggelse,” “Bebyggelsesflytninger pa overgangen,” “Stedskontinuitet i Fynske landsbyer,” and “Bebyggelseudvikling fra jernalder til middelalder.” A similar lack of continuity has been noted in Sjzlland and in Skane. Hedeager, “Settlement Continuity”; Steensberg, Bondehuse og vandmealler, 42~52 and 223—24; Steensberg, “Boligskik paa landet,” 372-73; Steensberg and Ostergaard Christensen, Store Valby, 1:185—343, esp. 1:216—20; Skansj6, Sdderslatt, 112—28; Holmberg, Den skdnska

6resundskustens medeltid, 86. 86. The shift is not remarkable in itself in light of the pattern of “wandering villages” in prehistory. Grongaard Jeppesen, Middelalderlandsbyens opstzn, 137; Becker, “Friiheisenzeitliche D6rfer,” esp. 108; Jensen, The Prehistory of Denmark, 200—I4.

87. See Porsmose, “Den agrare bebyggelseudvikling,” 30-31, on the role of central authority in the establishment of torps. This particular shift in settlement may have had to do with the introduction of the wheeled plow or new systems of crop rotation; this would have created the need for a new organization of the fields and villages, and the central authorities would have wanted to keep the new layout once established. The fields at Lindholm Hoje show the use of the wheeled plow in the eleventh century; a three-field system is known from Borup Ris from the eleventh or twelfth century. At Borup, a Viking Age village of three farm complexes seems to

222 NOTES TO PAGES 85-87 have been taken over by one large demesne farm about that time. Ramskou, “A Danish Viking Period Field”; Steensberg, Den danske landsby, 66-70, 73-78; Steensberg, Borup, 1:203 and passim; S. Gissel, KLNM, s.v. “Trevangsbrug.” Under this explanation for the establishment of new patterns, it is not the plow that created change but rather the demand for surplus production, created by the nascent state and commercial economy, that created the need for new technology. (On the possibility of acommercial economy at this early date, see Randsborg, The Viking Age in Denmark, 137-66, and Hodges, Dark Age Economics.) This demand brought with it a shift from animal] husbandry to agriculture as the main form of production. Porsmose, “Bondesamfund og rigsdannelse,” 61-71; Grongaard Jeppesen, “Ploven og vikingerne”; Porsmose Christensen, “Bebyggelse, kulturlandskap og driftsmader”; Porsmose Christensen, “Den stationare landsbyens opsten,” 68—72. Part of the de-

mand for surplus production may have taken the form of taxes or levies for the outfitting of ships. The reorganization of settlement may have had to do with the ledung, though it is doubtful how early this institution was really established. Ekbom, Ledung och tidig jordtaxering, 107-39. 88. Kristensen, “Danelaw Institutions,” 70-73; Skansj6, Sédersldatt, 142; Porsmose, “Bondesamfund og rigsdannelse,” 70. For criticism of the idea of military colonization see Gissel, review of Den regulerede landsby by Porsmose, 132-33. 89. Liber Donationum Monasterio Soroensis, SSRD 4:463—531; Norlund, “De zeldste vidnesbyrd,” on the Sorg book. The figure for the amount of land the family owned is based on a rather complex calculation by Nerlund, “Jorddrotter paa Valdemarstiden,” 163—70, based on Sune’s will; discussion in Ulsig, Danske adelsgodser, 25, and T. E. Christiansen, “Sune Ebbesens halve hovedlod.” 90. Erslev, Valdemarernes storhetstid, 111; Kong Valdemars jordebog, 1:4148, with Aakjzr’s commentary, 1:290~—317. Even for Falster the book only gives landownership and not the distribution of demesne and tenanted land, nor the status of those who worked the land. See P. Rasmussen, KLNM, s.v. “Valdemars jordebog.” git. C. A. Christensen, “Roskildebispens jordegods,” suggests that Knut the Great gave responsibility for the defense of the Roskilde region to the Bishop of Roskilde and that the villagers gave their land to the bishop in return for his obtaining the services of professional soldiers to carry out their military obligations. 92. Ulsig, Danske adelsgodser, 39—40; for the monasteries, the evidence comes from Liber Donationum Monasterii Soroensis, SSRD 4:463—531, and Liber Donationum Monasterii b. Petri Nestved, SSRD 4:335—406. See also McGuire, “Patrons, Privileges, Property.” 93. Norlund, “Klostret og dets gods,” 86-88; Mackeprang, “Logum klosters gods,” 87; McGuire, “Property and Politics,” 132—38, based on Codex Esromensis. 94. Most scholars now hold that the later medieval tenant system replaced not independent landowning peasants but rather cottagers working on large estates. See Paludan, “Vor danske Montesquieu,” for a discussion of the older view, that the late medieval feste (copyholder) system resulted from independent peasant proprietors giving up their land. 95. Porsmose, Den regulerede landsby, 1:393; Ulsig, Danske adelsgodser, 119. See the table of terms used in the Sore book, in Ulsig, Danske adelsgodser, 118, and the table of gifts to Logum, including the terms used, in Mackeprang, “Logum klosters gods,” 55—62.

96. The system of large curiae under stewards appears in the land registers from

Arhus and Roskilde. The earliest one from Arhus dates from 1315, but as many entries in it are dated 1282, it is likely that it is based at least in part on an original

NOTES TO PAGES 88-89 2.23 from that year. Arhus domkapitels jordeboger, vol. 3; P. Rasmussen, “Studier i Aarhus kannikebords jordebog,” 105. The Roskilde book dates from 1377. By com-

paring the structure of the villages at that time with later evidence for the same villages, scholars have attempted to show the direction of change, assuming that the picture in 1370 had not yet had time to change radically from what it had been before

the agrarian crisis of the fourteenth century. Roskildebispens jordebog, in Roskildekirkens jordeboger, 1-207; Ulsig, “Landboer og bryder,” and C. A. Christensen, “ Endringerne i landsbyens struktur,” use the Roskilde book as evidence of earlier conditions. From these sources a picture appears of small coloniae or tenant holdings

associated with large curiae under villici. The contrasts with the later situation, where tenant farms were much larger and there was no curia villicalis, serve to underscore the relative importance of the curia in the agriculture of the fourteenth and probably the thirteenth century. 97. See examples of early curiae in Ulsig’s table from the Sorg book, Danske adelsgodser, 118. Ulsig, “Landboer og bryder,” 146—56, points out that the oldest

grants of privileges only name coloni, not villici, and suggests that in the early thirteenth century tenants had holdings that were relatively larger than later when they were connected with curiae. The reasons for the shift from household-based agriculture by tenants in the twelfth century to large-farm agriculture in the thirteenth, where the tenants had much smaller holdings, might have to do with changes in the tax system. Yet Ulsig acknowledges that there were large farms in the twelfth century that probably had slaves on them; if curia in the twelfth and in the fourteenth century referred to a large-scale farm, it is not likely it would have referred to something else in the thirteenth. 98. DD 32, 1:4:55—61. The will is most often cited not for its manumission clauses but for the bequest to Saxo (presumably Grammaticus} of two and one-half marks of silver and the demand that he return to the monastery of Sorg two books that he had borrowed from Absalon. 99. AAVSjL Tr 13; SkL 220; ASun 130; ESjL 3:18. 100. The few exceptions are from Oland and Gotland. See Thunmark, “Burget pa Burge”; D. Carlsson, “Fran stengrund til bulhus” (house plans only); Borg in Borg et al., eds., Eketorp, 161-88; Stenberger, “Eketorp,” 15—18. See Swedish Archaeological Bibliography, Ambrosiani, “The Late Iron Age,” and H. Andersson, “Reflections in Swedish Medieval Archaeology,” for summaries of archeological work in Sweden.

Cultural geography has shed some light on the period by investigating not the structure of individual farmsteads but the relation of the farmsteads to each other and to the landscape. It is possible to identify settlement locations and date them approximately by association with graves of distinctive forms, without actually excavating them. See Dahlback, “Arkeologisk och kulturgeografisk forskning,” for approach and methodology. 101. Ambrosiani, Fornldmningar och bebyggelse, 202-08.

102. Hyenstrand, Centralbygd—randbyed, 118, 154-55; Andrae, Kyrka och frdlse, 87; Vasterg6tlands runinskrifter 4; Upplands runinskrifter 127, 164, 165, 212A, 261, and 331.

103. Ambrosiani, Fornlamningar och bebyggelse, 208. Other scholars have posited the beginnings of village organization, as opposed to individual farms, already with the introduction of the two-field system that began in central Sweden around the middle of the first millenium A.D., though the date varied from place to place. D. Hannerberg, KLNM, s.v. “Odlingssystem.” The two-field system required a

| larger area for cultivation and therefore supposedly a more communal organization |

224 NOTES TO PAGE 89 of settlement. Sporrong, Kolonisation, bebyggelseutveckling och administration, 194—98 (but see the critical review by Ambrosiani, “Bebyggelseforskning i Malaromrddet,” 302-07); S.-O. Lindquist, Det férhistoriska kulturlandskapet, 155; S.-O. Lindquist, “Fossilt kulturlandskap,” 155-57; U. Goransson, Kulturlandskapsférandring och samhallsutveckling, 97. See also D. Carlsson, Kulturlandskapets utveckling, 146, for the different development on Gotland. 104. Ambrosiani, “Settlement Structure,” 49; Ambrosiani, Fornlamningar och bebyggelse, 216—18; Larsson, Det medeltida Vdrend, 85; Thor, “Kulturlandskapets

utveckling,” 215; Sporrong, Mdlarlandskapen, 1; Lindquist, Det férhistoriska kulturlandskapet, 155; U. Goransson, “Samhallsforandring”; G. Hafstrom, KLNM, s.v. “‘Jordeiendom,” 659.

105. New taxation systems have been taken as the basis of the development of royal power in Sweden. Units of land measurement were connected to the assessment for the Jedung. Lindquist, “Aldre och yngre bebyggelsetaxering.” Whatever its origins (see Hafstro6m, Ledung och marklandsindelning, 127; Ekbom, Ledung och tidig jordtaxering, 125; Andrae, Kyrka och frdalse, 64-72), the ledung by the time of the law codes was a money tax and required evaluation of the land in units of attung or markland. The units varied in different parts of Sweden. See Dovring, Attungen och marklandet, 69-84, 130-50. On the date of the development of the markland, see Stahle, “De medeltida ledungsskatterna”; Sandstr6m, “Marklandet i Svealandskapen”; Lonnroth, “Marklandets uppkomst”; Dovring, Attungen och marklandet, 164-92. 106. Loénnroth, Statsmakt och statsfinans, 57-136; S. G6ransson, “Viking Age Traces”; S. Géransson, Village Planning Patterns, 13-16; Hannerberg, “Bytomt och samhallsorganisation,” 77; Lindquist, “Aldre och yngre bebyggelsetaxering,” 11314; Sporrong, Mdlardalen, 118—43; Hannerberg, “G4rd, by och territoriell organisation,” 376—77, 415—21; Sporrong, Mdlardalen, 41. One aspect of the regular layout of the village was solskifte, a division of the arable land into strips to be assigned to the individual farmsteads in a fixed order. Dovring, Attungen och marklandet, 165-66;

S. Géransson, “Regular settlements,” 76; S. G6ransson, “Regular Open-Field Pattern,” esp. p. 83. The only two surviving documents mandating such a division of a village deal with villages owned entirely by ecclesiastical institutions, and it seems likely that such solskifte was carried out in the interests of landowners, not peasants. Dovring, Agrarhistorien, 61; Dovring, Attungen och marklandet, 166—70. The law

codes, particularly of Ostergétland and Uppland, have strict regulations for the layout and division of villages, implying both that it was imposed by a central authority and that it was not yet fully accomplished by the end of the thirteenth century. Lindquist, “Aldre och yngre bebyggelsetaxering,” 111-12. G6ransson suggests that such regulation did not exist, or at least was not required, in Uppland before Upplandslagen of 1296. S. G6ransson, “Den regelbundna byn,” 258—59; S. G6ransson, “Regular Settlements,” 82. The laws could indeed be seen as evidence not of imposi-

tion of regulation from the top down but as evidence of decision making by the peasants themselves, because they express no fiscal motives and do not require that the division be made, only that if it is done it be done in a certain way. S. G6ransson, “Regular settlements,” 82; cf. OgL Byg 1. The Uppland law, however, clearly states that anyone who owns a quarter of the village may cause a division, which implies that mainly large landowners would be involved. If there were more than four farms in a village, no one who owned only his own farm would have had a say. UL Wibp 1. Many Swedish villages, however, might have had four or fewer farms. 107. Andrae, Kyrka och fralse, 87; Sporrong, Mdlarlandskapen, 41. For eccle-

NOTES TO PAGES 90-91 2.2.5 siastical holdings of whole villages in the earliest records for Uppsala cathedral, from

the middle of the fourteenth century, see Dahlback, Uppsala domkyrkas godsinnehav, 236. 108. Loénnroth, Statsmakt och statsfinans, 40; Andrae, Kyrka och frdalse, 91.

109. Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 39—42; Dovring, Agrarhistorien, 94; Dovring, “Agrarhistorisk forskning,” 389—90; Sko Klosters medeltida jordebocker, 16-25 and 26—63; Sjdden, “Studier i Sko klosters godspolitik.” See also Andrae, Kyrka och fralse, 89—90. Dahlback, Uppsala domkyrkas godsinnehav, 272—73; DS 3837. Dahlback cautions against drawing conclusions about social relations in the mid-fourteenth century from this material. 110. Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 53; “Fogd6 klosters jordebok,” 84—96. This is asixteenth-century copy of a mid-thirteenth century original. The editor dates it to before 1233, Stahle to after 1233. Stahle says that the original used twelfth-century sources. Stahle, “Om var aldsta jordebok,” 119—23. Fogd6 did have villici (see DS

IIOI, 1172, 1396, and 1772, all giving privileges to the monastery’s lands “cum villicis, colonis, et familiis” or similar phrases), who were probably administrators or overseers of the tenants. Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 55. Norborg, Storféretaget

Vadstena Kloster, 147, claims that large-scale demesne farming was common in early medieval Sweden, breaking up into tenant farms in the twelfth century, but his only support besides Sko is from analogy with the Continent. Vadstena, his particular object of study, was first planned in 1346 and built in the 1370s.

111. Andrae, Kyrka och fralse, 95; DS 1207. 112. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhédille, 132—38, has analyzed this

material as to geographical and chronological distribution. My search of the published and unpublished diplomas has not uncovered any wills not known to Nevéus, and I have drawn on her analysis here. 113. This does not include the will of Absalon of Lund, since Skane was part of Denmark in the Middle Ages. It is not always clear in which province the slaves were located, because many of the testators held land in more than one province. Nevéus has identified the location of any lands mentioned in the will and any other land known to have been owned by the testator, as well as the location of the beneficiaries and if possible the witnesses. She does not publish this data, but prints a table (132— 33) listing the wills by province, classified into more and less certain attributions. I have used her attributions by province. 114. Nevéus, Trdalarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 134. 115. DS 855 (will of Christina Fastesdotter, between 1258 and 1282); DS 911 (will of Nils Ubbeson, 1286); DS 615 (will of Wihlog Nilsson, 1276}; DS 890 (will of Philip Jonsson, 1285—91)}.

116. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 136-37. In Carolingian and other Continental sources, however, the term mancipia was used solely for prebendal slaves, to distinguish them from the domiciled. 117. Nevéus, Trdlarnailandskapslagarnas samhédlle, 136, includes another will in this category of possible fostrar: DS 951 (will of Cecilia Elofsdotter, 1287): “Furthermore, if there should be found anywhere in the realm of Sweden anyone of either sex belonging to me or my husband in servile condition, with the agreement of my aforesaid husband, I grant them full perpetual freedom.” Nevéus, 135n., suggests that the testatrix did not know whether or not she owned any slaves, and that a possible reason for this might be that she had fostrar whose status as unfree was not clear. However, the will could also be read to indicate that the testatrix did not bother to specify the locations of all the slaves she owned but certainly knew she owned some.

2.26 NOTES TO PAGES 91-92 118. DS 615 (Wihlog Nilsson]; DS 762 (Sigge Guttormsson, 1283); DS 855 (Christina Fastesdotter); DS 890 (Philip Jonsson; the will only bequeaths one curia but he frees the slaves on all his lands); DS 901 (Philip Carlsson, 1270s, only bequeaths one predium, the rest of his bequests being in money, but he must have had multiple landholdings since he leaves a mark in coin to the church of each parish in which he has a mansio or farm); DS 911 (Nils Ubbeson); DS 951 (Cecelia Olofsdotter, who bequeaths only one mark of land, but money to parishes in which she holds land); DS 1043 (Andreas Bath, 1291); DS 1095 (Christina Johansdotter, the wife of

y Birger Persson, lawman of Uppland, 1293}; DS 1278 (Nils Sigridsson, lawman of Varend, 1299); DS 1428 (Ingeborg, widow of Magnus Johansson, 1304); DS 1722 (Helga, wife of Johan Ingevaldsson, 1283); DS 1737 (Magnus Johansson, 1292); Sko

Klosters medeltida jordebocker, 93 (Margareta Ragnvaldsdotter, before 1277). Johann Karlsson, who, as Nevéus, Trdlarna ilandskapslagarnas samhalle, 25, notes, came from the highest level of society, left only money, no land, in his will, in which he freed all his slaves. DS 695 (1279}. Cecilia, daughter of Knut Jarl, freed five slaves in

her will, but her son was to select the five, implying that she owned many more. DS goo (12708). 119. DS 786 (Ragnvald Ingesson, 1284}; DS 871 (the priest Bjorn, 1275—92); DS

1656 (Asmund Lang, 1310}; DS 457 (Bengt Sigtrygsson, 1259, freeing four slaves “whose names the rector of the church at Radena and my stablemaster Homerus know”); DS 541 (Bengt Magnusson, 1269, freeing “ascero in brunaby & Nicolao in sorby,” who may have been stewards or domiciled slaves}; DS 559 (Peter Erengislesson, 1272, freeing a named woman and her children}; DS 742 (Folke Karlsson, 1282, Lawman of Varend, freeing three named slaves}; DS 855 (Christina Fastesdotter: in addition to “all the slaves” on several curiae, she frees nine named slaves, two with their residence or possible place of origin named, and also announces that three other people, whom she may have manumitted earlier, are free}; DS 902 (Brynolf Haroksson, 1280s, bequeathing only one predium but implying that there is more land going to his heirs; he frees one slave, the son of his slave woman); DS 925 (Hafrid Sigtryggsdotter, 1286, who frees a named slave and her two children).

120. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 24-25. 121. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdille, 95n., quite sensibly suggests that a provision on OgL about fatherless children owning slaves implies that the slaves were inherited. OgL Gipt 18. 122. One freed slave is referred to as a carpenter, but he is also given cattle and grain. DS 742 (Folke Carlsson, lawman in Varend, 1282). 123. OgL Arf 21; UL Manh 6:4 (slaves also appear working in the forest in AVgL Forn 2:2 and YVgL Forn 5}; AVgL Retl 9 and YVgL Ret] 20; UL Kép 4 and VmL Kop s. 124. OgL Arf 6; SdmL Arf 3:4; AVgL Gipt 6:3.

