Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds | Hacker News Reader

Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds

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The author of TFA and a few others like it is Marc Morris. To get his viewpoint at greater length, see his The Norman Conquest: The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England (2012).

Since at least the 19th century, there has been sharp controversy among English academics over whether the Norman invasion was a good or bad thing. Morris is strongly on the "good" side. For a view from the other direction, try the short and readable The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction by George Garnett (2009).

It's kind of weird to think of historians coming down on "good" and "bad" sides. But even if they do, it's hard to imagine anyone looking at the reign of William and saying "yeah that was awesome". At least from the point of view of the losers. I don't imagine even the slaves enjoyed the Harrying of the North.

"Mixed" seems reasonable. "Good" seems a lot to ask.

The day of William's coronation in London, Christmas Day 1066, the city was on edge. It had surrendered peacefully to William after he had slowly, systematically cut off every road to the city.

When the city people cried out in celebration at the new king William's men — being Normans, Bretons, Flemish and other continentals — did not understanding what was said in English. They misinterpreted the crowd as if they had assassinated William. Suddenly they attacked the townspeople and set fire to nearby houses.

The cries of alarm and the smell of acrid smoke could be heard and smelled from within the church as William was crowned king.

Eventually peace would be restored, but that moment was forever emblematic of the uneasy reign William would have over England.

A skeptical read would be that the economics of Norman style feudalism heavily relies on the peasants to work the land. Obviously you need the peasants to stay in their place. If all the warrior caste have the same perspective, you can't be carting off the population and selling them off overseas, without some major friction. And if you are trying to "take" some land from another warlord, it's not going to be very economical for you to sell off the peasants, cause then who is going to work the land?

The Normans were pretty harsh in their treatment of rebellious areas - the "Harrying of the North" being particularly brutal:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrying_of_the_North

Yeah but that region wasn't as economically important. And it had a critical problem where it was the border region with Scotland and a preferred entry point for the Danes. Depopulating the area makes sense from a medieval military perspective because invaders won't have crops and infrastructure to pull from as they transverse the region. Other states in this time period had similar state-directed depopulated areas on the border for the same reasons.

What are some other examples? That's such a fascinating practice. Was it done in the ancient world as well? What about in other places (Asia, Americas)?

Other folks may have more apt examples to share, but I would examine the history of Dacia and also the Sasanian fortification lines both east and west (but especially east) of the Caspian Sea -- both of which separated the empire from nomadic tribes of the steppe.

I believe these involved depopulated regions both north and south of the main defensive structures to allow harrying of invading forces while denying access to plundered resources.

Eventually, they were overcome by the Hephthalites (aka White Huns) following heavy Sasanian losses north of the limes in the AD 484 Battle of Herat, but it's interesting to note that the defensive structures separating southern 'civilization' from the steppe were considered a joint responsibility of the predominant (Roman/Sasanian) empires in spite of their generally being at war with each other, as the nomads were a shared threat.

Edit: Another great example is drawn from Caesar's description of Helvetian practices in his Gallic Wars; the Helvetians, a Germanic tribe located in modern Switzerland, had deliberately depopulated a wide area around their territory for defensive purposes.

Off the top of my head, China’s Great Clearance [1] and the Desert of the Duero in Spain [2]. IIRC the area north of Hadrian’s wall was also kept depopulated.

The Habsburg Military Frontier [3] could probably qualify too but the area was somewhat populated by soldier-settlers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Clearance

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repoblaci%C3%B3n

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Frontier

It was pretty common practice from ancient through to modern times for a resisting or rebellious population (especially a city) to be slaughtered or enslaved. A few examples would be the Roman massacres in Judea, the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols or the wars against Native Americans.

It was pretty common practice .. by some extremely aggressive groups .. from ancient through to modern times .. by war-like nations. Yes Romans.. not everyone did this worldwide. The world has been wounded repeatedly by the extreme brutality of some armed groups. It is simply false to ascribe this behavior to "pretty common" without distinction, and IMO makes the horrible into some kind of banality.

I would argue that the groups you label extremely aggressive were just the winners, and the other “less brutal” groups would have done the same thing if the boot was on the other foot.

yes, I am arguing that is exactly not the case

Right, but I was specifically asking about the practice of slaughtering/enslaving or otherwise depopulating an area specifically for the purpose of creating an economically/politically undesirable buffer zone against invaders.

The British did it to the Boers about a hundred years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War_concentration_...

tl;dr: "Genocide is good, actually."

I'd go slightly further than "pretty harsh". It was basically ethnic cleansing. Albeit an incomplete and fairly moderate one as these sorts of genocidal things go

A really thorough ethnic cleansing is generally more difficult without modern government structures and mass media to really gin up the hate: in Rwanda, ordinary Hutu slaughtered half a million Tutsi in three months -- 2/3 of the entire Tutsi population at the time -- and they did it with garden tools[1].