125. YVgL Piuf 20-21 (if a bryte and a householder’s son steal together, both hang, whereas if a master and his own slave steal together, only the master is punished; if a bryte and slave steal together only the bryte is punished]; YVgL Dr 16; YVeL Piuf 26; OgL Dr 14. 126. YVgL Forn 46; OgL Kr 9. 127. Forexample, see DS 454 (1259], the will of Gytha villica, bequeathing totam curiam to a monastery, with the permission of her lord, on her behalf and that of her husband the villicus. See also DS 625 (1277), a donation by Bishop Henry of Link6ping of a life interest in lands in two villages to the villicus Hermod “in remuneration for his labor”; DS 871, the will of the priest Bj6rn giving four cows, a horse, and a bed to his villicus and the latter’s daughter; DS 1336 (1301), the will of Margareta, villica

NOTES TO PAGES 93-97 227 of lawman Birger Persson of Uppland; DS 1378 (1303}, the will of Ragnhild, witnessed

by two villici. 128. Andrae, Kyrka och fralse, 95; Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 47. See DS 1029 (1291: acontract with a steward}, and DS 1124, 1289, and 1605, documents from 1295 to 1309 giving or bequeathing land except for the part in the possession of the steward. 129. OgL Dr 14:5; OgL Uin 12; AVgL Arf 12; YVgL Arf 15; AVgL Arf 16-17; YVgL Arf 21-24; YVgL Piuf 36. 130. Sko Klosters medeltida jordeboécker 93. 131. Riis, “Villici og coloni,” discusses these diplomas. Necrologium Lundense,

73. Jacobsen and Moltke, Danmarks runeindskrifter 40 (Randbel, North Jutland}, and 83 (Sender Vinge, North Jutland). The villici of the great ecclesiastical institutions may have been partners or estate farmers in some way since they did not have fixed dues. Instead of stating how much they owe each year the registers give approximate or minimum amounts. Arhus domkapitels jordeboger 3, passim, and Rasmussen’s commentary, 63—65; Samling af adkomster, 61, 63, and 79. The later Roskilde book, however, makes no distinction in the fixed nature of the dues owed by the coloni and the villicus. Ulsig, “Landboer og bryder,” 144. 132. See Ulsig, Danske adelsgodser, 124. 133. SkL 226-31; SkL 171-73; VSjLAO 3:13; ESjL 3:19; ESjL 3:68; JL 2:76; JL 2:1 (but cf. JL 2:56); JL 2:32; JL 2:66; JL 2:102; JL 2:70. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 32, however, sees the provisions restricting the rights of a free bryde as traces of an earlier period when the bryde was a slave, not as due to economic dependence. 134. OgL Uab 16. Even if a home-born slave might be more valuable to the master than a purchased slave he or she would probably not be worth two and two-thirds times the value of another slave (eight marks to three}. OgL Dr 16:1. Some other factors besides the market value of the slave are operating here. 135. OgL Uab 16:1; OgL Dr 13:2; OgL Uap 41; OgL Dr 16. 136. The same went for a fostra who married a free man. OgL Gipt 29. 137. Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 89; OgL Egh 23. 138. DS 786 (will of Ragnvald Ingesson); DS 1737 (will of Magnus Johansson}. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 152—53, was not able to identify with certainty the location of the slaves in the latter will; she gives Uppland as the

most likely place, Ostergétland and Vastmanland as other possibilities. Magnus may, of course, have held land and slaves in all three provinces. Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 86, places the former will in Uppland and the latter in Smaland. 139. VmL Manh 25:9; Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 90. See also Odeen,

Studier i Smdlands bebyggelsehistoria, 380-87. The movement out of slavery and toward domiciling is discussed in chapter 5. It is not clear why such economic status would be connected with the slave’s being home-born. 140. AVgL Arf 4:2; YVgL Gipt 11. VmL Manh 24:8 also refers to a slave who bears

his master’s keys and commands a higher compensation, but he does not have a special title. CHAPTER 4 THE LEGAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE SLAVE

1. Watson, Evolution of Law, 68-70. 2. lam grateful to Elsa Sjdholm (pers. comm., June 1984) for making me more

: sensitive to this problem.

228 NOTES TO PAGES 97-98 3. For a more complete view of penal law involving slaves, see Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht. 4. Sallstrom, Bologna och Norden, 151—81; Fenger, Romerret i Norden, 5 4— 59; Bagge, “Nordic Students,” 2—13. On Danes studying both canon and civil law in Paris, see Arnold of Ltibeck, Chronica Slavorum 3:15. See Sjdholm, “Rattlosa,” 123-— 24.

5. Itis not a realistic possibility that resemblances between Scandinavian and Continental Germanic laws go back to some proto-Germanic tribal law; the comparison with Roman law makes this clear. 6. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, gives an excellent codeby-code summary of slavery in the Swedish and Danish laws. I have cited her work on particular points where I have used her interpretations or suggestions, or where her analysis disagrees with mine, but not in every place where I have reached conclusions similar to hers. 7. GuL 223 (they had to be male, at least fifteen years old, and brought up at home}; Gr Ib 221 (two gras’ worth of slaves for one gra’s worth of vadmal, and the payor retained the right to redeem the slaves within a year’s time if he had raised them}. The monetary system was based on the mark. The mark was a weight that varied but was somewhat more than 200 grams or somewhat less than half a pound avoirdupois. The mark was divided into eight ounces (gra, aura), each of which was divided into three grtugs. Each grtug was further divided into ten pennyweights (twelve in some regions}. The mark was a measure of value, as well as of weight, as were its subdivisions; I have used ounce in translating gra when it clearly refers to weight, otherwise I have used gra. “An gra in vadmal” means “the value of an ounce of silver in cloth,” with the value set at a certain number of ells to the ounce, and “an grain slaves” means “the value of an ounce of silver in slaves.” “An gra in coin” refers to coins with face values adding up to an gra ({i.e., thirty pennies}, but because the coins were not of pure silver, laws regulating payment might call for “three gra in vadmal or six gra in coin.” See S. O. Jansson et al., KLNM, s.v. “Mark.” 8. AVgL Mandr 5:7; YVgL Dr 16; OgL Dr 16:2; VmL Manh 24:8; SkL 122. The latter law sets a standard price of three marks unless the owner can prove the slave was worth more; Andreas Suneson’s paraphrase makes it clear that three marks was the original law and that the payment of the slave’s value was an innovation (ASun 51). One of the Sjzlland law codes implies that the slave was worth three marks: if the slave killed a free man, his master had to turn him over to the victim’s relatives along with a fine of six marks; if the slave was unavailable, the fine was nine marks (ESjL 2:32).

g. “Halld6érs pattr Snorrasonar in fyrri,” 257—58; Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar 80. In Brennu-Njadls saga 36, Njal and Gunnar agree upon the amount of twelve gras, or one and a half marks, as compensation for the killing of a slave, and in this saga this amount is considered a very low price. 10. Laxdeela saga 12 (by making a special point of stating that it was permissible to pay twelve gras for a concubine, Grdgds implies that the standard price for a

female slave was less than that amount: Gr Ia 112); Svarfdoela saga 26—27. Six hundred silver pennies (assuming that is in fact what “pieces of silver” means) would amount to two and a half marks. Prices are not usually quoted in pennies in the sagas, but this is one of the latest sagas, dating in its present version from the late fourteenth century. Jonas Kristjansson, KLNM, s.v. “Svarfdcela saga.” Yngvild was not a slave, but a married woman who had egged her husband on to a killing; the victim’s son, to break her pride, sold her into slavery.

NOTES TO PAGES 99-102 229 1r. GuL 57; FrL 5:41. In the Gulabing law, one of the defects was pregnancy; apparently the cost of rearing a child to maturity was enough to outweigh the advantage of getting two slaves for the price of one. On slave defects in Roman law (which did not include pregnancy) see Watson, Roman Slave Law, 49-52. 12. AVgL Piuf 19; YVgL Piuf 54; OgL Uin 1 (“If a man wants to sell his slave, he shall be bought with a broker and witnesses like a horse”); GL 32a (Add. 4}. The

Gotaland provisions also list other transactions that require witnesses, which are paralleled in the Danish laws that do not mention slaves. 13. Reykdeela saga 10; GuL 71. 14. GuL 71; FrL 11:20. 15. MHLL 4:7; MHBL 4:6. Nearly all the Continental Germanic law codes have a very similar provision. Cf. LVis 5:4:11; LLomb Liutprand 48; LAlam Pactus 39; LAlam 45; LBav 9:4 and 16:5; LSal 66; LRib 17; LSax 20; LThur 37-38. 16. “Hrafns pattr Hritfirdings” 3; Pdttr Rognvalds, Olafs saga Tryggvasonar 243, Flateyjarbok 1:320. 17. ESjL 3:18; AEVSjL 160; VSjLAO 3:10. The laws of Skane provide for an enslaved free man to be compensated as a free man. The law mentions his having been sold after being captured, but there is no penalty for the seller. SkL 129. 18. OgL Uab 30:1; YVgL Add 7:23; UL K6p 3. The law of S6dermanland follows the law of Uppland exactly. SdmL Kop 3. 19. The parallel between the forty-mark fine for selling a free man and the forty pieces of silver for which Christ was sold is probably not significant; forty marks is a standard penalty throughout the Swedish and Danish law codes for many offenses. 20. The Vastmanland laws retained only the older provision about selling a free man (VmL Kop 4), and one manuscript included as a rubric on this provision “This

deals with if a man sells a Christian man,” even though this code did not copy the prohibition on selling Christian slaves. 21. Will of Magnus Johansson, DS 1737. — 22. GuL 182; FrL 4:56. 23. GuL 198. The Frostapbing law gives similarly small amounts of compensation (two to three gras}, without specifying what the compensation is for; it could be an amount due on the killing of a slave, in addition to the slave’s value. FrL 11:21. This passage is followed by one containing fines of twelve gras and up for killing someone’s dog (FrL 11:24). 24. FrL 4:61; GuL 198. This may mean a twelfth of that paid to the master for the slave, or more likely one-twelfth of the compensation the master would receive if he himself were injured.

25. Griattri. 26. Gr la 113. 27. SkL 122; ASun 51; SkL 115. 28. ALVSjL Tr 7-9; AAVSjL Tr 13; AVSjL Tr 15. 29. AVgL Mandr 5:7 (on the places where a slave was worth full compensation, AVgL Mandr 13:1]; AVgL Ser 6; AVgL Bar 2:1; AVgL Uab 3; AVeL Gipt 5; AVgL Gipt

6:3; YVgL Gipt 4 and 11, adding that the man who lay with someone else’s slave woman “caused him [the owner] shame.” 30. OgL Dr 16:1—17:1; OgL Dr 21; OgL Uap 3; OgL Uab 16; OgL Uab 25:2; OgL Arf 15. 31. UL Manh 6:5: “Everything that a slave does or has done to him, that will be

worth as much compensation as a free man, unless the owner or his wife or children do anything to him, whether killing or wounding: that will not be subject to any

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230 NOTES TO PAGES 103-04 compensation.” This exception will be discussed below. See also UL Arf 22 on intercourse. 32. VmL Manh 24:8; VmL Arf 17; VmL Manh 6:4; VmL Arf 17. 33. SdmL Byg 24:1; SdmL Manh 26:8: “Whoever is killed at home, whether free

or unfree, is compensated double.” This does not say whether the slave is to be compensated at double a free man’s compensation, but since no slave compensation is stated anywhere in the laws, this is probably the case.

34. GLI5. 35. GL 19:37. The phrasing of a provision about rape (GL 22) which raises the possibility that the woman herself got the compensation suggests the possibility that it may be the slave’s relatives who got the wergeld. The ambiguity comes from the fact that the dative case is used without a preposition, and it is not clear whether the payment is‘to or for the slave. 36. According to Egils saga 81, the killing of aslave was punished with outlawry if compensation was not paid within three days. Eyrbyggja saga 43 states that the compensation price was twelve ounces of silver and the men bringing the payment had to start their journey by the third day. 37. E.g., Reykdeela saga 6 and to. 38. E.g., Lnb S89 (H77). 39. LSax 20; LThur 3; Pactus 10:3; LAlam Pactus 17:4 and 17:7; LBav 6; LBurg 10:1—10:5; LRib 8; LLomb 129-37; LVis 6:5:9. But see Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 268-—

69, on slaves in Salic law being compensated only at their value and not with wergeld, and Gutmann, Die soziale Gliederung, 14, on the lack of slave wergeld in LBav. In the Ostrogothic Edict of Theodoric, the master could get two slaves in recompense for the one killed. EdTh 152. In LFris 1:11, no standard value is set. 40. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 29—31; Watson, Roman Slave Law, 54-58; D 9:2:3; Inst 4:3:11. 41. In the Alamannic law, for example, slaves are mentioned under only one injury in the catalogue of fines: having the big toe cut off. LAlam Pactus 11:7. There the fine is half of what would be owing to a free man whose toe was cut off. In none of

the other injuries, however, is a slave mentioned, although the freedman appears often. The catalogues of injuries in the Salic law do not mention injuries to slaves (Pactus 17 and 29), although there is a provision that if someone beats a slave so as to keep him from work for forty days he must pay one and a third solidi (Pactus 35:4; LSal 58). LThur also excludes injuries to slaves from the catalogue of injuries (LThur 4—25), as do the Saxon and Frisian laws: LSax 1-13 (for nobles only, but this term in the Saxon laws probably includes all freeborn people}; LFris 22: 1—90 (for nobles, free men, and liti). 42. LBav 6 (one-half to one-third); LLomb 103~—37 (for household slaves and

aldii one-half to one-fourth that for free people, for field slaves one-half that for household slaves). 43. LVis 6:4:9. See also LVis 6:4:1. In LBurg, a table of fines for different injuries is not given, but for cutting off someone’s arm the penalty is to be half the victim’s pretium, whether the victim is free or slave. LBurg 11:1. 44. D 47:10:15:34—-49. 45. AEVSjL provides a higher penalty for intercourse with a special slave woman

who neither grinds nor bakes than for a normal slave woman; the Frisian law has a higher penalty than usual for intercourse with a special slave woman, called bortamagd (tablemaid), “who neither milks nor grinds.” LFris 13:1. Other Continental laws compensate the master for intercourse with his slave women, as do the Scan-

NOTES TO PAGES 105-07 231 dinavian laws. LFris 9:3—9:7; Pactus 25:1; LBurg 30:1, specifically relating to rape (violentia) rather than just intercourse; LLomb 194 (on rape: LLomb 207); LAlam 75; LBav 8:12—8:13. The Visigothic law has somewhat stricter provisions: a free man has to pay a penalty to the woman’s owner and receive fifty lashes if he rapes a slave

woman, but if she commits adultery with him voluntarily, outside her master’s house, only she is punished. If it is within her master’s house, both partners are flogged; there is no financial penalty. LVis 3:4:15-16. 46. Sodid livestock. A feud might start over the killing of sheep, but sheep never had a right to personal compensation. 47. GuL 182; FrL 5:20.

48. Grla Itt. 49. Lnb, S385 (H338); Egils saga 85. The former story may be a fabrication designed to explain some place-names. 50. The Visigothic law is an exception, providing that one could not kill one’s own slave without cause. If the slave had committed a crime, if the killing were in self-defense, or if the killing occurred during chastisement for a just cause, the killing was not punishable; otherwise, the master who killed his slave was to be exiled, his property going to his heirs (LVis 6:5:12). The Visigothic code’s inclusion of provisions on this matter is indicative of its closer relation to Roman law than that of the other Germanic laws. The Lombard law provided only that one could not drag one’s own slave out of sanctuary (LLomb Liutprand 143}. The Church might put limits on a master’s power over his slaves even where the secular law did not; e.g., from the year 517, Concilium Epaonense 24, Concilia 1:27, excommunicating for two years anyone who killed his own slave without a judicial decree. 51. Watson, Roman Slave Law, 116—20, 124-28. 52. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 36—38; CTh 9:12:1—2; D 48:8:11:1— 2;D 1:6:2; C9:14:1. See Bradley, Masters and Slaves, 123—29, and Watson, “Roman Slave Law,” on how these protections worked, or did not work, in practice. 53. GuL 198; this phrase appears in a specific context (where the slave accom-

panies his master to a gathering], yet other laws bear out that this was the case generally. FrL 10:40 explicitly applies only to a native-born slave, but there is no different provision made for a foreign-born slave. JL 1:32 makes a blanket statement. 54. SkL 123-24. The fine a master paid for a killing by his slave was much less

than that he would owe if he had done it himself, so that masters may often have blamed their slaves for their own deeds (SkL 119). The Jutish law makes no more specific provision than the general statement quoted above; the other Danish laws require the slave to be turned over. ESjL 2:32; VSj]L does not mention the killing of a free man by a slave but that is certainly included in matters for which the penalty is forty marks, for which the slave had to be turned over (AZVSjL Tr 2-3). 55. UL Manh 6:5. If the master was not willing to pay compensation fora slave’s deeds as for those of a free man, however, he might be able to turn over the slave to the victim instead (UL Manh 14:1). It may have been cheaper for the master to turn over the slave than pay the compensation, which would be equivalent to the value of the

stolen goods. As Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 122, points out, this could mean that a slave could lose his life for something for which a free man could only be fined. The plaintiff, however, might prefer to keep the slave, not kill him (the law does not specifically say he may do with the slave as he wishes}, and in this case the slave would be in the same position as a free man who could not pay a fine: enslaved by the person against whom he committed the crime. 56. VmL Manh 24:8. The thirteen marks’ fine for killing by a slave is the same as

232 NOTES TO PAGES 108-10 for a killing by a domestic animal if the owner denies it but it is proven (VmL Manh 1}. GL 16:2.

57. OgL Dr 13:2; OgL Eb 15:2-16; OgL Uab 15:4; OgL Uab 16:1. 58. AVgl Mandr 4, which also states, “If aslave kills aman of kin, he must not be called his killer.” YVgL Dr 9 is similar but has “he must not be called a thegn’s killer.” 59. Though the fragment mentions only injuries, not killings, committed by a slave, the text now lost probably covered killings by slaves. GuL 163; the fragment of FrL 5:31 is printed in NGL 2:506. Chapters 5:29—30 are missing from the text of the fragment, but the beginning of 5:29 shows that it dealt with the killing of a woman by a man; chapter 30 could have dealt with killings by slaves. 60. Gr la 111. If two slaves fight and one is killed, the owner of the killer can either let the slaves be prosecuted or else pay for the value of the victim; if two slaves fight and one is crippled, the two owners share the labor of the healthy slave and the costs of upkeep of the crippled one. Pactus 35:1 has the same provision in case of a

killing of one slave by another; it apparently derives from Mosaic law. Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 276—84; Sjdholm, “Rattl6sa,” 139. 61. Fostbroedra saga to. The East Norse laws did not punish slaves with outlawry, and some specifically stated that this was because a slave might consider outlawry desirable (OgL Ep 15:2—16). 62. GuL 259 (for the equivalent law from the Frostaping, but dealing with flight rather than theft, see FrL 10:40); GuL 57. 63. GL 38 (Add 5); YVgL Piuf 22-23 (these provisions are absent in AVgL); OgL

Uab 41. ,

64. SkKL 160—62; A.VSjL Tr 10-11; AVSjL Tr 13; ESjL 2:77. 65. The case of penal slaves in Ostergétland (OgL Uap 4) was an exception. The

slaveholder was responsible for paying compensation for their deeds only up to the amount they were serving for; after that it was the responsibility of their relatives.

66. Grlb 237; Grlarrt. 67. Especially insulting was the the term argr, which implied both effeminacy or passive homosexuality and general immorality as well as cowardice. Meulengracht Sgrensen, The Unmanly Man, 18-20. 68. In Fldamanna saga 26, Porgils Pérdarson and his followers kill a slave for his insolence. Porgils’s men do not kill the slave on the spot but wait for Porgils and the slave’s owner to return; Porgils asks for compensation but the slave’s owner, Anakol, replies that “what the slave says does not matter” and refuses, so they kill the slave. 69. On crimes by slaves see Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 86—100, Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 98, and Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 91-94; CTh 9:10:4; 9:18:1; 9:24:2. Cf. C 1:12:4; C 9:2:29; D 47:9:1:pr.; 48:8:4:2; 48:2:12:34; 48:19. 70. Seyfarth, Soziale Fragen, 133; D 50:17:32; Watson, Roman Slave Law, 6771; Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 98—130; Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 68—74, 80-84. Considering the question of whether the liability is really the master’s or his only as defensor of a person who has no legal standing to defend himself, Buckland concludes (113) that noxal liability is a legal form unto itself, neither direct not representative liability. 71. Provisions in the Continental Germanic law codes requiring either surrender of the slave or satisfaction by the master for various crimes are numerous, including EdTh 117 and 120 (following Roman law closely as did the entire Edict), LVis 6:4:3; 6:4:10; 5:4:18; 3:3:9; 8:1:8; 8:1:12; 8:2:1—2; Pactus 35:8. Cf. also AngloSaxon laws: Hlothhere and Eadric 1-4, Gesetze 1:9; Ine 74, Gesetze 1:120—23, re-

NOTES TO PAGES 110-11 233 peated in LHP 70:5. See Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 133-39, 193-97, 291, 352—53, 380. In LRib offenses by slaves are listed with only monetary penalties: LRib 19:2; 21; 23; 30-31. The monetary penalties refer not only to damages but to an additional compensation probably amounting to the value of the slave. Similarly LFris 1:13; 9:17; LSax 51; LThur 576. 72. Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 196—98, believes the latter was rare. See LVis 6:4:7; 6:4:4; 3:3:8-10; 3:4:14; 8:1:4—6; and 9—10; LLomb 142 and 254; LLomb Grimoald 3; LLomb Liutprand 63; LBurg 2:3; 30:1; 33:4; 4:2, 4:4-7; 5:6; and 7; Pactus 12:1—2 and 40:1~—11; LFris 3:7.

73. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 114—15; Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 76—

78, 85-86; CTh 9:10:4; C 3:41:4; D 9:4; D 47:6:1:1; D 47:10:17:7. The master’s responsibility if he knew of the crime, not just if he ordered it, is expressed, e.g., in LVis 6:4:2, and LBurg 2:4.

74. See Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 74—75. This problem is discussed further in chapter 5 in connection with fugitive slaves. 75. Innocent II] wrote to Archbishop Andreas that slaves who had committed a sin that normally required papal absolution should not come to Rome if it would cause their masters serious hardship. DD 108, 1:2:213—14. 76. Skanske Kirkelov 10(DGL 1:850). This contrasts with fines for free people. 77. GuL 16; GuL 20; FrL 2:28; BpL 1:14; EpL 1:12; GrII 23. BpL and FrL fine the master if he has commanded the slaves to work ona holy day; if it is their own choice,

they are to be beaten but he can redeem them. , 78. See LAlam 38; LBav 7:4; LFris 18:2; LSal Decretio Childeberti 3:7. These laws, unlike the Norwegian ones, do not make a distinction depending on whether the slave has done the work of his own accord or on his master’s orders. Cf. also Wihtred 9, Gesetze 1:13; Ine 3, Gesetze, 1:90—91; Edward and Guthrum 7:2, Gesetze, 1:132—33; I] Cnut 45-46, Gesetze 1:342—45. The English laws all strictly specify that if the lord forces the slave to work on the feast day or Sunday it is the lord who is to be

punished and the slave is freed; the slave is only punished if he chooses to work. 79. GuL 261. Presumably it is too obvious to state that the owner is responsible if he steals together with his own slave. But cf. several of the Continental law codes that deal with a slave stealing together with a free man not his master: LVis 7:2:4—5, in which, if a slave steals with his own master, only the master is punished, but if the slave steals with another free man, both are punished and the slave’s master and the other free man each bear half of the financial penalty; LBav 9:7, in which the slave is flogged but only the free man pays the financial penalty; similarly LBurg 70:1 and 91. LHP 59:24, has the same rule, that the free man pays and the slave is flogged, but LHP 85:4—4a provides that if free men and slaves slay or steal together only the free men are responsible. The latter provision is particularly interesting because it is phrased exactly the same as the Gulaping law provision (as nearly as one can determine given that the latter is in the vernacular and the former in Latin}: “He commits theft alone who commits it in company with a slave.” The similarity of the phrasing need not imply a textual relationship between the law codes, however, because the statement is short and pithy enough to have been transmitted orally without distortion. 80. YVgL Piuf 20-21; OgL Dr 8. The same was true if a woman killed together with a man: the man was held responsible. 81. E.g., Egils saga 22. The phrase used is “prela ok mansmenn,” which has led some to postulate a difference between the two groups for which there is no other evidence. 82. GL 16:2; SkL 162; ESjL 2:32; AAVSjL Tr 4; VSjLAO 4:29.

234 NOTES TO PAGES 111~—13 83. LVis 7:2:5 and 7:3:5 provide that the slave not be punished because he was following his master’s command; this attitude seems particularly lenient for this harsh code. LAlam 5:3 seems to imply the same thing but is not clear. LLomb 259 provides for punishment of the master only but does not explicitly state, as does LVis, that the slave is not to be punished. Similarly LSax 50; LSax 18 (a litus rather than a slave); LFris 1:14. In LBurg 2:3, ifa slave kills a free man with his master’s knowledge, both are put to death, but it is not clear whether this would be the case if the master had explicitly commanded it. LLomb Liutprand 21 provides for the master to forfeit his property if a slave kills a free man with his consent and mentions a punishment

for the slave only if the master denies responsibility. This indicates that the slave probably would not have been punished by law if the crime was deemed the master’s responsibility, but as part of the master’s property the slave would be turned over to the heirs of the victim, from whom he could hardly expect lenient treatment. 84. E.g., Brennu-Njdls saga 47—49 (theft); Fostbroedra saga 9-10 (killing); Eyrbyggja saga 26 and 43 (killing). 85. Saxo, Gesta Danorum 13:4:1. Skyum-Nielsen, “Saxo som Kilde,” 176-77, points out the economic advantage to a master who has his slaves commit his crimes.

This particular instance has no value as an historical event but is indicative of a common theme. 86. In addition, if a slave killed an outlaw, he may have gotten the reward himself (Gr II 381}. The provision is intended to cover debt slaves, but it is not at all clear who got the money if a normal slave killed the outlaw; it seems as likely that the slave got it as that the master got it. The phrasing of the law implies that slaves, even those called przll and not logsculdarma6r, may have been in that status because of debt. Similarly, in Grla 14, if “slaves or debtors” kill a polar bear, it goes to the man

to whom they owe money. It is not clear who gets the bear if the slaves are not debtors.

87. GuL 56: “A slave may not arrange any transaction except for his knife alone.” This contrasts with, among others, a minor who could make no valid bargain and a free woman who could make a purchase of up to an gra. For Sweden, OgL Uin 8:1; UL Kop 4. SdmL KO6p 4 restricts the purchasing rights of only the wife and children, not servants or slaves; similarly, HL K6p 2 and DL Byg 32. VmL K6p 5 puts a

limit for a slave; as in the Uppland law an exception is made for purchases at the market. 88. FrL 10:44; DS 742. 89. SkL 135. Andreas Suneson took the strict view. ASun 83: “Nothing can belong to someone’s slave that does not belong to his master, to whom the slave also belongs.” 90. See Watson, Roman Slave Law, 90-101, and Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 187—233, on the nature of the peculium and how a creditor might sue upon it. Buckland, 187, briefly explains the peculium thus: “In essence the peculium was a fund which masters allowed slaves to hold and, within limits, to deal with as owners. It was distinct from the master’s ordinary property—the patrimonium, and though in law the property of the master, it is constantly spoken of as, de facto, the property of the slave.” See also 18o9ff. for “a host of rules” expressing “the detachment of the fund from the master and the establishment of it as a sort of property of the slave.” See D 15, passim. 91. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 201; Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, 104; Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, 102. Buckland discusses in detail the Roman law provisions about the various sorts of legal transactions and

NOTES TO PAGES 113-15 235 the various sorts of permission the slave needed in order to engage in them. The commercial law of the Germanic law codes, both the early medieval Continental codes and the later Scandinavian ones, is far less developed and the details thus have little relevance to a comparison. 92. LBurg 21:1 provides that anyone who lends money to a slave without his master’s permission has no right to a repayment of the loan. LLomb 233 invalidates purchases from slaves: the buyer must return the goods to the slave’s owner and also forfeit the purchase price. See also LLomb Liutprand 87. LBav 16:3 allows the master the option of validating the transaction, though LBav 16:7 (drawn from the heavily Roman Codex Euricianus), recognizes the existence of the peculium. Pactus 27:33 provides a penalty of 15 solidi for engaging in a transaction with a slave without the

master’s permission. LRib 77 invalidates any transaction with a slave. LVis 2:5:5, reflecting a society that retained much of Roman urban life and commercial sophistication, invalidates written contracts made by slaves. LVis 5:4:13 invalidates sales by slaves but seems to recognize the existence of a peculium, though not by that name. LVis 5:7:14 explicitly gives a freed slave the right to do with his peculium as he wishes. See also LVis 10:1:10, invalidating all acts by slaves without their masters’ permission. On self-purchase, LBav 16:7; LVis 5:4:16. Of course, all this meant is

that the master was not legally required to permit self-purchase; since he could gratuitously free his slaves, he could also free them upon payment of money that was officially his, but he was not obliged to do so. 93. OgL Re 11; YVgL Add 2:1; YVgL Add 13:1; JL 1:31. 94. In Gisla saga Surssonar 1, Ari marries Ingibjorg, who brings in her dowry a slave who owns this sword. Ari’s brother Gisli uses the sword and refuses to give it back; he and the slave kill each other over it. 95. By contrast, Magnus Eriksson’s national law from the mid-fourteenth century prohibited anyone, even free farmers, in the service of a nobleman from bearing arms (MELL Ser 9). Among the Continental law codes, the Visigothic law envisions

that slaves would bear arms, participating in the army along with their masters. Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 171-72; LVis 9:2:9. 96. OgL Arf 6; SdmL Arf 3:4; AVgL Retl 9; YVgL Retl 20. 97. FrL 4:5; Gul 86. 98. There are examples in Scandinavian law where slaves could be tortured, e.g. GL 38 (Add 5), but these involve instances where the slave is accused of a crime and the torture is a means of extracting a confession. Roman law required torture as a

guarantee of the truth of the slave’s testimony even when the slave was only a witness and not implicated in the crime or delict. See Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 86-91; Watson, Roman Slave Law, 84—86; Watson, “Roman Slave Law”; CTh 9:1:14; 9:7:4; D 22:3:7; D 48:18—19; C 9:41. LVis also discusses the torture of slaves to obtain their testimony, though this apparently only refers to cases where they are accused of a crime and are being tortured to obtain a confession or the names of accomplices. LVis 2:3:4; LVis 2:4:4; LBurg 7; Pactus 40:1—11. LVis also allowed slaves to appear in court as representatives of their masters or to testify in certain cases where they were witnesses to an oral contract or where the master vouched for their veracity. LVis 2:2:10; 2:4:8; 2:5:11; 7:1:2. 99. Even where the marriages of slaves in the American South were performed by a minister they had no standing in the law. The ceremony often did not include the words “Till death do us part.” Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 452—58 and 475~81. 100. On marriage among the free, see Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, 111-14. On Sweden, see L. Carlsson, “Jag giver dig min dotter”, and critical

236 NOTES TO PAGES 115-17 discussion in Sjéholm, Gesetze als Quellen, 53—85. See Jochens, “The Church and Sexuality,” 384, on the Church’s attempt to impose its ideas of morality in Iceland, also Jochens, “Consent in Marriage.” tor. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 76-79; C 9:9:23:pr. See Bradley, Masters and Slaves, 47—50, and Watson, Roman Slave Law, 77—78, on the de facto recognition of the slave family in Rome, even though not recognized under the law. 102. LLomb 217~—220 recognizes marriage between a slave man and an aldia (a woman of intermediate status) or an aldius and a slave woman as well as between two slaves, even if they belong to different masters. LLomb Liutprand 66 and 104 both recognize that a slave could have a wife (uxor). LLomb Liutprand 140 even provides that if two slaves are married to each other and the master has intercourse with the

woman, he has committed adultery and both slaves may go free. See Nehlsen, Sklavenrecht, 367—68. Pactus 25:7, in prohibiting two slaves of different masters to

marry without their masters’ permission, implies that they could marry (in coniugium sociare) with that permission, but Nehlsen, 271, notes that “from the use of this term [coniugium]|, however, one may not conclude that unions of that sort enjoyed the protection of legitimate marriages.” LVis 10:1:17, in stating rules for marriages between slaves of two different masters, uses the term contubernium, implying that there was no legal marriage. 103. Landau, “Die Eheschliessung Unfreier,” 515-18; Gilchrist, “Medieval Canon Law,” 289—92; Concilium Cabillonense 30, Concilia 2:279.

104. GuL 64. The law does not specifically use the term marriage, referring instead to “coming together.” Among free people, however, the payment of the mund was the criterion for a legal marriage.

105. Grlattt. 106. Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, 70. 107. Féstbroedra saga 21-22. 108. BpL 2:15.

109. ESjL 3:17. It is possible that this law was not due to specific canon law influence—the phrase used for marriage is wighiaes, “is consecrated,” which is not necessarily Christian—but the law implies that marriage was normally indissoluble, which definitely labels it as Christian. The canon law rule was certainly known in Denmark, for it is mentioned in a letter of Abbot William of Abelholt, dating from the late twelfth century, DD 1:3:2:439. See Damsholt, “Abbed Vilhelm af Abelholts brevsamling,” 18, on William’s use of canon law. The canon law provision was also known in Norway and Iceland, though it is not reflected in the secular law there. Letter of Archbishop Eirik to Bishops Brand and Porlak, 1189, DI 1:287. 110. OgL Gipt 29. 111. GL 22; Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhalle, 61n. 112. It provides for a freedman or a slave to fa (receive, have, or marry} a slave woman, then stated that a slave woman’s lover (Kizpsir) would have no right to her children. The latter statement is probably meant as a contrast to the situation where the slave or freedman marries her legally, but it is possible that lover refers to the freedman or slave who receives, has, or marries her. AVgL Gipt 4; YVgL Gipt 3. The law stipulates a payment “for her bed,” which probably means “for the work time she loses in childbed,” but could mean “for his right to her bed,” which might include a right to the children. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhéalle, 80, agrees that the slave woman’s lover who has no right to the children does not refer to the case where the slaves are legally married. 113. OgL Gipt 29.

NOTES TO PAGES 117-20 237 114. Sko Klosters medeltida jordebocker, 92. 115. AEVSjL Tr 14.

116. The women and children freed in some of these wills might be concubines and children of the master, but one of them is the will of a woman. Will of Peter Erengislesson, 1272, DS 559; the priest Bj6rn, 1275—92, DS 871; Brynolf Haroksson, 1280s, DS 902; Hafrid Sigtrygsdotter, 1286, DS 925. 117. VmL Kr 7. 118. A free woman had to do penal slavery or pay a fine if she slept with a slave. GuL 198; FrL 2:1. 119. Gr la 118. Marriage is clearly referred to here; the verb eiga in Icelandic means to marry as well as to have. It implies possession but is used of both partners, not just the man. See Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. “eiga.””. 120. The story of Ketil and Armeid, in Landndmabok and Droplaugarsona saga, has been cited in chapter 2; similarly, Helgi Ottarsson marries a woman he captures in Ireland, daughter of a king. Lnb, $84 {H72). 121. No betrothal ale is mentioned, but the phrases used imply legal marriage. Svarfdcela saga 20. The verbs fa (to receive} and ganga me0(go with) are often used in reference to marriage but also in other instances. Gipta, however, is used almost exclusively of marriage. 122. She has not, however, freed him in order to marry him. When her child is born, Pérkel sends Freystein to go expose him, but Freystein puts him where he will be safe and where someone is likely to come pick him up. The child is picked up and

brought up, and he eventually proves to be such a promising youth that Porkel acknowledges him as his nephew. Porstein, the nephew, then persuades Porkel to free Freystein. “Porsteins pattr uxafdts” 7. 123. “Pattr Régnvalds,” Olafs saga Tryggvasonar 243, Flateyjarbok 1:320. 124. LVis 3:2:2~3: confiscation of property if she marries her own slave, flogging and enslavement if she marries someone else’s; see also LVis 3:2:7. LLomb 221 and

Liutprand 24: enslavement, or death at the hands of her relatives; according to LLomb 216, a free woman could marry an aldius. Pactus 13:8 (LSal 14:7} and 25:4:

enslavement for sleeping with or marrying a slave; Pactus, Capitulare 3:98: for marrying her own slave, confiscation of property and outlawry (her relatives could kill her with impunity]. LAlam 17: enslavement. LFris 6:1—2 provides that a woman who unknowingly married a slave could remain free if they did not sleep together

after she found out; otherwise she became a slave. The situation is like that considered in the canon law, but the emphasis is on her personal status, not the validity or dissolution of the marriage. Cf. Concilium Dingolfense 10, Concilia 2:95. 125. Watson, Roman Slave Law, 14—15; CTh 4:12:1 and 9:9:1. See Yuge, “Die Gesetze im Codex Theodosianus.” Cf. C 9:11. 126. SkL 130; Grla 96. 127. Williams, Thraldom in Ancient Iceland, 110. 128. In Nitida saga 3, a late medieval romance, a queen eludes an unwelcome suitor by disguising a slave woman (ambdtt} as herself, the suitor kidnaps the slave woman. The ruse is discovered because the woman is constantly weeping for the loss of her husband and children. Not much can be concluded from this about Icelandic attitudes toward the slave family: the tale does not purport to describe a real situation in Iceland (Nitida is a queen of France} and although the slave is given a family and suffers when separated from them, the saga takes no real interest in her. She is not mentioned again after it is discovered that she is not the queen. 129. This is true of the family sagas; the riddaraségur may well take their refer-

238 NOTES TO PAGES 120-23 ences to slaves from foreign models, although where a Continental European story has a servant and an Icelandic one makes it a slave, this tells us something of how Icelanders thought of the social order. 130. One of the people who freed slaves in her will was Christina, wife of Birger Persson, the lawman who several years after her death was given the job of codifying the law of Uppland. DS 1095. 131. DD 32, 1:4:55—63; Jacobson and Moltke, Danmarks runeindskrifter 58 (Herning stone}, 1:96—97. 132. AVgL Mandr 4 and YVgL Dr 9g, in which a slave is not to be considered the killer of a free man. This may not be so much a question of dishonor at being killed by

a slave as an emphasis on the fact that someone other than the slave must be considered financially responsible. 133. SkL 115: “If a man’s slave is killed, no equivalence-oath shall be offered for him any more than for any of a man’s other livestock, if it were killed.” FrL 5:18: “That shall be valued at half the value if chattel harms chattel: horn or hoof or slave.” Cf. LLomb 334, where a pregnant female slave is considered in the same category as a cow in calf or mare in foal; LBurg 4:1, where the theft of a slave is considered in the context of the theft of livestock; similarly LFris 2:11 and 4. 134. VSjJLAO 4:6; AVSjL 95; YVSjL 28. 135. It has been suggested (Gjessing, “Treeldom i Norge,” 138—40, and Eriksen,

“Um treldom hos Skandinaverna,” 23) that there were certain physical marks of slavery, perhaps another means of expressing contempt for the slave. In Fereyinga saga 8, Prond attempts to sell as slaves two boys whose father he has killed. They have shaved heads and wear white cowls, but these signs are not specifically connected with their being slaves. In Saga Haralds konungs hardrdda 94—95, Harald hears a story about how his grandfather subdued a rebellious slave and instead of killing him reenslaved him and gave him a plain white shirt to wear. Harald then gives the slave’s grandson a similar shirt and tells him to take his family’s slave status along with the shirt. There is no indication that a shirt was a generalized sign of slavery, however; here it seems to symbolize dependence on a master who provides clothing. 136. JL 3:32; AVgL Lecara retar; similarly YVgL Utg 29, referring to a tramp. CHAPTER 5 SLAVERY AND FREEDOM

1. See Fenoaltea, “Slavery and Supervision,” esp. 637—41, on the effectiveness

of manumission as an incentive to slaves. 2. Dockés, Medieval Slavery and Liberation, 230—40, has argued that the danger of slave rebellion in a time when central government was too weak to control it was the major factor in the shift from slavery to the colonate under the late empire and early Middle Ages (see chapter 1}. 3. Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldommen,” 174—77, suggests that in Nor-

way opportunities for manumission meant that the need for supervision of slaves was less. In a period of civil war, however, the threat of slave rebellion (especially since slaves were armed for war) was too great and slaveowners began to shift toward tenant farming, which was safer. This does not explain, however, why the tenant farmers were not considered serfs. 4. See, for example, Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, especially 597—98; Bradley, Slaves and Masters, 31-33. 5. FrL 10:40.

NOTES TO PAGES 124-28 2.39 6. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 267—74, discusses in detail Roman provisions about fugitives; see especially 269, citing the laws punishing concealment of or aid to a fugitive. Rewards could be offered but were not established by law. D 19:5:15; D 47:2:52:12; C 6:1. See also penalties for aiding fugitives in LVis 9:1:1—8 and LVis 9:1:15 and 21 (see also Rothenh6fer, Untersuchungen zur Sklaverei, 35— 36); LBurg 6:4—10; LBurg 20:4; LLomb 267, 269-71, and 273-76; LLomb Liutprand 44; LAlam 20; LAlam 82; LBav 1:4; LBav 13:9. LVis 9:1:14 and LBurg 6:1 also provide rewards for the return of fugitive slaves. 7. GuL 68-69; FrL 10:40; AVgL Piuf 18; UL Manh 53:2; VmL Manh 34:1; GL 38:2 (Add 5}; SkL 133—134; ESjL 3:18. 8. SkL 162; AVSjL Tr 3; GL 38:2 (Add 5).

9. See chapter 4 for the master’s liability in such a case. Continental codes bearing on this, some with partial responsibility on the master’s shoulders even after the slave has fled, include LBurg 2:5; LBurg 20:1—-2; LLomb 256; LLomb Liutprand 11; LLomb Liutprand 88; LRib 33—34; LSax 52. 10. The laws about the killing of a free person by a slave could be seen as signs of

slave resistance, but these laws are always in the context of laws about free men killing slaves and free men killing each other. They do not mention slaves killing their own masters and there is nothing to imply that the killings they deal with are seen as motivated in any way by the slave-master or slave-free relationship. 11. Grla 102. The Stadarh6lsbok redaction extends the provision to a debt-slave

as well (Gr II 313). |

12. UL Manh 15:1. 13. Grottasonegr, Edda, 297—301. The version of this story in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda 53 has them grinding out an army against Frodi, the leader of which, after

his victory, sets them to grinding salt. They keep on doing so until his ship sinks, pouring all the salt into the sea where the mill keeps on turning. This is the earliest known version of the folk tale “Why the Sea Is Salt.” 14. Snorri Sturluson, Ynglinga saga 26; Saga Heidreks konungs ins vitra Io. 15. Rimbert, Vita Anskarii 38; Skyum-Nielsen, “Nordic Slavery,” 138. 16. Lnb SH8—9; Lnb S125, Hg7. In the first incident, two of Ingolf’s own slaves had reported the matter to him; one, Karli, ran away, apparently taking advantage of the situation, and took a slave woman with him; the other, Vifil, was freed and given land. 17. Fl6amanna saga 23—26. The saga does not describe in any detail his recovery of the slaves, and the incident is not a major focus of the story.

18. “Pattr Rognvalds,” Olafs saga Tryggvasonar 243, Flateyjarbok 1:321; “Draumr Porsteins Sidu-Hallssonar,” 321-26. 19. Fldamanna saga 32; Droplaugarsona saga 7 (Helgi is fined and exiled for his responsibility for the killing); Reykdcela saga ok Viga-Skutu 5.

20. Snorri Sturluson, Oldfs saga Tryggvasonar 49; Saxo, Gesta Danorum 14:17:2.

21. One example of such disloyalty that found expression other than an attack on the master occurred when a group of Danish slaves attacked a cleric, and Innocent III suspected they may have done it only to be relieved of their duties (they would have to go to Rome to be absolved}. DD 108, 1:4:213-14. 22. OgL Arf 14; SkL 128; GuL 57. The contrast between the treatment of those children as advantages or disadvantages to the owner is direct: in Sweden the putative father had to prove that the child was his, whereas in Norway he had to prove that it was not.

240 NOTES TO PAGES 128-30 23. AVgL Arf 22; OgL Arf 17—19; OgL Arf 21. 24. In Icelandic literature the example appears of a freed child of a free man and his slave buying his mother’s freedom {Vatnsdcela saga 43). 25. SkL 131. 26. See Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 437—646, for detailed discussion

of all the ways a slave could gain his or her freedom. 27. OgL Gipt 29; UL Kép 3; SdmL Kop 3; JL 3:2. 28. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 602—07, lists the offenses, which include exposing slaves, castrating them, prostituting them, or circumcising them. On freeing of slaves purchased by Jews, see LVis 12:2:11 and 13—14, and 12:3:12—13. 29. Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 598—602. Most good deeds for which a slave was rewarded with freedom consist of the denunciation of various offenders.

30. Gul 312. 31. Saxo, Gesta Danorum 5:3:5; Fostbroedra saga 9—10. There are several instances in Eyrbyggja saga (26 and 43) where slaves are offered freedom if they will do a killing, but the killing never actually takes place. 32. LnbSHo9; Laxdcela saga 38. In Harodar saga Grimkelssonar ok Geirs 26, Bolli

helps his master recover his stolen goods; he gets his freedom for this. Skidi in Svarfdcela saga 20 is given his freedom so he can marry Yngvild because he has been wounded in fighting against men who came to attack his master.

33. Lnb H120: Atli, in charge of a farm of Geirmund’s, takes in a group of shipwrecked men. Geirmund asks how he dares to do so without permission; Atli replies that people will think Geirmund an exceedingly great man if even his slave can behave so magnanimously. Geirmund is so pleased with this answer that he frees him. 34. Gisla saga Surssonar 25—27. This is not to say that Gisli is always magnanimous toward slaves: earlier in the story he has exchanged clothes with his own slave Pord the Coward, so that his enemies killed the slave and not him (20). 35. Lnb, M, epilogue. This epilogue is probably from Styrmisbok, the earliest redaction known to have existed. 36. The distinction is clearest in the Borgarping Christian law, which prescribes that the two types of freedmen be buried in different parts of the churchyard (BpL 1:9; similarly, EbL 50).

37. A. Bge, KLNM, s.v. “Leysingi.” In Iceland frjalsgjafi meant the one who gives freedom. Peter Sawyer suggests that the use of this term for freedman in the Norwegian laws was due to a misunderstanding of the term, an indication that the details about slavery in the laws as recorded are not reliable. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings, 41~42, criticized in review by P. S. Andersen, 222. Since all four Norwegian

law codes use the term, in passages that are independent of one another, semantic shift seems a more likely explanation for the differing meaning in Iceland and Norway.

38. GuL 61; FrL 4:55. 39. GuL 62; FrL 9:12. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings, 20, calls the rituals “remark-

able displays of ingenuity that had little relation to reality.” He suggests that the rituals were not reflections of practice at any time, but rather were an attempt by a society that no longer knew slavery to explain why, if all men were free, not all were equal (Sawyer, pers. comm., July 1984). 40. Snorri Sturlusson, Oldfs saga helga 23. 41. Gria 112. The translators (LEI, 174) note that this provision probably goes back to older Norwegian laws because it refers to farms held from the earl or king,

NOTES TO PAGES 130-33 241 neither of which Iceland had. The provision does not, however, resemble any of the extant Norwegian laws. 42. LBurg 88; LVis 5:7:14 (see Rothenh6fer, Untersuchungen zur Sklaverei, 36, on the resemblance between Visigothic and Roman manumission}; LLomb Liutprand 9 and 23; LRip 60:1; Pactus 26:1; LLomb 224. Cf. Willelmi Articuli 15, Gesetze 1:491, and LHP 78:1. On methods of manumission in Roman law see Watson, Roman Slave Law, 30—34. 43. Several Continental law codes prohibit it: see LVis 5:4:16 and LBav 16:7. 44. AElnoth, Passio Gloriosissimi Canuti Regis et Martyris 14, Vitae Sanctorum Danorum, 101. 45. SkL 126; SkL 134; ESjL 3:16. 46. Jacobsen and Moltke, Danmarks runeindskrifter 58 (Horning stone). The text reads “Toki the smith raised this stone after Thorkel Gudmundson who gave him gold and freedom.” The phrase “kaf: kul: uk: frialsi” might also mean “gave kinship and freedom,” reading “kuld” instead of “guld.” Most runologists have considered this the less likely reading. If correct, however, it would further support the idea that appears in several law codes of the slave being adopted into the family of the freedom-giver. 47. GL 16:2. Laws punishing slaves for various misdeeds, where the punishment is a prolongation of the time in slavery, support the hypothesis that emancipation was automatic at a certain point. On a slave woman killing her newbom child, GL 2:3; ona slave working on a holy day, GL 6:5. The law also provides for someone to use his own property to redeem himself from captivity, but this seems to apply more to captives held for ransom than to slaves (GL 28:6; the whole law, though quite long and detailed, does not mention slavery in any way}. 48. OgL Arf 17; AVgL Arf 22. YVgL Dr 7 may possibly distinguish between

someone adopted into the kin and a freedman. See Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhalle, 83; Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar, 5:256 and 5:266n. If there was a distinction it does not seem to have made a difference. 49. GuL 66—67; FrL 9:10; FrL 9:11. The freedman could apparently also purchase his freedom from this further dependence (FrL 11:23); this is not the same as the freedom ale but rather a later step. See also FrL 9:14 (which suggests that purchasing this freedom might have taken the place of the freedom ale); Krag, “Trelleholdet,” 67—68.

, 50. GuL 63; GuL 66; GuL 106; FrL 9:11; FrL 9:14—16; Grla 96; Grla119; Grla 112; Lnb $86 (H74); Evyrbyggja saga 32. The freedman, Ulfar, had made his property over to someone other than his freedom-giver. 51. Barrow, Slavery in the Roman Empire, 190; Watson, Roman Slave Law, 35— 38; LVis 5:7:10-13, 17, and 20; LBurg 57; LLomb 225; cf. Wihtred 8, Gesetze 1:13. 52. GuL 129; GuL 63; GuL 66; Gr Ila 127; Gr Ib 134; Gr Ib 137. 53. Watson, Roman Slave Law, 17. 54. SkL 127; ASun 52 says that the freedman himself had to pay two-thirds. 55. YVgL Arf 32, but cf. AVgL Arf 25 and YVgL Arf 35; OgL Arf 17. 56. UL Kop 3:1; SdmL KG6p 3:1.

57. OgL Arf 20 indicates that the latter was the case. 58. DS 457, 890, 1428 and 1737: “plenam libertatem”; DS 615: “plenarie libertati”, DS 695: “plena & perpetua libertate”; DS 902: “liberum ab omni conditione seruili.” 59. SkL 126; AVgL Mandr 2; ESjL 3:16; GuL 185 (one of many examples). 60. GuL 57; FrL 10:47; SkL 128.

242 NOTES TO PAGES 133-36 61. LLomb 224; LLomb Aistulf 11; LVis 5:7:14. 62. E.g., LBav 5; LThur 43; similarly elsewhere. The freedman could be treated

as an aldius or litus although these terms were not synonymous with freedman. 63. Pord leysingjason (Freedmansson) was foster-father to the sons of Njal. Brennu-Njals saga 39. His father had been freed by Njal’s mother. He had gotten a kinswoman of Njal’s, who acted as housekeeper, pregnant, which implies that he was considered an acceptable sexual partner for a free woman. In Viga-Glums saga 17, Glim’s freedman Hallvard fosters Glam’s son. 64. Eiriks saga Rauda 3; Valla-Ljots saga, 5. 65. See, for example, Lnb S135 (H107), where Vegest and Bjorn, a freedman of Vegest’s father, end up killing each other; Eyrbyggja saga 30, where Porodlf Twistfoot

has his slaves steal the freedman Ulfar’s hay and says “That slave is too rich”; Vatnsdcela saga 47, where a freedman is killed out of resentment of his wealth. 66. J6nsb6k Manh 5 repeats the provision from MHLL 4:7 against the sale of a free man outside the country. Since this is taken from the Norwegian law it may not have any particular relevance for Iceland; it does not indicate that slavery still existed there. 67. Foote, “Prelahald 4 Islandi,” 64, suggests that the use of a neuter adjective gramt with the word god in the passage on manumission (Gr Ja 112] implies that the _ provision may have its origin in the early Christian period, before the word goo or gud became exclusively masculine. Foote, 65—68, also discusses the provisions on slavery in Kristinna laga pattr, codified between 1122 and 1133, suggesting that much of the material there was not introduced with Christianity. If these provisions are of earlier date, he argues, they cannot be taken as evidence of the continuing importance of slavery. However, he does not explain the persistence of these laws in Gragas if they were totally obsolete. 68. Foote, “Prelahald 4 Islandi,” 59. 69. In McGrew’s translation of Islendinga saga 173, Sturlunga saga 1:401, she translates Jausamaor as freedman. The word actually means loose-man, a laborer of no fixed abode. Many such men might originally have been slaves but this is by no means implied in the word, which is not at all synonymous with leysingi although both come from the same root. 70. MHLL 3:3. This is taken from GuL 312. The phrase also appears in Sverris saga 24, 29, 162 and 167, and Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldommen,” 176-77, suggests it is not just a figure of speech but that slaves were actually mobilized in the

period of civil war in the late twelfth century. The national law does contain an indirect reference to slavery, prohibiting the sale abroad of a free man (MHLL 4:2). This does not indicate that slavery still existed at this time within Norway, nor does it indicate that any instances of sales of free men occurred, but it does mean that someone thought it might still be a problem. It could be significant that the law says, “If anyone sells a free man,” not just “if anyone sells a man.” Perhaps slavery was becoming unprofitable in Norway but instead of just freeing their slaves some people tried to sell them abroad. Lunden, “Treletida,” 355, argues that several passages in which MHLL specifies that duties (e.g., cook in the ledung) should be carried out by free men imply the continued existence of slavery. It is not always clear that the references here to free men are meant to be contrasted with slaves. Perhaps the duty of cooking was considered slavish (see chapter 3) so it was necessary to specify that a free man had to do it. 71. Frb 3:19. 72. It is mentioned also in the church laws of the Borgarping and Eidsivaping,

NOTES TO PAGES 136-39 2.43 both dating from the twelfth century: BpL 1:9 and EpL 50. The provision for penal enslavement of nuns (FrL 3:14) also hints that slavery was not just a phenomenon of the pagan past, but the law does not use the term ambdatt for such a woman, and penal servitude is not the same thing as slavery. 73. The saga of Magnus Erlingsson, the last in Heimskringla, describes a battle in 1163 after which the king’s slaves are stripping bodies. Magnuss saga Erlingssonar 14. Once again, in events taking place in the late twelfth century, in Sverris saga 53 Magnts refers to Sverri’s supporters the Birchlegs as “slaves and beggars by kindred,” and a slave of Magnus is killed in Sverris saga 64. 74. JL 1:25, 1:31, 1:32, and 3:2. 75. Thomas Lindkvist, pers. comm., December 1984. In the provisions where JL

mentions slaves, a Low German translation of the later fourteenth century has knechte in both instances (DGL 4:291 and 4:359), and the Latin version of JL from the first half of the fourteenth century has servus, glossed as threel (DGL 4:46 and 4:198). The provision for the king to free the slave (servant] sent to the ledung in his master’s place still remains in the translations. Probably the institution no longer existed and they were just translating with the nearest equivalent. But this could also mean that the term was being used for dependent workers in general. See the appendix for more on the purposes of the law of Jutland. 76. YVSjL 86. See the appendix for the manuscript traditions and the relationship of the two redactions of VSjL. 77. Heorby, “The Social History of Medieval Denmark,” 41, argues that since

slavery “surely was of minor importance” in Denmark by the time the laws were written, the provisions about slavery are there only to make complete the sets of rules about issues like inheritance or legal responsibility. He implies that they are survivals of archaic law (unless someone invented laws about a nonexistent institution for the sake of completeness}. See also Horby in Lund and Herby, Samfundet i Vikingetid og Middelalder, 280—81. He thus runs into the same old problem: how does one decide certain laws are archaic or obsolete in the absence of evidence outside the laws? There is no good reason for the laws being there except that someone thought they should be kept for their traditional values or that someone thought they were relevant to the situation at hand. 78. See chart in Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhédlle, 134. 79. UL Manh 6:5, setting rates of compensation for deeds by and against slaves at the same amount as those by and against free people; UL Arf 19, recognizing slave marriage and (at least in a later redaction) freeing the children of such a marriage; UL Kop 3, preventing the sale of Christian slaves. Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 56—62, calls the slavery that appears in the Uppland law a “reformed slavery.” 80. It does not take up the provision on equal compensation for slaves in general, but has no general provisions at all about compensation for slaves. As Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 129, points out, SdmL has no trace of adoption into the kin as part of manumission; this may imply a late stage in the process of the ending of slavery. 81. DS 3106. 82. Henning, “Traldomens férsvinnande,” 87, points out that werinsk to mean

“from Varend” is not attested in Old Swedish, and that later fourteenth-century discussion of the eriksgata states that the lawmen of Vasterg6tland and Varmland were both to meet with the king at Skara. Werinsk is probably an editor’s misreading

| for wermsk (the original of the text is no longer extant). | 83. Henning, “Traldomens f6rsvinnande,” 89—90, noting that the lawman of

!

244 NOTES TO PAGES 139-41 Vastergotland at the time, Knut Magnusson, had been a member of the commission that codified the law of S6dermanland, so the king might have been particularly receptive to his suggestions as to ordinances to be issued; Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 68—84. Lind, “The Ending of Slavery in Sweden,” 67—71, sees the Skara ordinance as an example of moral leadership by the king and “proto-parliaments.” On the possibility of similar ordinances having been issued for other provinces, Henning, 898n., points out that one of the other provisions in the Skara ordinance is repeated in an ordinance for Ostergétland in 1345, so it is likely that the whole Skara ordinance was not issued in 1335 for that province, but Hasselberg, 83— 84, claims that the latter ordinance has a much wider scope than the corresponding provision in the Skara ordinance. 84. DS 1656. 85. See dispute in Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 51-52; Henning, “Traldomens férsvinnande,” 88—89; Landtmansson, “Traldomens sista skede,” 39-41. 4I. 86. Henning, “Traldomens férsvinnande,” 91—93, has argued that the provision in the Uppland law that the child of a legal Christian marriage between two slaves shall go free (see chapter 2) is a later alteration and is based on the Skara ordinance. His argument on why the Uppland law must have been changed, however, is not entirely convincing, and the influence might have gone the other way, if the Uppland law was changed after the 1327 redaction of the S6dermanland law but before 1335. The Vasterg6tland lawman Knut Magnusson would have been familiar with the Uppland law, which was the model for S6dermannalagen, since he served on the commission which drew up the latter; if the provision had already been changed in the Uppland law at the time of the commission, however, it would be strange that they did not include the newer version in S6dermannalagen. 87. GL 16:2; GL2:3; GL6:5. Schlyter suggested (SGL 7:18) that the exclusion of the provisions on purchase of slaves and theft by slaves from ms. A of the law code, though the rubrics appear in the list of chapter titles (he included them as GL Additamenta 4~5}, shows that they were antiquated. See also Sjoholm, Gesetze als Quellen, 88. This does not explain why they were included in the other ms. (a later copy from earlier texts) but it may well be that the trade in slaves was no longer active by the

middle of the fourteenth century though some form of slavery remained. Other provisions not included in that ms. and printed by Schlyter as additamenta deal with inheritance and could be similarly outdated. 88. For an introduction to this complicated subject, see Davis, The Problem of Slavery, 84—106. On the early church and the slave see also Giilzow, Christentum und Sklaverei; De Ste. Croix, “Early Christian Attitudes”; Verlinden, L’esclavage dans Il’Europe médiévale, 1:29—42; on the patristic and medieval periods, Milani, La schiavitt nel pensiero politico, 237-391. 89. Bloch, “How and Why,” 10—15; on the Merovingian church see Graus, “Die Gewalt,” 73—74. The prohibitions by Frankish church councils on the sale of Christian slaves to non-Christians indicate that the Church was not opposed to slavery as such. On the Visigothic church see Verlinden, L’esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, 1:99—101; see the same work, vols. 1 and 2, for comments on the Church in other periods. See also Thompson, The Goths in Spain, 305—07. 90. FrL 5:20. 91. OgL Arf 14 provides for a man freeing his child by a slave woman “after it is baptized.” VmL Kr 7 provides for masses for the souls of slave children, who were presumably baptized. On sexual offenses, see VmL Kr 24:12—13.

NOTES TO PAGES 141-44 245 92. Note the will of Absalon, DD 32, 1:4:55~61, and, for a lesser figure, that of the priest Bj6rn, DS 871. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 161-62, argues that the will of Christina Fastesdotter, DS 855, in leaving to Alvastra abbey some property with all its appurtenances except slaves, implies that if the exception had not been made the church would have received the slaves as well. Nothing indicates that any ecclesiastical institution would have turned down such a bequest. 93. DD 108, 1:4:213 (1206). 94. The Church encouraged manumission in Rome as well: on manumissio in ecclesia beginning in the age of Constantine, see Buckland, The Roman Law of Slavery, 449-51. Saxo, Gesta Danorum 1:3:2, however, did not attribute the practice of manumission in Scandinavia to the Church; he saw it as having been more widespread in antiquity and then as having been prohibited after an attempt by a freedman on a king’s life. 95. GuL 4~5; FrL 3:19. Larson, Earliest Norwegian Laws, 253n., says the building of roads replaced manumission “because thralldom had by this time disappeared in Norway,” but perhaps the building of roads had merely become more urgent than manumission. Cf. Athelstan Ordinance 1, Gesetze 1:148, where the king asks his reeves to free one penal slave annually. 96. See Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 23-25 and 138, where she notes that in one will (DS 457) a priest is said to know the names of the slaves who

are to be freed; this might indicate that it was the priest who encouraged the slaveowner to free his slaves in his will. 97. OgL Arf 20.

98. ESjL 3:16; ASun 73 (the Danish version in SkL 126 does not mention deathbed or testamentary manumission)}. 99. FrL 9:13, which refers to farmers or merchants at sea buying a slave in order to liberate him. It is not clear why only farmers and merchants at sea are mentioned and not merchants at home, priests, or anyone else. 100. GuL 61; ESjL 3:16; GL 16:2. ror. UL Arf 19; UL KO6p 3. 102. Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 66. 103. Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei auf Island, 13; Foote, KLNM, s.v. “Trel,” 18; Palsson, “Um lok preldéms,” 194—98; P. Johannesson, Die Stellung der freien Arbeiter, 102.

104. Palsson, “Um lok preldéms,” 197-203. 105. Rafnsson, Studier i Landnamab6k, 173, 180. 106. J. Johannesson, Islendinga Saga, 345—49. Units called hjabu or hjdland were parceled out from the farms. They had their own dwellings and small homefields. The hjabu still followed the main farm when the latter was transferred by sale or inheritance. M. Larusson, KLNM, s.v. “Jordeiendom.” The first known document reflecting this situation is DI 402, 1:401—02 (around 1220), a church deed (maldagi) for Saurber, referring to “leiglendingar eda hiabudar menn.” 107. Gr Ib 183, requirement to rent out land; similarly in Gr II 409 and Joénsbok, Landsleigubalk 41. Rules for landlord-tenant relations: Gr Ib 220. For examples of farms held by tenants, see Brennu-Njals saga 78. This could represent the pattern in

: the thirteenth century when the saga was written, rather than the period it purports

: to depict.

| 108. Karlsson, “Godar and H6fdingjar,” 368; Karlsson, “Godar og beendur,” 45— 48; Hastrup, Culture and History, 177.

| tog. For an example of one who was, see Eyrbyggja saga 30.

246 NOTES TO PAGES 144~—47 110. Brennu-Njals saga 36. 111. Grla78—8o; Jarnsida 128, NGL 1:197—98 (Jarnsida is edited there under the title of Hakonarb6k; the passage is taken from GuL 70}; J6nsbok, Landsleigubolk 8 and Kaupabalk 25-27. See P. Jshannesson, Die Stellung der freien Arbeiter, 121-51. 112. Huskarlar and huskonur, or simply karlar and konur, appear throughout Sturlunga. As pointed out by P. Johannesson, Die Stellung der freien Arbeiter, 100, and Kalund, “Familielivet pa Island,” 362—63, the sagas often confuse slaves and free servants. But see Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei auf Island, 116. Probably it is not that the sagas are unclear as to the legal status of these people but that terms like huskarl and verkstjori are meant to indicate not these people’s legal status but the jobs they do; they do not specifically mean either slave or free servant. It is a question not of confusion but of alternation between juridical and economic categories. See Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 71.

113. Nieboer, Slavery as an Industrial System, esp. 303, 384; Domar, “The Causes of Slavery.” 114. The Domar model does not distinguish between slavery and serfdom, and therefore does nothing to explain, for example, the end of slavery in late Roman Italy and the shift to the colonate, but that is not relevant here because Icelandic slavery did not shift into serfdom. For general criticism of the model see Engerman, “Some Considerations”; Patterson, “Structural Origins of Slavery.” I do not suggest it has universal validity, yet it seems reasonable as a partial explanation of what happened in Iceland. Agnarsdottir and Arnason, “Prelahald 4 bjédveldisdld,” make a similar argument. 115. Oldafs saga helga 22—23. An older, probably late twelfth-century saga of St. Olaf, on which Snorri probably drew, says that Erling let his slaves (4naudga menn)

earn money to buy their freedom, but does not describe what they did once freed (Olafs saga hins Helga 46). The earlier saga mentions Erling’s slaves in passing, to illustrate how rich he is; Snorri makes it a separate chapter, without such a clear context, and adds details that may relate to his own time. 116. This is the most likely interpretation of “keypti sér annat man,” taken together with the fact that the passage implies a continuing process, not one-time emancipation of the thirty slaves. It could be that keypti should be understood as hired and that slaves were replaced with wage laborers. Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. “kaupa,” however, gives only examples meaning to buy or to strike a bargain. “Kaupa verk at” could mean to hire (e.g. GuL 70) but where the phrase used is only keypti man, as in Erling’s case, it probably means “bought slaves.” 117. Krag, “Treller og trellehold,” 221—22, suggests that if slaves had been exten-

sively involved in new clearances or internal colonization place-names would be likely to show more traces of this than is actually the case; but see responses by Sandnes, “Tolv kyr, to hester og tre treler,” 79—80; Lunden, “Trzletida,” 357. 118. Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 38. 119. The Frostaping law discusses the status of the “guest kinsman” who seems to be a tenant (FrL 9:5). FrL Intro: 20, referring to a shortage of labor in the countryside, might be taken to imply that the shortage is of hired workers, but it could also be referring to a scarcity of tenants. 120. GuL 66-67. One provision in the Gulaping law has been taken to imply that the slave might acquire land as a tenant when he was freed, but of course he might acquire it in some other way than being given it with his freedom. According to GuL g1, afreedman may prosecute people who trespass against him, “if he has land” (the verb eiga means both to own and to possess). Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldom-

NOTES TO PAGES 147-51 247 men,” 164, discusses examples of freedmen holding land, but it is not clear that they got it from their former masters. 121. Gul 61; GuL 62; FrL 9:12; Iversen, “Trelldommens betydning,” 247, and Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldommen,” 161—64; Krag, “Trelleholdet,” 367—68. 122. Helle, Norge blir en stat, 157. The laws about free laborers are found in GuL 70 and FrL 10:10. 123. Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldommen,” 166—67; GuL 296; FrL 7:10; FrL 7:11.

124. Iversen, “Den gammelnorske trelldommen,” 167-70. 125. Lunden, Norge under Sverrextten, 271, 277; Helle, Norge blir en stat, 15 5— 57. Sandnes, “Tolv kyr, to hester og tre treler,” 82, dates the process to the twelfth

and thirteenth or perhaps as early as the later eleventh century, tying it to the landskyld form of rent collection. By the time of the Black Death, tenants held onehalf to two-thirds of the land of Norway (Lunden, Norge under Sverreztten, 277—80; Sandnes, “Bondesamfunnet,” 55). 126. Lunden, “Om arsakene”; Lunden, Norge under Sverreetten, 272-73. 127. Helle, “Nye og gamle synspunkter,” 511-12. 128. GuL 72—81 and FrL 13:1—8, 13:17—23, and 14:1—8 discuss the leiglending. See Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 83—127. 129. The inquilini are the only group in Scandinavia for the period in question for whom the word serf may be appropriate, yet they do not seem to have been subject to

any servile dues or obligations, and there is no evidence of restrictions on their mobility. 130. See chronological chart of terminology in Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 155.

131. Ulsig, “Landboer og bryder,” 146-56. He argues that in the course of the thirteenth century the curiae villicales gained at the expense of the coloni. 132. Ulsig, Danske adelsgodser, 123, 132—33; Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 49. 133. Cf. Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 117—27. The relations between tenant and landowner in Denmark are treated only in SkL 238—41 and ASun 143-50. The other laws do not treat the tenant’s relations with the landowner but mention only

his legal status within the community, which seems to have been lower in Denmark | than elsewhere. 134. The Danish laws do not provide regulations, as do the Icelandic and Norwegian ones, for the hire of free laborers. 135. There could have been continued importation of slaves from around the Baltic region, but the opportunity for this lasted beyond the time when slavery ended, so the trade did not stop because of lack of potential supply. 136. Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 145-46. 137. Andrae, Kyrka och fraélse, 97~98; Glanzner, “Das Pachtrecht,” 150. 138. Olle Ferm, pers. comm., August 1984. 139. DS 742; DS 1656; DS 532; Sko Klosters medeltida jordebocker, 93: “Steinoni Villico de Frédwi do duas oras terrae, et libertatem.” (To Sten the steward of Frévi I give two gras of land and his freedom.”) 140. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdalle, 136-37. 141. Not in Vastergotland, where the fostre seems to be a slave in a particularly trusted position, a steward or household supervisor. 142. See Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 83—87, on the contractual relationship between landlord and tenant.

248 NOTES TO PAGES 151-54 143. Of course, even household slaves could have become tenants, if the owner’s farm was split up into smaller holdings. On peasant proprietors’ having tenants, see Dahlback, “Genom historiematerialismens glas6gon,” 95. 144. See chapter 3. See also Larsson, Det medeltida Varend, 94~—98, who found a

much higher density of farms in parishes where land was mostly owned by the nobility. 145. Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 90, though he seems to envision this being done under the auspices of small proprietors. 146. Hasselberg, “Den s.k. Skarastadgan,” 67—68. 147. Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 125-27. 148. Provisions governing the contractual relations between free laborers and their employers are found in AVgL Forn 11; YVgL Utg 26—27; OgL Byg 12; UL Wib 11; SdmL Byg 26 and Add. 7; VmL Byg 11; DL Byg 51; HL Wib to. See Nevéus, Trdalarna i landskapslagarnas samhdalle, 166—72, for a discussion of other references in the laws

to the legal status of free laborers. Birger Magnusson in 1303 required vagrants either to prove that they had an employer or to leave the kingdom (DS 1384). The purpose may have been not merely to prevent vagrancy but also to assure a supply of labor. 149. The regulations for the contract appear in MELL Byg 14. The provision is

very similar to that found in UL and the other Svear laws, but only SdmL has the requirement that anyone who owns less than three marks must hire himself out. 150. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhalle, 175—77. For example, MELL Ping 21 repeats the provision of UL Manh 6:5, which referred to slaves. 151. MELL Byg 28:4; MELL Ping 26:1; Lindkvist, Landborna i Norden, 117 and passim; Glanzner, “Das Pachtrecht,” 151-57. 152. Nevéus, Trdalarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle, 176—78, puts forward this hypothesis. 153. Anexact figure for the number of slaves is impossible to come by. A figure of more than 20 percent of the population has been suggested for Iceland in the settlement period (Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, appendix C, 354). This figure is too high. Like any alternative figure that might be suggested here, it is based on impression rather than on data (in this case on Carl O. Williams’s rough estimate based on the sagas). Sandnes has suggested a figure of 50—75,000 for Norway, or 12~25 percent of the population, based on an average of three per farm (“Bondesamfunnet,” 45—50).

Palme, Stdnd och klasser, 13, estimates that there were as many slaves as free peasants in Viking Age Sweden, although this seems to be a blind guess not based on any source. 154. See Hastrup, Culture and History, especially 107—08, on the cultural mean-

ing of slavery. I am in full agreement with her statement that the persistence of slavery in law (and, I would add, in literature} points to “a continued significance of the distinction between free men and slaves in the perception of the social order,” and with her “focus on social classes as classification rather than as particular forms of relations of economic dependence.” 155. The OED, s.v. “free,” lists inter alia the following relevant definitions: “Not bound or subject as a slave is to his master; enjoying personal rights and liberty of action as a member of a society or state,” “Enjoying civil liberty; existing under a government which is not arbitrary or despotic, and does not encroach upon individual rights,” “At liberty; allowed to go where one wishes; not kept in confinement or captivity,” “Unimpeded,” “At liberty, allowed or permitted to do something,” “Clear of (something which is regarded as objectionable or an encumbrance},” “Acting of one’s own will or choice, and not under compulsion or constraint; determining one’s

NOTES TO PAGES 155-60 249 own action or choice, not motivated from without,” “Released or exempt from, not liable to (e.g. a rule, penalty, payment),” “Exempt from, having immunity from, not subject to (some circumstances or affection regarded as hurtful or undesirable},” “Exempt from, or not subject to, some particular jurisdiction or lordship,” “Possessed of certain exclusive rights or privileges.” On the many meanings of “freedom” in the Middle Ages, see e.g. Grundmann, “Freiheit als religidses, politisches und pers6nliches Postulat.” 156. FrL 9:11. 157. See Lindkvist, ‘“Medeltida bonder och skatter,” 423—24. 158. N. Lund in Lund and Herby, Samfundet i Vikingetid og Middelalder, 63; Lund, “Viking Age Society,” 30—31; Randsborg, The Viking Age in Denmark, 29-44; cf. A. E. Christensen, Vikingetidens Danmark, 214-17. 159. Karlsson, “Godar og bendur”; Karlsson, “Godar and Hofdingjar”; Byock, “Cultural Continuity”; Hastrup, Culture and History, 172-73, 191-97. 160. Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, 80; Sawyer, Kings and Vikings, 93.

161. See Einarsson, “Status of Free Men,” 46—47, on the equality of all free men under the law in Iceland, as opposed to Norway. Norwegian law had more categories among the free than did Icelandic—the hauld ranked higher than the simple bonde— but even then this was a matter of a higher wergeld and not of differences in types of rights and obligations. 162. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 174-77. 163. E.g. AVSjL Tr 15; GuL 261; VmL Manh 24:8; OgL Dr 17:1; UL Manh 6:5; GL 19:37; Grla111; FrL 4:5; SkL 123; ESjL 2:32; YVgL Piuf 20-21. There are many other examples; only one from each code is cited here. Occasionally other words are used in opposition to “thrall,” for example pizengn (“thegn”) in AVgL Mandr 13:1; this particular one seems to be for the sake of alliteration. 164. It does occur occasionally in connection with a specific obligation, but this

comes mostly in late ordinances or charters. In the law codes it usually denotes nonslavery. Von See, Altnordische Rechtsworter, 143-48. 165. Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. “frjals,” citing Go freihals and OHG frihals; De Vries, Altnordisches etymologisches Worterbuch, s.v. “frjals.” See also Grimm, Deutsches Worterbuch, s.v. “Freiheit.” FrL 9:12; Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, 73. Such a manumission provision appears in only one of the two extant Norwegian laws and in none from the other countries, and it may not be of great antiquity; the notion of the neck-ransom might even be a back-formation from a connection of the word for free with the word for neck. 166. OgL Uab 38; OgL Uap 4. 167. For “to give freedom”: e.g., GuL 4—5; FrL 4:55; Grla 112; OgL Arf 20; SkL 126; ESjL 3:16; Horning stone, Danmarks runeindskrifter, ed. Jacobsen and Moltke, 50. For “to redeem”: OgL Arf 14; GuL 57; SkL 131. 168. OgL Arf 17. See von See, Altnordische Rechtsworter, 131-38, on this and the two following terms. 169. FrL 4:61; Grla 111. See Cleasby-Vigfusson, s.v. “helgi” (“inviolability”), and s.v. “heilagr” (“one whose person is sacred, who cannot be slain with impunity”). 170. As Krag, “Trelleholdet,” points out, the phrase frjals ok fulltida, “free and of age,” was common in legal language as an alliterative way of expressing full capacity. 171. Saxo’s use of slavery as a metaphor for political domination emphasizes this aspect of slavery. Skyum-Nielsen, “Saxo som kilde,” 178-79. 172. These may have come from formerly unfree people: consider the kings’

250 NOTES TO PAGES 160-66 stewards in Denmark and Sweden, discussed in chapter 3, and the drmaor in Norway, discussed in Krag, “Armannen,” Lunden, “Treletida,” 359—60, and Lunden, “Tre! og armann,” 451-53. 173. Loit, “Klassamhd4llets uppkomst,” 21-22, and Gurevich, Svobodnoe kres-

t’ianstvo, English summary, 260-63, discuss feudalization. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 178, suggests that it was a drop in the supply of slaves that led landlords to force free people into a dependent position. But the free people who became tenants did not become juridically unfree; legally they were in a free contractual relationship with the landlords, not feudal relations of dependence. More likely it was the existence of free wage or dependent labor that obviated the need for slavery. 174. Andrae, Kyrka och fralse, 44—45; Christensen in Christensen et al., Danmarks Historie, 392; Paludan in ibid., 435—36; Helle, Norge blir en stat, 142. But cf. Helle, “Norway in the High Middle Ages,” 185, arguing that the boundary between aristocratic and peasant society was still fluid. 175. Foote and Wilson, The Viking Achievement, 126—27; Svenska Akademien, Ordbok, s.v. “fralse.” Similarly, in Danish: Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskap, Ordbog over det danske sprog, s.v. “frelse,” although this meaning is now archaic and frelse in modern Danish means salvation rather than nobility. 176. Andrae, Kyrka och fralse, 146—50. On the development of the hird in Norway—the legal standing of the king’s retainers, including their exemption in 1277 from the Jedung tax—see Lunden, Norge under Sverreetten, 413-15. 177. It did not even have to be legal differentiation among classes of free men; perceived differentiation would do. See Einarsson, “Status of Free Men,” 47—49. 178. See Ulsig, “Omkring Kvinde og slave,” 251, on the fluctuating nature of the concept bonde. See also Gurevich, Norvezhskoe obshchestvo, English summary, 314.

179. Sawyer, Kings and Vikings, 41, has suggested that the laws on manumission that appear in the law codes are not reflections of actual practice but rather attempts to explain why there are so many free people in dependent positions. But the laws suggest not only that many people were descended from slaves but also that many people were themselves slaves. This provided a justification for the control of some

people over others, but also stressed to those free dependents that although they might not be economically independent they were free and their interests were with their political peers, not their economic class. 180. Hastrup, “Classification and Demography,” 184—86, makes a similar point, that increasing differentiation among free people brought the end of the slave-free dichotomy. She dates the beginning of this process to just after the time of settlement.

CONCLUSION

1. Finley, Ancient Economy, 41—42, 68-69, 73-75. 2 Jordan, From Servitude to Freedom, 20. This would be the case even through the early modern period, where even after the abolition of serfdom anyone who was in the employ of another was seen as in some sense not free: See, e.g., the seventeenth-century English political theorist James Harrington, Art of Lawgiving 3:1: “The first personal division of a people is into freemen and servants. Freemen are such as have wherewithal to live of themselves; and servants, such as have not.”

NOTES TO PAGES 167-68 251 APPENDIX

1. Good lists of all the published medieval sources (which, for the period in question, includes practically all those extant) may be found in textbooks for the individual countries: P. S. Andersen, Samling af Norge, 11-40; Helle, Norge blir en stat, 13-27; Christensen, Danmarks historie 1:513~—29; Lund and Herby, Samfundet

i Vikingetid och Middelalder, 15-32 and 297—303; Carlsson and Rosén, Svensk historia 1:47—57 and 1:96—107. See also Norborg, Kdllor till Sveriges historia. On diplomatic sources in particular see Oberg, Das Urkundenmaterial Skandinaviens. For dating and authenticity of diplomatic material I have relied on the editors of the

various collections. The Danish publication Diplomatarium Danicum is the only modern edition of diplomatic material for the period in question. The editions of diplomas for the other countries are older. The early portion of the Swedish series, Diplomatarium Suecanum 1—4, whichis the most extensively used here, has serious

problems and is presently under revision by a team at the Swedish National Archives. Through the kindness of Clara Nevéus and Birgitta Fritz I was able to consult the Diplomatarium staff’s file of documents that were not included in the publica-

tion and to check the material from DS which I used against the copy at the Diplomatarium office containing the staff’s notations as to more recent views on dating

and authenticity. 2. For theories on the importance of the lawspeaker, see Wessén, Svenskt lagsprdk, 14-17; Wessén, “Lagman och lagsaga”; Rehfeldt, “Saga und lagsaga,” 47—

49. A letter from Innocent III to the archbishop of Uppsala in 1206 refers to the custom of having lawspeakers declare the law publicly each year. DS 131. 3. Westmann, De svenska rattskdllornas historia, 25. For amore recent proponent of this view see Wihrer, “Die danischen Landschaftsrechte.” 4. Sjdholm, Gesetze als Quellen, 131; but see Fenger’s review, 118. Sjdholm’s current research continues along the same lines. For a good summary of scholarly views on medieval Scandinavian law in general, see Torkelsen and Blom, “Fra gammel ret,” 233—43.

5. Iuul, “De danske landskabsloves bidrag,”” 11-13; Hafstrom, “De svenska landskapslagarna som historisk kdalla,” 14-17; Fenger, Romerret 1 Norden, 57; Nystrom, Historieskrivningens dilemma, 62—78. 6. Horn, “Die legistische Literatur,” 307—o9, summarizes the present state of scholarship. Scholars have identified foreign influence particularly in the conception of royal power. Fenger, Romerret i Norden, 77—88; Fenger, L’influence du droit romain, 46—73. See also Baath, Bidrag till den kanoniska rdattens historia. 7. Von See, Altnordische Rechtsworter, esp. 249-55, emphasizes the Christian European rather than ancient Germanic concepts underlying the most basic purpose and structure of the Scandinavian laws. 8. Sjdholm, “Rattshistorisk metod och teoribildning”; see also her Rechtsgeschichte als Wissenschaft und Politik, 70, and Gesetze als Quellen, 174. g. Stahle, Syntaktiska och stilistiska studier, 56—58, gives some examples of a style in the Swedish laws closely resembling wisdom-sayings in several Germanic literatures. But see Foote, “Oral and Literary Tradition,” 51, and “Some Lines in Logréttupattr,” 206; Foote accepts Stahle’s linguistic argument that the Swedish laws are archaic but points out that the Norwegian and Icelandic laws are earlier yet syntactically very different. 10. Ahlstrém, Vdra medeltidslagar, 1; Jonsson, “Vers i gamle nordiske indskrifter.”

252 NOTES TO PAGES 169-71 11. Utterstr6m, “Die mittelalterliche Rechtssprache Schwedens,” 738-39. Stahle, “Om Dalalagens alderdomlighet och alder,” 395, suggests that those parts of the various law codes that show the clearest evidence of foreign legal influence in their content show the fewest traces of archaic style. Von See, Altnordische Rechtsworter, 87-89, however, takes the wisdom-saying style as a late development and some of the supposedly oldest provisions in the Swedish laws as late medieval forgeries or interpolations. 12. Ehrhardt, Der Stabreim, 39—104. See especially the table, 39. 13. Clanchy, “Remembering the Past,’”’ discusses law in the context of what is known of oral tradition in preliterate societies. 14. Wolf, “Die Gesetzgebung,” 549, makes this point for late medieval French custumals. 15. Sjoholm, “Rattlosa”; Sjdholm, pers. comm., June 1984. Sj6holm’s fully developed theories have not yet been published, but see her article “Rattlosa” for an introduction. 16. Horby in Lund and Horby, Samfundet i Vikingetiden og Middelalder, 213. 17. D. A. Seip, KLNM, s.v. “Borgartingsloven”; T. Knudsen, KLNM, s.v. “Eidsivatingsloven”; von Amira, Germanisches Recht 1:112. These texts have been edited by Meissner as Bruchstticke der Rechtsbucher des Borgarthings und des Eidsivathings, as well as in NGL 1. 18. Havn. E Donatione Variorum 137. See Knudsen, KLNM, s.v. “Gulatingsloven,” on the textual history and the relation of the various redactions. See also Maurer, “Die Entstehungszeit der alteren Gulapingslog.” The text of the Gulaping law from the Codex Rantzovianus is edited in NGL 1, with emendations in NGL 4.

The fragments are edited in NGL 1, 2, and 4. An English translation is found in Larson, The Earliest Norwegian Laws. Larson's translation tends to impose his own interpretation on the material, through word choice and interpolated explanations that make the meaning seem clearer than it actually is. All quotations in this work from the Norwegian laws are my own translation, which preserves for the reader more of the ambiguity that exists in the original. The reader who wants access to the texts of the Norwegian laws as a whole will find Larson’s translation useful. 19. Where a provision cited does appear in one of the earlier fragments, this has been noted. 20. Knudsen, KLNM, s.v. “Frostatingsloven”; Maurer, “Die Entstehungszeit der alteren Frostapingslog.” The text is edited in NGL 1, with emendations in NGL 4 and fragments in NGL 2, 4 and 5, and translated in Larson, The Earliest Norwegian Laws. 21. Edited by Meissner, Landrecht des Kénigs Magnus Hakonarson, Germanenrechte, Neue Folge (Weimar: Bohlau, 1941}, as well as in NGL 2. 22. For an argument that they were in fact official law codes, see Taranger, “De norske folkelovboker,” 39:199—200 and 41:31. 23. GuL 314. “Rett eda ragnk” could, however, mean “right or wrong” not in

the sense of accurate or inaccurate but rather in the sense of just or unjust. The passage would then be the compiler’s expression not of doubt about the compilation but of humility about the ability of man to make just laws; the law of defense seems a strange place to express this humility. 24. FrL 1:2. 25. FrL 3:19; GuL 4-5. 26. Gurevich, “Edda and Law,” 81-82, stresses the poetic and oral-formulaic quality of these law codes, but as discussed above this need not mean that the content was archaic.

NOTES TO PAGES 172-74 253 27. Ari Pérgilsson, [slendingabék 2; Von See, Altnordische Rechtsworter, 98100. See Stein-Wilkeshuis, “Law in Medieval Iceland,” for a presentation in English of what amounts to the traditional view on Icelandic law. 28. Ari Porgilsson, Islendingabok to.

29. On the state of Grdgds scholarship see Olafur Larusson, KLNM, s.v. “Gragas.” Fragments of other compilations exist, which do not conform to either of the two redactions of Grdgds. The standard editions of the various versions of Gragds

are, for Konungsbok, Gragds, Islendernes Lovbog i Fristatens Tid, tor Stadarholsbok, Gragds efter det Arnamagnzanske Haandskrift nr. 334 fol., and for the fragments, Gragdas, Stykker. To date one volume has appeared of an excellent English translation (LEI), based on the Codex Regius version but including in an appendix the

text from Stadarhélsbok where it differs significantly. On the dating of the laws in Gragds, see LEI, 4—6 and 9-13. Facsimiles of Codex Regius and Stadarhélsbok have been published as CCI 3 and 11. The name Grdgds means literally “Gray Goose.” The saga of Magnus the Good refers to a law code by this name, and about 1600 the name was applied to the Icelandic manuscript compilations, although the text is certainly not that referred to in the story of Magnus. Amira, Germanisches Recht I:120. 30. Foote, “Oral and Literary Tradition,” 52. Olafur Larusson, “Gragas,” 478, suggests that the common source is Haflidi’s law code (Haflidaskra) itself. 31. Grla 117, trans. LEI, 190. See detailed discussion of this passage in Foote,

“Some Lines in Logréttupattr.” |

32. Gria 113. 33. The child of a slave man and a free woman is mentioned in passing in a discussion of inheritance. 34. LEI, 14. 35. Jarnsida is edited in NGL 1:259—300 and 5:13—15, /onsbok in NGL 4:185— 340. The latter code got its name from the lawspeaker J6n Einarsson, who brought it to Iceland. Amira, Germanisches Recht, 1:123. 36. SKL is edited in DGL 1:1, the Latin paraphrase (Liber Legis Scaniae, here referred to as ASun for its presumed author) in DGL 1:2. Two manuscripts of SKL from around 1300 are considered the earliest; they have a common original. One is

entirely in runes (AM 28, 80, reproduced in facsimile, Det Arnamagnzanske haandskrift No. 28, 8vo). There are also five more manuscripts from the fourteenth century and about thirty from the fifteenth. Kroman and Iuul, Danmarks gamle love pd nutidsdansk 1:xiv-xvi; Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 4:xi-xvii. Brondum-Nielsen, in his introduction to the facsimile edition of Holm. B74, CCD 3: vii, suggests, however, that this ms. is the earliest, dating from around 1250. The earliest manuscript of ASun is from the fourteenth century. Kroman and Iuul, Danmarks gamle love pd nutidsdansk 1:xv-xvi. 37. A comparison of the Latin vocabulary of the paraphrase with that of Andreas’s Hexzemeron, a theological poem, supports this attribution. Iuul, “Anders Sunesen som lovgiver,” 10.

38. Skov, “Anders Sunesgns parafrase,” gives many examples. See also Holmbdack and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar, 4:xix-xxx. 39. Iuul, “Anders Sunesen som lovgiver,” 12, suggests this authorship because of the great interest shown in the rights of the archbishop.

40. Iuul, “Anders Sunesen som lovgiver,” 13-14; Lunde domkapitels gaveboger, 145.

41. ASun 73. The other law code with this principle is Valdemar’s Sjzlland

254 NOTES TO PAGES 174-76 Law, also thirteenth-century and heavily dependent on the laws of Skane. A VSjL Tr 14. 42. The canon law on this point was variously interpreted in medieval Europe. See Chapter 2. 43. Jorgensen, Dansk retshistorie, 28—32; Kroman and Iuul, Danmarks gamle

love pd nutidsdansk 1:v-ix and I:xvi-xvili; Kroman, KLNM, s.v. “Valdemars sjellandske lov.” The various redactions are edited in DGL 7-8. 44. Kroman and Iuul, Danmarks gamle love pd nutidsdansk 1:ix-xi and 1:xviiixix; Kroman, KLNM, s.v. “Eriks Sjellandske lov.” The different redactions are edited in DGL 5-6. 45. Edited in DGL 3-4. There are numerous fourteenth-century manuscripts of the Danish version, a few possibly from the end of the thirteenth century. Kroman and Iuul, Danmarks gamle love pd nutidsdansk 1:xix-xx; Iuul, KLNM, s.v. “Jyske lov.”

46. JL, preface. It is not clear, because of textual variants in the mss., whether the last sentence says “the king may not change the law,” “no one may change the law,” or “the law may not be changed.” On the introduction and Gratian, see Gagnér, Studien zur Ideengeschichte der Gesetzgebung, 354; Holberg, Dansk og fremmed ret, 23-83. 47. JL 1:25; see N. K. Andersen, “Kanonisk rets indflydelse,” 107—08. 48. Skautrup, “Sproget i Jyske lov,” 249, concludes that the language of the code shows many signs of coming from an oral tradition; as discussed above, traces of an oral style do not necessarily mean that the content was orally transmitted. 49. The town laws have been edited in DGKL. 50. Edited in SGL 7. There are four mss: one from the mid-fourteenth century (Holm B64, reproduced in CCS 5); one trom 1587 (AM 54 4:0} which, however, goes

back to an earlier redaction than the former and includes some material the former does not (printed in SGL as additamenta); a German translation from 1401; and a Danish translation from the late fifteenth century preserved in a ms. of the midsixteenth century. Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 4:\xiv-lxviii; Wessén, KLNM, s.v. “Gutalagen.” Both translations are also edited in SGL 7. 51. DS 832. See DD, 1:5:145, and Skyum-Nielsen, review of Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdlle by Nevéus, 358n., on the inauthenticity of this letter. Skov argues in “Anders Sunesgn og Guterloven” that resemblances to Andreas’s paraphrase of the Skane laws show that he had a hand in the actual writing down of the Gotland laws. The resemblances, however, are of a very general nature. Iuul, “Anders Sunesen som lovgiver,” 18—20. In any case, Andreas need not have been involved in the codification of the law, and indeed it need not have been codified in his lifetime, for the Skane law to have had a great effect on it. It may be that the Gotlanders did not

have a codified law as of the year 1225: Andreas’s fellow papal legate in Livonia, William of Modena, wrote in that year that the community of merchants at Riga had been granted privileges including the “Jus Gutorum,” but “it was doubted among them what was the law of the Gotlanders.” “Handlingar r6rande Gottlandska képmans privilegier,” 3~—4.

52. Sjdholm, Gesetze als Quellen, 94—99, casts doubt on the standard dating of the Gotland laws to the first two decades of the thirteenth century. Her suggestion (163—73) that the law code dates from the mid-fourteenth century and is contemporary and parallel to the Visby Town Law seems unlikely, unless it includes much older material as well. Sjsholm suggests, 172, that the exclusion of most references to slaves from the one medieval manuscript of the laws signals their late date, but texts

NOTES TO PAGES 176-77 255 about slavery (which Schlyter prints in SGL 7 as additamenta} are found in a sixteenth-century copy that must go back to a medieval original. 53. GL 61. There are in fact a number of annotations and additions in the ms. 54. SGL8. Hasselberg, Studier rérande Visby stadslag, concludes that although heavily influenced by German law, the Visby law is basically Scandinavian in charac-

ter. Sjdholm, Gesetze als Quellen, 111-19, severely criticizes Hasselberg’s methodology.

55. Snorri Sturluson is known to have visited Eskil, and Wessén even suggests that the codification of Vastgé6talagen was due to Snorri’s influence. Wessén, “Lagman och lagsaga,” 75. However, there were certainly other opportunities for Swedish-Norwegian contact besides Snorri, including temporary unions of the crowns. Lefebvre, “Juges et savants,” 14. For more detail, including the possible role of lawman Eskil (1215—27}, see Beckman, “Studier till Vastg6talagarnas historia.” Both

redactions of the code are edited in SGL 1. An overliteral English translation by Alfred Bergin of the older version, The Law of the Westgoths, is available. The older redaction is known from a fragment dated on linguistic and paleographic grounds to 1250 at the latest, but the full text is known only from Holm. B59 (facsimile in CCS

12}, from the 1280s. Wessén, Landskapslagar, 15-28; Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 5:xi-xviii; Aqvist, KLNM, s.v. “Vastgotalagarna.” The later redaction is known from a mid-fourteenth-century ms., Holm B58 (facsimile in CCS 6}, and is generally dated to the beginning of the fourteenth century. Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar §:xxxviii-xliii; Aqvist, KLNM, s.v. “Vastg6talagarna.” Sjdholm, “Rattshistorisk metod och teoribildning,” 254, questions Wessén’s dating of AVgL. 56. Nevéus, Trdlarna i landskapslagarnas samhdalle, 68. Where the two versions agree exactly, only the older is cited here. 57. Utterstrom, “Die Mittelalterliche Rechtssprache,” 739, notes that the laws of Norway and Iceland, although much older, make much less use of alliteration than the Swedish laws. See also Ehrhardt, Der Stabreim. 58. Ericsson, Den kanoniska ratten. 59. Wessén, Landskapslagar, 21-25. 60. Sjdholm, “Rattshistorisk metod och teoribildning,” 254. Gagnér, “I knutz

kunungxs daghum,” 130—40, has pointed out that at least one provision in Ostgotalagen, a law against nam (pignoratio) or seizure of someone’s goods in collection of a debt without legal approval, was adopted because of influence from the Church,

probably in the mid-thirteenth century. The code is edited in SGL 2. There is a complete manuscript from the mid-fourteenth century, Holm. B50, as well as several fragments, anda printed edition of 1607 that probably goes back to an earlier ms. than

the one that has been preserved. Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 1:3; C. 1. Stahle, KLNM, s.v. “Ostgétalagen.” 61. The Uppland law is edited in SGL 3. There are five extant fourteenth-century mss. (one, Ups. B12, reproduced in CCS 15) and a printed version from 1607 based on a now lost ms. Holmbdck and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 1:2:3—4; B.

Lundberg, KLNM, s.v. “Upplandslagen.” It may be that none of the extant mss. represents the text in its original, royally sanctioned form; rather, the lost codex on which the printed edition from 1607 is based may best represent that redaction. Henning, “Upplandslagens redigering,” 146. See also Stahle, “Nagra fragor rorande den f6rsta utgavan.” For further discussion of the relation between the mss. and the 1607 text, see Chapter 2. There may have been some earlier law codes that no longer exist. Olaus Petri used a now-lost manuscript of old Uppland laws, and King Magnus

256 NOTES TO PAGES 177-78 Ladulas (1275—90} arranged for codification of Narke’s laws, of which no manuscripts survive. Stahle, “Medeltidens profana litteratur,” 45. 62. UL, Confirmatio. The introduction to the code itself says that it has been given by the king as God gave the first law to his people through Moses (UL Praefatio, SGL 3:6). 63. UL Praefatio. 64. Von See, Altnordische Rechtsworter, 98—100. 65. Sallstr6m, Bologna och Norden, 230, suggests that it is no coincidence that Birger Persson’s cousin Karl Erlandsson had studied at Bologna from 1292 to 1295 and

that the archdeacon of Uppsala, Olav Niclasson, was there in 1296. Though these men did not serve on the commission they may have influenced it. 66. Edited in SGL 4. There are two extant mss., Holm. B53 (A), reproduced in CCS 9 and-dated to the first half of the fourteenth century, and Havn. NKS 2237 4:0 (B), from the second half of the fourteenth century. Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 3:xi-xiv; Wessén, KLNM, s.v. “SGdermannalagen”; Wessén, Landskapslagar, 96—99. The two manuscripts represent two different texts, as Bhas some provisions said to have been added in 1325 and A does not. Only B has the confirmation of 1327. Jagerstad, “Den aldre och yngre S6dermannalagen,” suggests that A represents a redaction from the 1280s, but this is not generally accepted. Wessén, Landskapslagar, 97, agrees that an earlier redaction existed but claims that A is from shortly after 1300 because it does show the influence of Upplandslagen. More recently, Wiktorsson, S6dermannalagens B-handskrift, 17-26, has argued that the text of both mss. is later than 1327 and is an offshoot of the officially confirmed version. See also Reinhammar, “Om Sd6dermannalagens B-Handskrift.” 67. Edited in SGL 6. HL is known from one mid-fourteenth-century ms. (Ups. B4g, reproduced in CCS 8}, and an edition of 1609 based on a now-lost ms. Neither ms. represents the original text. HL was used in Swedish Finland and is important in the development of Finnish law. Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 3:xliii-xlv; Wessén, Landskapslagar, 100—o1. 68. Wessén, Landskapslagar, 63—76. If this provision is in fact archaic it may derive from the pagan practice, known only from sagas, of sprinkling a child with water at naming. The practice is known only from Iceland but could have existed in Sweden; it would make sense in this context as a recognition of the legitimacy of the child. See Carlsson, “Jag giver dig min dotter,” 2:219—34. Both VmL and DL are edited in SGL 5. DLis known from one fourteenth-century ms., Holm. B54 (CCS 17) and VmL from three, including Holm B57, reproduced in CCS 20. Holmback and Wessén, Svenska landskapslagar 2:xiii-xiv and 2:xxxii-xxxiii; Wessén, Landskapslagar, 31-36 and 56-58; J. Liedgren, KLNM, s.v. “Vastmannalagen.” Schlyter classified DL as an older redaction of VmL. Wessén, Landskapslagar, 32, disagrees; more recently, Wiktorsson, Avskrifter och skrivare, 37—61, has argued that the text of Holm. B54 is actually an older Vastmannalagen. See the debate on this between Utterstrom, ‘“Konstruktioner kring Dalalagen,” and Wiktorsson, “Dalalag.” The two regions may have been under the same lawman yet have had separate laws, as was the case with Halsingland and Uppland. 69. Wessén, Landskapslagar, 40-43; Hafstrom, KLNM, s.v. “Dalalagen.” But once again, antiquity of style does not necessarily mean antiquity of content. 70. Wessén, Landskapslagar, 55. 71. Hemmer, “Yngre straff- och processrattsliga stadganden”; Utterstrom, “Der mittelalterliche Rechtssprache,” 743—45. Utterstr6m concludes that Swedish schol-

NOTES TO PAGES 178-81 257 ars have been on a wild-goose chase in their attempt to date the laws on linguistic evidence. See the reply by Stahle, “Om Dalalagens alderdomlighet och alder,” 39297, and Utterstrém, “Alderdomlighet utan alder?” Wennstrém, Lagsprdk och lagtexter, 321-44, argues that DL is later than VmL and UL, but mainly on the ground that certain of its provisions are far developed from primitive Germanic rules. As discussed above, this is a far from certain method of dating. 72. Bizerkoz retter, SGL 6; MELL, SGL 10; MESL, SGL 11. 73. Sjoholm, Gesetze als Quellen, 174-79. 74. E.g., Koht, The Old Norse Sagas, 119-39. 75. Lonnroth, “Genesis of the Scandinavian Kingdoms,” 7—8. See also Porsteinsson, review of Das alte Island by Kuhn, for another severe criticism of attempts to write history from the sagas. 76. For separate discussion of the kings’ sagas, particularly textual traditions, see T. Andersson, “Kings’ Sagas.” 77. On the early history of saga scholarship, an excellent summary is T. Andersson, Icelandic Saga Origins. For a survey of views since Andersson’s work see Clover, “Icelandic Family Sagas.” Liestol, The Origin of the Icelandic Family Sagas, is representative of the freeprose point of view. Members of the bookprose school put forward their ideas mainly in monographs on individual sagas rather than synthetic works, for part of the theory is that each saga is a literary achievement unto itself; for an extreme view on the lack of an oral tradition see Baetke, “Uber die Entstehung.” Die Islandersaga, ed. Baetke, is a selection of excerpts from articles and monographs on both sides of the controversy up to 1964. 78. For criticism of this school, see Clover, “Icelandic Family Sagas,” 241-44; T. Andersson, Icelandic Saga Origins, 82-119. 79. Whether the background details of a saga come from oral tradition or are the creations of a thirteenth-century author is particularly critical for the study of law. The details of law depicted in the sagas differ in many cases from provisions in Gragas, the surviving Icelandic legal compilation (see above for its history and dating}. This was taken by the early freeprosists as proof that the saga represented an earlier stage of the law and was therefore based on an eleventh-century oral tradition. Another possibility is that the law as presented in the saga shows how things worked in practice as opposed to the ideal provisions in Gragdas(T. Andersson, Icelandic Saga

Origins, 44); or the saga could represent a later state of the law than Grdgds (Sveinsson, Dating the Icelandic Sagas, 67-69). 80. Nordal, The Historical Element, 18-29; Baetke, “Uber die Entstehung,” 34— 35; Sveinsson, “The Icelandic Family Sagas,” 71-90; Byock, Feud in the Icelandic Saga, 38. Similarly Turner, “An Anthropological Approach,” 358, holds that social structure did not change greatly between the time the sagas purport to depict and that when they were written. Meulengracht Serensen, Saga og Samfund, 15 §—57, stresses that historical accuracy would not have been the primary concern of medieval Icelanders. 81. Jochens, “The Church and Sexuality,” 378. But, though Jochens takes the

thirteenth-century Sturlunga saga as more reliable, Clover, “Icelandic Family Sagas,” argues that “relative proximity to events” does not prevent distortion of social aspects.

82. See Steffansson, “Comments on Economic Structures in the Early Iron Age,” for a discussion of the problems that can arise when scholars do not recognize this; see also Halldérsson, review of Das alte Island by Kuhn, 154: “It is also not

258 NOTES TO PAGES 181-83 unlikely that much of what the sagas tell us about the customs and manners of men refers rather to the Age of the Sturlungs than the Saga Age (e.g. on the size of the family}.”

83. Foote, “Prelahald 4Islandi,” 70—71. Quotations are from English typescript version kindly provided to me by Professor Foote; page references are to the published Icelandic version. 84. Viga-Glums saga 7. 85. Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar 85. 86. Wilde-Stockmeyer, Sklaverei auf Island, especially “Die literarische Schablonisierung der Sklaven in Islandersagas,” 93—148, gives numerous examples of literary motifs involving slaves that may have no relation to the reality of slavery in the Saga Age.

87. For the use of Greek literature as a source for the social status of slaves in Greece, see Vogt, “Slavery and the Ideal of Man.” Vogt considers many issues in the relation of literary image to reality that are relevant to the slave in Icelandic literature.

88. Hastrup, Culture and History, 12; see Clover, “Icelandic Family Sagas,” 256, for several criticisms of the “social” approach to the sagas. For an attack on the whole notion of applying the criteria of “historical truth” to the sagas, see SteblinKamenskij, The Saga Mind, 21—22 and passim, reviewed by Hallberg, “The Syncretic Saga Mind,” with responses by Steblin-Kamenskij, “Some Considerations on Approaches to Medieval Literature,” Hallberg, “‘Medieval Man’—and Saga Studies,” and Steblin-Kamenskij, “Further Considerations,” and summary in Clover, “Icelandic Family Sagas,” 260—62.

89. Landndmabok exists today in five redactions. Turville-Petre, Origins of Icelandic Literature, 103—04, suggests that the extant redactions draw on a version

written in the first half of the thirteenth century but relying on earlier material. Rafnsson, Studier i Landndmabok, 114ff., argues that the earliest (now lost) redaction dates from before 1104. See his stemma of mss., 81. For a view disagreeing on the dating and the stemma, though not on the conclusions, see Benediktsson’s review. The extant independent redactions are Hauksbok (H]}, Sturlub6dk (S), and Melabok (M). Benediktsson’s Fornrit edition draws on all the redactions. The English translation by Palsson and Edwards is based on S. See stemma in the translators’ introduction, 5.

) go. Benediktsson, “Landnadmabok: Some Remarks”; Rafnsson, Studier i Landnamabo6k, 166—81 and 219, and review by Benediktsson, 317. 91. For good summaries of previous work on Saxo and his sources, see Kroman, Saxo og overleveringen af hans verk, 7—51, and K. Johannesson, Saxo Grammaticus:

composition och vdrldsbild, 7-17. Recent collections of articles on Saxo, covering among other things his value as a historical source, include Friis-Jensen, ed., Saxo

Grammaticus, and Boserup, ed., Saxostudier. :

92. In Kvinnor och man and “Women in Gesta Danorum,” Strand provides a good example of how Saxo’s treatment of a social group may be taken as evidence of

attitudes during his own time, but not of actual status or attitudes at the time he wrote about. The situation is slightly more complicated for slaves than for women, in that one may assume women were a significant group in society both at the time he wrote and at the time he described, but one may not assume the same of slaves. On Saxo’s political outlook and his literary background, see K. Johannesson, Saxo Gram-

maticus: composition och vdrldsbild, 308-75.

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Index

Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, 48, 54, 88, Chalons, Council of, 115

120, 173, 225NII3 Children: costs of rearing, 52, 229nII,

Adam of Bremen, 48, 71 239n22; legitimacy of, 74—75, 214n24,

Adoption into kin group, 131, 132-33, 215n27, 256n68; of concubines, 73-76,

134, 241mn46,48 214n24, 237n116; of mixed unions, 34,

AC Diniz, 73, II7,215n27, 174, 253n33; 195n58, 20554, Ambatt, 43, 75,47 121,50-52, 243n72 214N24, of two slaves,

Anaudéigr, 43 50—52, 117, 139, 142, 205n54, 206nn6o, Ancilla, 28, 42, 43, 200nIO 62, 66, 243n79, 244n86; sale of, 118—19. Anderson, Perry, 157 See also Infanticide; Marriage Andreas Suneson, 86, 173—74. See also Christianity: and law, 53, 106, 110, 142,

Skane: codification of law of 207N70; as motive for abolition, 140,

Anngpogher, 43, 157 142, 152, 156; brotherhood of all men Anskar, Saint, 47, 125 in, 62, 67, 142, 1§2, 207n70. See also

88-89 baptism of

Archaeology, 69~70, 76—77, 82, 83-85, Church; Sale: of Christians; Slaves:

Ari Porgilsson, 172 Christians as slaves. See Slaves: Christian Armadr, 80, 250n1I72 Church: and abolition, 142, 162; and humanity of slave, 106, 140—41; and Baetke, Walter, 180 law, 110, 142, 170, 175, 255n6o; and

Barschalk, 28 Marriage, 115, 142, I91I-92nI4,

Beaumanoir, Philippe de, 8 236nnI00,109; and manumission, 140— Beowulf, 197ng1I, 202nN30 42, 149, 150, 162, 245n9q; and slave

Bloch, Marc, 8, 24, 25, 26 trade, 15, 31, 142, 244n89; and Blood groups. See Genetics treatment of slaves, 142, 145, 152,

Bonde, 157. See also Peasants: 231n50; as landlord, 86—88, 89-90, 144;

landowning as slaveholder, 31, 140, 141, 152, Bordarius, 30 245n92. See also Christianity

Borgarping law, 116, 170 Cistercians, 86~—87

Bosl, Karl, 23 Coins, 46, 202N29, 203n34, 228n7

Bound debtors. See Debt slavery Coloni: as term, 41, 42; in Denmark, 87,

Bovarius, 32 149, 22397; in France, 19, 20, 21-22,

Bracton, 34-36 36, 194n51; in Roman Empire, 13, 17—

Brennu-Njals saga, 58, 81, 144, 180 19, 34, 36, 238n2. See also Landbo; British Isles: settlement patterns in, 76— Tenants 77, 216n4go; slave burials in, 73; slaves Commendation, 28, 54, 55

in, 197n90. See also England Compensation: for injuries to slaves,

Bryde. See Bryte 100-05, I12—13, 119, 1§7, 201Nn22,

Bryte: as term, 42, 80; status of, 92-93, 227N134, 243n8o; for offenses by slave,

111. See also Stewards; Villicus 112—13; for various categories of

Byock, Jesse, 180 dependents, 13, 47, 94, 133, 159; in Germanic law, 98, 104-05, 230n39 Castration of slaves, 58, 123, 126, 202n34, Concubines. See Women slaves: as

208n89, 240n28 concubines

Censuales, 27, 28 Cotarius, 30 301

302 INDEX

Coutumes de Beauvaisis, 8 Domiciling, 36, 156; in Denmark, 149; in

Curia: as term, 41, 87; in Denmark, 87, England, 31-32, 70; in France, 21, 26, 93, 149, 222n96; in Sweden, go. See 70, 1§5, 194n48; in Iceland, 129; in

also Demesne farming; Denmark: Norway, 146-47; in Sweden, 91, 94. agricultural organization in; Slavery: See also Fostrar prebendal; Sweden: agricultural Droplaugarsonar saga, 75, 126 organization in

Eddic poetry, 60-63, 64, 71, 124, 179, Dalarna: law of (Dalalagen), 44, 176, 177-— 212N3, 213NIg

78; wills freeing slaves in, 91 Edict of Theoderic, 13, 230139 Davis, David Brion, 8, I91nI Egils saga Skalla-Grimssonar, 75, 98, 106,

De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae. 182

See Bracton Ehrhardt, Harald, 169 De Villis, 20 Eidsivaping law, 55, 170

Debt slavery, 11, 53-55, 118, 139, 140, Emancipation. See Freedmen;

234n86, 239NII Manumission

Decretum. See Gratian England: serfdom in, 32-36, 205n54; Demesne farming, 70, 85, 87, 122, 155; in settlements in, 84, 85; slavery in, 29— Denmark,145—50; in England, 31-32; 31, 70, 197ngI; tenants in, 156 in France, 19, 20; in Germany, 27; in Erling Skjalgsson, 78, 79, 130, 146-47 Norway, 146; in Sweden, 90, 150-51. Esne, 30 See also Curia; Denmark: agricultural Estonia, 47, 48, 201n25 organization in; Slavery: prebendal; Europe, slavery in, 5, 7, 9, II, 12-16, 123.

Sweden: agricultural organization in See also England; France; Germany;

Denmark: adoption into kin-group in, Italy

134, 241n46; agricultural organization Exposure of children. See Infanticide

in, 69, 83-88, 148-50, 223N97; Erybyggija saga, 132

compensation for slaves in, 98, 102; concubinage in, 74; debt slavery in, 54; | Family sagas. See Sagas decline of slavery in, 137-38, 148—S0; Famulus, 43 freedmen in, 132~—33; fugitive slaves in, Finland, 48, 139, 189nI 124; hereditary slavery in, 51; history Finley, Moses I., 6, 7, 17, 191nI of, 3—4; landownership in, 86—88, 156, Flatforing, 54, 207n74 222nn9g90,94; law of, 173—76; law of, Flight. See Fugitive slaves sources for, 109—I0, 115, 116, 120, 128, Fl6damanna saga, 126

137, 141, 174—75; Manumission in, Fogd6, 90, 225nII0 128—29, 130—31; Marriage in, 116, I17, Foote, Peter, 2, 157, 181

174; native slavery in, 52-53, 56—57, Fornaldarségur. See Sagas 134; offenses by slaves in, 108—09, 124; Fdéstbroedra saga, 64, 65, 116

penal slavery in, 54; rights of slaves’ Fostrar, 91, 92, 93-95, 102, I07, ISI, kin in, 118, 128, 132; sale of slaves in, 205N54, 225NII7 100; self-purchase in, 113, 130-31; Frels, 160. See also Fridls settlement patterns in, 83—86; slave France: numbers of slaves in, 194n50; burials in, 72; slave prices in, 98-99; serfdom in, 24—27; slavery in, 19-23,

slave rebellion in, 125, 127; 70

slaveowners’ liability in, 10o8—09, 124; Franks. See France; Law: Frankish slaves’ ownership of property in, 113; Free-unfree dichotomy, 6, 22—23, 26, 29, social structure of, 83-85, 156; sources 31, 37, 39, 154, 156—60, 161-62, 166. of slaves in, 47, 56—57; stewards in, 87, See also Freedom: meaning of; Slavery:

93, 222n96; surrender of slaves in, 107, and freedom 109; tasks of slaves in, 88; tenants in, Freedmen: as slaveholders, 218n56; rights 87—88, 148-50, 222n94; towns in, 176; of, 131-34, 147, 155; social status of,

wage labor in, 247n134. See also 121, 122; varieties of, 129-30. See also

Jutland; Sjelland; Skane Adoption; Freedom ale; Fridlsgjafi;

Dependence, and unfreedom, 28-29, 36— Leysingi; Manumission

37, 166. See also Servitude Freedom: meaning of, 5, 6, 22, 26, 29, 37, Domar, E. D., 145, 148, 246nI14 154, 157-59, 160, 161—62, 165, Domesday Book, 29—31, 198n95 248n1I55, 249n164; of nobility, 6, 22,

INDEX 303

29, 37, 221n8q; and wergeld, 158—59. Gratian, 173, 175, 205055 See also Slavery: and freedom; Unfree Graves. See Slaves: burial of Freedom ale, 129~30, 131, 132—33, 147. Greenland, 126, 216ngo

See also Manumission Gulaping law: as source for Icelandic law,

Frjdls, 157, 1§8, 249n165. See also 172, 173; codification of, 170-71;

Freedom: meaning of compensation for slaves in, 101; dating

Frjalsgjafi, 129-30, 240n37. See also of, 136, 170; debt slavery in, 54; foreign

Freedmen slaves in, 53, 59; freedmen in, 132-33,

Frostabing law: children of slaves in, 51, 147; fugitive slaves in, 124; insults in, 52; codification of, 169, 170-71; dating 66; killing of slaves in, 105; Jedung in, of, 136, 141, 170; foreign slaves in, 53, 79; Manumission in, 128, 130, I4I; 58, 123; freedmen in, 132, 133, 147; marriage in, 116; offenses by slaves in, fugitive slaves in, 123; household size 107, 108, 110, I11; penal slavery in, 55; in, 78—79; injury to slaves in, 101, 105— slaves as currency in, 96; slaves as 06, 140, 158; Manumission in, 130, 136, witnesses in, 114; stewards in, 80 141; offenses by slaves in, 107, 108, Gurevich, A. IA., 39 110; penal slavery in, 55; property of

slaves in, 113; Slaves as witnesses in, Hagiography, 13-14, 203n36

114; tasks of slaves in, 80 Hakon Hakonsson, 4, 209n103 Fugitive slaves, 123—24 HAlsingland: law of, 176, 177; wills freeing slaves in, 91

Gardseder, 87. See also Inquilini Harald harda0i, 47

Gaul. See France Hasselberg, Gosta, 94, 152 Geirmund Heljarskin, 59, 64, 80, 81, 129, Hatcher, John, 34

212n3 Heimskringla. See Snorri Sturluson

free Henry of Livonia, 48 Genetics, 49 Herdal, Harald, 2 Germania. See Tacitus Hilton, Rodney, 32, 33, 34 Gemeinfreie, 21-22. See also Peasants: Helle, Knut, 148

Germanic society: slavery in, 12—13; Horige, 27

structure of, 13, 61, 157; unity of, 2,12, | Homines proprii, 27 61, 192nI9. See also Law: Germanic Homme de corps, 25, 196nn73,75

Germany: numbers of slaves in, 19556; Hornungr, 74-75 servitude in, 27-29; settlements in, 19, Hrisungr, 74—75

84; slavery in, 20 Human sacrifice. See Slaves: burial of

Gesta Danorum. See Saxo Grammaticus Hyams, Paul, 33, 34 Gisla saga, 65, 129

Glanville, 32 Ibn Fadlan, Ahmad, 46—47, 71

Gotland, law of: codification of, 176; Ibn Rusta, 71

dating of, 139—40, 176, 254n52; debt Iceland: agricultural organization in, 70, slavery in, 53, 139—40; fugitive slaves 80-83; bearing of arms by slaves in,

in, 124; illegitimate children in, 74; 114; compensation for slaves in, 101— manumission 1n, 131; Marriage in, 117; 02, 103, 104-05; concubinage in, 75—

offenses by slaves in, 107, 108, III, 76; conversion of, 143; debt slavery in, 124; purchase of slaves in, 99; torture of 55, 118, 207n82, 234n86; decline of

slaves in, 108; wergeld in, 103-04 slavery in, 135—36, 143—45; freedmen Gotar, 3; laws of, 99, 107—08, 114, 128, in, 129, 132, 133-34; hereditary slavery

176. See also Ostergotland; in, 50, 51-2; history of, 4; killing of

Vastergotland slaves in, 103, 106; labor supply in,

Gragas: codification of, 172; dating of, 143—45; landownership in, 81, 82-83; 135, 172, 242n67; debt slavery in, 55, law of, 172—73; manumission in, 129,

118; killing of slaves in, 103; 130; Marriage in, 115, 116, 117—18,

manumission in, 130; Marriage in, 116; 204n48; numbers of slaves in, 190n11,

offenses by slaves in, 108, 110, IIT, 248n153; offenses by slaves in, 107, 124, 158; self-purchase in, 129; status 108—o9; penal slavery in, 55; rights of of children in, 51, 75, 206n62; tenancy slaves’ kin in, 118; self-purchase in, in, 144; wage labor in, 144. See also 129; settlement patterns in, 82—83;

Jonsb6k slave prices in, 98—99; slave rebellion

304 INDEX Iceland (continued) Landnamabéok: as source, 182-83;

in, 125—27; slaveowners’ liability in, attitudes toward slaves in, 59, 66; 108—o09; slaves’ ownership of property freedmen in, 58, 129, 132, 144; in, 112—13; social structure of, 4, 61, settlement in, 81, 129, 144; slaves in,

156-57, 240N4I, 249NI61, 257n8o; 80, 103, 125, 127

sources of slaves in, 49, 52, 56, 57—60, Law: access to, 33, 34, 35—36, 199NI22;

143; tasks of slaves in, 81, 21864; Alamannic, 230n41; and contempt for

tenants in, 143—44; torture of slaves in, slaves, 121; and practice, 35—36, 96—97, 126; wage labor in, 144—45, 246nI12. II19—21, 167, 169; Anglo-Saxon, 31,

See also Gragds; Sagas 233n78; borrowings in, 13, 96-97, 116,

Illegitimacy. See Children; Women 120, 137, 141, 168, 169, 174, 199NI25,

slaves: status of children of 228n5, 231N50, 232N60, 252nIT, Infanticide, 52, 143, 207N67 256n65; Burgundian, 230n43; canon, Inquilini, 87, T49—§$0, 1§4, 247NI29 97, 115, 116, 141, 168, 173, 175, Insults, 66, 67, 109, 211NN132—33, 205nN55, 254n42; codification of, 142,

232n67 167-78, 243N77; common, 30, 34;

Ireland, 48—49, 197n90. See also Slaves: customary, 9, 25, 30, 35—36, 96, 169;

_ Irish Danish, 173—76; Frankish, 22,

Islendingabok, 172 230NN39,41, 232N60, 233n71; Frisian,

Italy: Roman, 16—19, 26; slavery in, 13- 104, 230N4I, 230n45; Germanic, 12, 13,

14, 70 53, 97, 98, 100, 104, 106, IIO, III, I13-

Iversen, Tore, 148 14, 118, 120, 123-24, 130, 132, 133, 214N24, 228n5, 229nI5, 230Nn45,

Jarnsida, 135, 144, 173 232nN71, 233n79; Icelandic, 172-73; Jochens, Jenny, 181 Lombard, 13, 104, 133, 168, 205n54, Jonsbok, 135, 144, 173 231n50; Norman, 31; Norwegian, 170-—

Jutland: children in law of, 74; 71; Roman, as influence on other codes, codification of law of, 173, 174-76; 13, 29, 34-36, 41, 96-98, 114, 116, 120, contempt for slaves in law of, 121; 128, 137, 162, 165, 168, 231n50;

disappearance of slavery in, 138; lack of Roman, provisions on slavery in, 53, 74, references to slaves in law of, 137-38; 96-98, 104, 106, IO9—10, I13—I4, IIS,

offenses by slaves in law of, 107, 123—24, 128, 132, 165, 205nn54—55, 231n54; settlement patterns in, 83-85; 214n24, 229n11; Saxon, 230n4I;

slaves in Jedung in law of, 128; slaves Scandinavian, 50, 96—97, 127-28, 167— as sureties in law of, 114; stewards in 78; Swedish, 176—78; Thuringian,

law of, 93; towns in, 176 230n4q1I; Visigothic, 13, 104, 133,

205n54, 231nNgd5,50, 235ng8. See also

Kings’ sagas. See Sagas; Snorri Sturluson Borgarbing law; Dalarna; Edict of

Knecht, 28 Theoderic; Eidsivabing law; Frostaping Konigsfreie, 21-22, 85 law; Gotland; Gragds; Gratian;

Kormaks saga, 64 Gulaping law; Halsingland; Jutland,

Krag, Claus, 2 Ostergotland; Skane; Sjzlland;

Kristensen, Anne K. G., 85 Sédermanland; Uppland; Vastergétland;

Vastmanland Labor: direct exploitation of, 9,11, 16,21, Laxdcela saga, 58, 65, 75, 98

27, 69, 87, 122, 150; indirect Ledung, 79, 88, 114, 136, 137, 224nI0O¢5, exploitation of, 10, 31, 87, 90, 122, 144, 242n70. See also Taxes

149, 151-53, 162; slave and free, Leibeigene, 27

relative advantages of, 17, 31-32, 52, Leiglending, 42. See also Tenants 143, 145, 146, 148, 150, 193ngo; supply _Lejre, 71, 72 of, 21, 143-45, 148, 153, 196n74; wage, Leysingi, 129-30, 242n69. See also 90, 144-45, 152—53, 156, 250N173. See Freedmen

also Demesne farming; Serfdom; Liber, 22

Slavery: prebendal; Tenants Lind, Joan Dyste, 2

Land tenure: and access to courts, 33; and Lindkvist, Thomas, 152 personal status, 9, 20, 24-26, 28, 34, Ljdésvetninga saga, 81

155, 196n72, 198NITS, 247N133 Lombards. See Italy: slavery in; Law: Landbo, 42, 87. See also Coloni; Tenants Lombard

INDEX 305 Lonnroth, Erik, 178 06; peasant landowners in, 148, Lunden, Kare, 148 217n47; penal slavery in, 55; sale and

Magnus Eriksson, 138, 176, 206n6o. See P urchase of slaves 98-99; self— purchase in, 113,in, 130, 241nq9;

also Sweden: national law ot settlement patterns in, 76-78, 21536,

Magnus Lagaboter (Hakonarson}. See 217n45; slave burials in, 72; slave

N orway: national law of prices in, 98; slave rebellions in, 127;

Maitland, F. W., 31, 34 slaveowners’ liability in, 108, 111; Mancipium, 42, 225n1I16 slaves as witnesses in, 114; slaves’ Mansmaor, 44, 157 . ownership of property in, 113; social

Manumission, 122; and an group, 128, structure of, 61-62, 209N104, 249161; £31 134158) 5 foward 128-29" soures of slaves, 4957-39,

245n95; in England, 32; in France “DI; tasks of ° laves in, 79—80, 24270; in Scandinavia 127- 34, 250; rituals of fenants in, 78, 145—48, 217147,

/ ares y 246n119; wage labor in, 147, 246nI19.

130, 158, 171, soe al. 9; without owner’s See also Borgarbing law; Eidsivaping

Free so a Ben so Freedmen, law; Frostabing law; Gulaping law

Freecom ale; WIS Novel disseisin, 33

Mn eskalk, 29 Novgorod, 48, 139, 203n46 arriage: mixed, 33, 34, 50-51, $3, 73, Noxal liability, rog—10, 192n23

117-19, 174, 195n58, 204n48; of ’ 4

Me seta ayénioe Daan o, caands, ODN, 64, 7% lural 214n20, re-Christian 115 Olafs saga helga, 78, 81, 130, 146

qe yo, 99, 127

Ma x Ka dL to iP , Olaf Tryggvason, 4, 47, 127; saga of, 82, Military colonization, 21-22, 85 Old Norse: dialects of, 189n1; terms in,

Ministeriales, 28—29

Modes of production, 10, 164 157-58 in , a Oral tradition: in 41~45, law, 167—70; 192nnts,18, 194n4s literature, 179-81 Mund, 116, 236n1I04q a

, Oseberg ship burial, 72

Nevéus, Clara, 2, 48, 91, 117, 151, 152, Ostergotland: children in law of

225NNII2—13, 228n6 (Ostgotalagen), 73, 117; codification of

New World, slavery in, 5, 9, I10—II, II5, law of, 176, 255n60; compensation for

123, I9INI, 193n32, 235N99 slaves in law of, 102; dating of law of,

Nieboer, H. J., 145, 148 177—78; fostre in law of, 93—94, 102, Nielsen, Leif Christian, 83 151; freeing of kin in law of, 52, 92,

Nidls saga. See Brennu-Njdls saga 131, 133; law of, as source of national Nobility, 160-61, 162, 166. See also law, 178; manumission in law of, 131,

Freedom: of nobility 133, 141; marriage in law of, 116, 117, Nordal, Sigurdur, 180 128; offenses by slaves in law of, 107,

Norway: agricultural organization in, 70, 108, 111; ordinances for, 244n83; penal

76—80, 145-47, 216NN39,41, slavery in law of, 53, 158; sale of free

217nn45,55; compensation for slaves men in law of, 100; sale of slaves in law in, 101, 104—05; debt slavery in, 54-55; of, 99; stewards in law of, 92—93,; wills

decline of slavery in, 136, 145-48, freeing slaves in, 91

242n70; domiciling of slaves in, 146— Outlawry: for killing of slave, 101-02, 47; foreign slaves in, 53, 123, 20770, 103, 230N36; of slaves, 124, 232n6I 231n53; freedmen in, 131-32, 133, 134; Outlaws, killing of, by slaves, 234n86

fugitive slaves in, 123-24; hereditary ;

slavery in, 51—52, 146; history of, 4; Palsson, Arni, 52, 143

land clearance in, 146, 246n117; Patterson, Orlando, 7, 190nI1I, I91nI landownership in, 77-78, 147; marriage Peasants: as slaveowners, 78, 92, 149-50,

in, 116, 117; Manumission in, 128, 152; tree, 21-22, 27, 161—62;

129—30; national law of, 4, 99, 136, 169, landowning, 62, 92, 148, 149-50, I55—

170, 173; native slaves in, 53, 123, 56, 157, 161, 166, 218n56. See also

23153; numbers of slaves in, 78, Bonde; Tenants

248n153; offenses by slaves in, 108, Peculium, 9, 113—14, 234n90, 235n92 111; owners’ rights over slaves in, ros— __ Pelteret, David, 31

306 INDEX

Penal slavery, 53-55, 140, 158, 206n62, Serf, as term, 18—19, 23, 42, 197n93. See

243n72 also Serfdom; Tenants: free, and serfs

Pentateuch, Old Swedish, 41-44 Serfdom: absence of, in Scandinavia, 122, Phillips, William D., Jr., 12, 191n9 144-45, 153, 154-55, 247N129; Polyptychs, 19—21, 24, 155, 195n56 definition of, 8, 10; in England, 32—36;

Portugal, slavery in, 15 in France, 24—27; in Germany, 27—28;

Postan, M. M., 44 in Russia, 2t0n111; landlords’ rights

Priim, register of Abbey of, 20 under, 25-26, 27, 28, 34, 35; obligations

. of, 9, 24,122, 25, 36; as legal 239nIO category, 24— Rebellion, 123-27, . Revkdeela sava, 81. 12 25, 32-34. See also Serf; Servitude; in 84, OF, 127 ; Slavery: and serfdom

Rigspula, 60-63, ervitude: 64, 66, 159; dating of, of,8,Serv; ne . of, é1 62, 208n102 categories 13; signs

: ’ : 24-26,Saint, 28, 32-33, 36-38, 196nN70,77, Rimbert, 47, 125 er f See al Roman Empire: agricultural organization < 8n135; stigma OL, 10, 29. see also and unfreedom; Freein, 16—19, 194n4q3;; ependence, freedom in,unfree 165, dichotomy; Serfdom; Slavery; 193nNn33—34; slavery in, 9, 16-19, 26, Unfreedom

123. See also Italy:as Roman; Law: c6, 8, 13, 21, 22, 34, Roman e€rvus: Category,

Renneseth, Ottar, 77 Bo. as term, 27, 28, 30, 37, 41-42, * Runestones, 84, 86, 89, 93, 131, 156 To9n4, 1913, 197N93; casatus, 12, 18, Rus’ 16— 71, t x0n2 ,40—47, 7 19, 23; proprius, 27; quotidianus, 27 Russia. See Novgorod; Slaves: Slavic Ship levy. See Ledung

, Sjelland: burials in, 71-72; children in

St.-Germain des Prés, polyptych of, 20-21 law of, 74; codification of law of, 137-

Saga Age, 4, 64, 180-81 38; compensation for slaves in law of,

Sagas: agricultural organization in, 78,80— 102; contempt for slaves in law of, 121; 82, 83, 99; and law, 257n79; aS sources, dating of law of, 137, 174; fugitive 2, 3, 67, 106, I19, 120, 125, 143, 178— slaves in law of, 124; landownership in, 82, 206n66, 237n128; dating of slavery 86-87; manumission in law of, 131,

in, 135, 136; freedmen in, 133—34; 133, 141; marriage in law of, 116; hereditary slavery in, 50; killing of offenses by slaves in law of, 109, 111; slaves in, 106, 182; legendary, 3, 64, penal slavery in law of, 54; stewards in 179; Manumission in, 129, 130; law of, 93; women slaves in law of, 88

marriage in, 117-18; offenses by slaves Sjéholm, Elsa, 139, 168, 169, 170, 178 in, 111-12, 181; rights of slavesin, 112, Skalk, 28 129; sacrifice in, 71; slave-born children Skane: captured slaves in law of, 47—48, in, 75—76; slave families in, 118—19, 118; children in law of, 74; codification

237n148; stereotypes in, 64-67, 123, of law of, 41, 137, 173-74;

181 compensation for slaves in law of, 102;

Saints. See Hagiography dating of law of, 120, 173-74; fugitive

Sale: of children, 118—19; of Christians, slaves in law of, 124; landownership in, 100, 128, 142, 201n22, 204n46, 244n89; 87; manumission in law of, 128, 130, of free people, 98—100; of slaves, 98— 132, 141; offenses by slaves in law of,

100 108—09, 110; penal slavery in law of,

Sandnes, Jorn, 77, 78 54; settlement patterns in, 84-85; Sawyer, Peter, 157 slaves’ ownership of property in law of, Saxo Grammaticus: as source, 182-83, 113; stewards in law of, 93; towns in,

258n92; bequest to, 223n98; 176; women slaves in law of, 88

manumission in, 128; myths in, Skara ordinance, 138—39, 150, 152, 189n2, 209n1I02; slavery as metaphor in, 64; 244n83 slaves as tool in, I11, 127; stereotypes Skjgldunga saga, 61, 62, 209nI02

of slaves in, 56—57 Sko, 90, I50

Scandinavia: definition of, 189n1; Skov, Sigvard, 173 agricultural organization in, 69—70, Skyum-Nielsen, Niels, 2 122; social structure of, 156-57, 159— Slave: as term, I, 41, 45, 64, 65, 67; as

61. See also Denmark; Iceland; insult, 66—67. See also Servus; Thrall

Sclavus, 45 of

Norway; Sweden Slave breeding. See Slaves: reproduction

INDEX 307 Slave burials. See Slaves: burial of ture of, 108, 126, 23598. See also

Slave families. See Slaves: families of Sale: of slaves; Slave trade; Women

Slave-free dichotomy. See Free-unfree slaves

dichotomy Slavs. See Slaves: Slavic

Slave quarters. See Slaves: dwellings of Snorri Sturlusson, 47, 61, 78, 79, 81, 125,

Slave raiding. See Slaves: capture of 130, 146, 182, 209NT02, 255N55 Slave trade: in England, 31; in Europe, Sddermanland: codification of law of

14-15, 21; in Italy, 14; in Spain, 14-15; (Sodermannalagen), 138, 177, 244n83;

Vikings and, 46, 49-50; with Islamic dating of law of, 177; debt slavery in world, 14—15, 21, 45, 46—47. See also law of, 53; slavery in law of, 44, 138,

Sale; Slaves: capture of 206n60; wills freeing slaves in, 91

Slave women. See Women slaves Sorg, monastery of, 86, 223798

Slaveowners: liability of, 107—09, 111- Spain, slavery in, 13, 14-15 , 12; rights of, 9, 25, 105—06 Staffelsee, polyptych of, 20 Slavery: and availability of land, 145, 148, | Stewards: of estates, 80, 87, 90, 92—93,

151-52; and freedom, 6, 39, 154, 157, 126, 150; royal or episcopal, 85, 92-93, 158—59, 161—62; and other forms of 249n172; unfree, 92-93, III, 151. See dependence, 6, 161; and serfdom, 5, 8, also Armadr; Bryte 9, IO—-II, 21, 23, 24, 25-26, 32, 36, 37; Stjorn, 41—42

154, 161, 164, I91INI4, 194N75; as Stromberg, Marta, 84

cultural and social category, 3,6, 7, 11- Sturlung Age, 4, 180—81 12, 23, 38-39, 40, 96-97, 119-21, 123, Sturlunga saga, 59, 135, 144

142, 153-54, 156, I159—60, 162-63, Sune Ebbesen, 86 164—65, 248nI54; aS economic system, Svarfdcela saga, 55, 81, 98, 118, 134 3, 9-10, 69-70, 122, 149, 153, 157, 162, Svear, 3; laws of, 44—45, 100, I02, 106,

164; as legal classification, 9, 23, 38— 114, 131, 133, 141, 157, 176, 177-78. 39, 40, §6, 96—97, 119-21, 164—65; aS See also Dalarna; Halsingland; taint, 50, 57, 59, 63—64, 134, 159, 165, Sédermanland; Uppland; Vastmanland

21ONII2; as term, 1, 120; decline of, 21, Sveinn, 44 ; 31, 36, 134-63; definitions of, 6-12, 40, | Sveinsson, Einar Olafur, 61, 180 191n9; prebendal, 19, 20, 26, 36, 70, 78, Svein Ulfsson, 47. 85, 122, 146, 195n59, 197N92; signs of, Sweden: adoption into kin-group in, 131,

238n135; urban, 14, 16, I91nrl. See 132—33, 134, 241n48; agricultural also Denmark; England: slavery in; organization in, 70, 88-92, 150-53, Europe; France: slavery in; Freedom; 225n110; compensation for slaves in,

Germanic society: slavery in; 98, 102—03, 105; debt slavery in, 53-54;

Germany: slavery in; Iceland; Italy: decline of slavery in, 138—40, 150-53; slavery in; Labor: direct exploitation of, domiciling of slaves in, 94, 151;

New World; Norway; Portugal; Roman expansion of settlement in, 89, I5 1-52; Empire: slavery in; Servitude; Spain; foreign slaves in, 139; freedmen in,

Sweden; Unfreedom 132—33; fugitive slaves in, 124;

Slaves: as outsiders, 7, II, 15, 40; as hereditary slavery in, 50, 52, 150; property, 98—106, 121; as wealth, 7o— history of, 3; labor supply in, 150, 152; 73, 98, 212n3; baptism of, 141; bearing landownership in, 89—90, 150, 153; law arms, 123, 238n3; burial of, 65, 70-73, of, 168, 176—78; manumission in, 128, 211INI25, 212n7; capture of, 46—49, II19, 131; marriage in, 116-17, 139, 142,

150, 212n6; Christian, 15, 100, 128, 236NI12, 243n79; national law of, 138,

138-39, 142, 201n22, 204n46; 139, 152-53, 178, 235n95; native

dwellings of, 76-77, 82, 84, 218n68; slavery in, 52—53, 56, 95, 134; nobility families of, 115—19; honor of, 105, 119, in, 160—61; numbers of slaves in,

165, 238n132; Irish, 57-58, 125, 127; 248n153; offenses by slaves in, 108,

liability of, 107-11; names of, 66; III, 124; penal servitude in, 53; rights

numbers of, 30—31, 78, 1I90NII, 195n56, of slaves’ kin in, 118, 128; sale of slaves

248n1I53; ownership of property by, in, 100; self-purchase in, 113, 131, 112-14; reproduction of, 17, 51-52, 241n47; settlement patterns in, 88—89, 143, 193n38; rights of, 112-19, 159; 224n106; slave burials in, 72; slave Slavic, 46—47, 139, 20334; stereo- prices in, 98—99; slave rebellion in, 124; types of, 59-60, 61, 63-65, 123; tor- slaveowners’ liability in, 108, 111, 124;

308 INDEX Sweden (continued} marriage in law of, 51, 139, 142,

slaves as witnesses in, 114; slaves’ 244n86; offenses by slaves in law of, ownership of property in, 113; social 107, 124; penal slavery in law of, 53; structure of, 88—90, 156—57; sources of sale of slaves in law of, 100, 119, 128, slaves in, 47, 52, 150, 201n25; stewards 142; slave burials in, 73; tasks of slaves in, 92—93; supply of labor in, 150, 152— in law of, 92; terminology in law of,

53; surrender of slaves in, 107, 109, 44—45; wills freeing slaves in, 91 231n55; tasks of slaves in, 92; tenants Uppsala, 71, 90 in, 89-90, 94, 150-52, 153, 225NII0O; Utterstr6m, Gudrun, 178 towns in, 178; wage labor in, 152—53,

248n148. See also Dalarna; Fostrar; Valdemar I, 4, 54

HAlsingland; Ostergotland; Valdemar’s Cadaster, 86 Sé6dermanland; Uppland; Vastergétland; Valhalla, 64, 210n118

Vastmanland Valla-Lj6ts saga, 134

Varangians, 46, 201n27

195n6oO Vassus, 29

Tacitus, Cornelius, 12, 22, 61, 157, 168, Varmland, 91, 138~39, 243n82

Taxes, 85, 89, 148, 149, 150—52, 155, Vastergotland: abolition of slavery in,

160—61, 224NI05 138—39; codification of law of

Tenants: and landowning peasants, 15 5— (Vastgotalagen}, 176; contempt for 56; as slaveholders, 20, 78; free, and slaves in law of, 102; dating of law of, serfs, 10, 27, 122, 145-55, 156; free, in 176—77; fostre in law of, 94; killing of Europe, 20, 24—25, 30-32, 34, 36, 70; slaves in law of, 102; manumission in free, in Scandinavia, 37, 87—88, 89—90, law of, 53, 131, 132; marriage in law of, 93, 94, I§1, 161; in Denmark, 148-50, 117; offenses by slaves in law of, 108, 223n96; in Iceland, 143—44; in Norway, 111; penal slavery in law of, 53; sale of 145—48, 217n51; in Roman Empire, 17— slaves in law of, 99, 100; slaves as 19, 154; in Sweden, 150—52, 153; rights witnesses in law of, 114; stewards in and obligations of, 32, 122, 161; terms law of, 93; wills freeing slaves in, 91;

for, 42. See also Coloni; Fostrar; women slaves in law of, 92, 94 Landbo; Leiglending; Peasants Vastmanland: children in law of Peow, as term, 30, 43, 197N9I (Vastmannalagen), 206n6o; codification

Por, 64 of law of, 152, 176, 206n6o0;

Pérstein Sidu-Hallsson, Dreams of, 58, compensation for slaves in law of, 102;

126, 208n89 dating of law of, 177; fostre in law of,

“Porsteins pattr uxafots,” 118, 134 94, 151; marriage in law of, 117;

Prell. See Thrall offenses by slaves in law of, 107, 141;

Thrall: as term, 1, 41-43, 44-45, 55, 120, terminology in law of, 44; wills freeing I21, 157, 189nq; as insult, 66. See also slaves in, 91, 39

Slave Vatnsdcela saga, 76 Prymslum. See Freedmen Verlinden, Charles, 13 Py, 43 Verriest, Léo, 24, 26 Pysun, 74 Viga-Gluims saga, 50, 81, 181 Thralldom, 1, 41. See also Slavery Verkstjéri. See Stewards

Translation, problems of, 30, 41, 71, Viking Age: Scandinavia in, 3, 62, 64, 69,

200N4, 24375 76-77, 82, 83-86, 88-89, 156, 169;

slavery in, 2, 46-47, 48—49, 63, 70, 72—

Ulsig, Erik, 87 73, 127, 134, 143, 157

Unfree, 44—45, 157. See also Slave; Thrall _Villanus, 24, 30. See also Serfdom;

Unfreedom, 5, 11, 25. See also Free-unfree Villeins

dichotomy; Freedom; Servitude; Villeinage. See Serfdom

Slavery Villeins: freedom of, 32—33; rights of, 35

Uppland: amelioration of slavery in law Villae, 16, 19, 20 of (Upplandslagen}, 138, 152; children Villicus: as term, 42; in Denmark, 93, in law of, 50—51, 139, 150, 244n86; 2230N96—-97, 227n131; in Sweden, 90, codification of law of, 178, 244n86; 92—93. See also Bryte; Stewards compensation for slaves in law of, 102— ~+Vinogradoff, Paul, 32, 34 03, 105, 107; dating of law of, 177—78; Visigoths. See Spain; Law: Visigothic

INDEX 309

Watson, Alan, 106 113, 131, 133, 134, 138, 141-42, 151; of Wealh, 30, 45 Absalon of Lund, 88, 120 Wergeland, Agnes M., 2 Wilson, David, 157 Wergeld. See Compensation Women slaves: as concubines, 73-76,

Wessén, Elias, 177, 178 115; in Denmark, 88; in Iceland, 81; in Wilde-Stockmeyer, Marlis, 2 Norway, 79-80; in Sweden, 102; William of Abelholt, Abbot, 48 sacrifice of, 71, 212n9; status of Williams, Car] O., 2-3, 118~19 children of, 73-76, 214n24, 215n27,

Willibrord, Saint, 47 237N116, 240n24; terms for, 43; trade

Wills: bequests in, 43; freeing children, in, 46—47. See also Children; Marriage 74; freeing stewards, 93, 117, 151;

manumission clauses in, 90-92, 100, Ynglinga saga, 61, 62, 125

.