That kind of death used to take a standing army backed by decades, if not centuries, of training and discipline: Caesar's slaughter of the Helvetii is the first that comes to mind, maybe followed by the Qin wiping out the Song during China's Warring States period.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

Song was eliminated by Qi. I imagine you are referring to the Battle of Changping where the Qin buried 400,000 of Zhao’s surrendered armies.

A very interesting article, especially in that historians still aren't sure why war-based slavery died out completely in Britain in only 60 years -- between 1066 and 1120. You have to wonder if there was mostly an economic reason for it, like making more money from renting to serfs than owning them and having to house and upkeep them (as the article suggests). I can't believe the angels of lords' better natures was the catalyst. The uptake of Christianity thereabouts begat 800 years earlier with Charlemagne; that's a heck of a long gestation to develop a moral conscience.

Around 800 AD with Charlemagne. He was not 800 years before 1066, or even 1120.

Sorry. Meant Constantine (350 AD) -- far more significant to the rise of Christian morals than Charlemagne.

Um, Charlemagne was emperor from 800 to 828, only a bit more than 200 years earlier, not 800. Still plenty long enough though.

Well, they hadn't invented progress yet, there was no hurry.

The timeline overlaps with the Peace of God movement and the Gregorian reforms which legal historian Harold Berman calls the Papal Revolution in his book Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. Also coincides with the beginnings of renavatio that Charles Taylor mentions in A Secular Age. You could argue though that perhaps it took some time until the population fully Christianized; it is precisely in this time period we start seeing the use of familiar Biblical along with a set of standardized Germanic first names all across Europe while old Germanic naming conventions start to disappear.

Thanks for this Berman reference.

The article stated that Williams tutor urged him to end the sale of slaves. William complied and also made him archbishop.

I understand analysis of structural forces is a thing. But the great persons of history had a fair impact too.

> You have to wonder if there was mostly an economic reason for it, like making more money from renting to serfs than owning them and having to house and upkeep

You wouldn’t be enslaving your own peasant but rather buying foreigners or capturing people outside of your territory in raids etc.

If the slave populations were self-sustaining I’d assume just banning the slave trade would had a significant effect

> that's a heck of a long gestation to develop a moral conscience.

True, but there were many reformist movements around ~1000 AD and the church was finally able to assert its independence from secular authorities around that time. Before that it had somewhat limited power to force anyone to do anything so they just usually went along with stuff like slavery, polygamy etc. while occasionally criticizing it.

Promising an end to slavery is a great way to conquer a place. Napoleon followed the same game plan, and in a way, so did Lenin.

Can someone explain what the deal was with selling slaves to Ireland? It makes it seem like Ireland was some wealthy nation buying slaves.

Ireland had viking settlement activity in the 800s and 900s. Newly formed settlements/kingdoms were consumers of slaves to further develop. But also, maybe they were named simply because Irish viking rulers had close ties with York, and therefore, there was more trade between nearby and politically close viking kingdoms.

The local Irish had a long tradition of engaging in slave trade (and raiding) themselves, though e.g. St. Patrick

At the time, Ireland was indeed a wealthy country, having made its fortune selling leather to the Romans three centuries before, because the semi-nomadic Irish cultivated large herds of cattle roaming on unfenced plains, while the settled Britons kept sheep. This permitted the establishment of a culturally sophisticated Gaelic Order so stable that it was able to assimilate the invading Vikings and the first wave of Normans, who actually went native and began speaking the Irish language.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Irish_than_the_Irish_th...

Ireland was colonized by the vikings from the 8th century onward, who continued their long history of seaborne trade even after they abandoned the practice of raiding for which they are more famous. So they had the liquid wealth (primarily gold and silver) and the cultural willingness to acquire slaves. The viking settlements became the first large towns in Ireland, and supported the first sophisticated cash economy on the island capable of generating the liquidity for purchasing slaves from abroad. While the native Celtic Irish also had a history of slave-holding and raiding (see, e.g., the life of St. Patrick), they produced and held significantly less liquid wealth than the viking settlers and never established the large scale trading communities necessary for slave markets to emerge. As a result, pre-viking native Irish slavery did not involve large scale cash-based slave trading.

Also worth mentioning that the scale of the medieval British slave trade was likely small relative to the total populations of either England or Ireland, because it disproportionately consisted of the sale of young women as concubines. Note that there is a difference between the size of the enslaved population and the size of the slave trade. While as much as 30% of the population of Anglo-Saxon England may have been enslaved and the vast majority of those were economic slaves, only a small portion were ever bought or sold on the slave markets, and an even smaller portion sold to the foreign market.

There was simply less demand for purchasing economic slaves because Ireland did not have a robust cash economy for agricultural goods that would have generated the revenue necessary to acquire slaves. That is, acquiring economic slaves for cash only makes sense if those slaves can be used to generate further cash. Concubinage was an exception because in economic terms it is a form of consumption rather than investment. Economic slaves were more likely to be acquired via raiding or conquest, which effectively converts a surplus in defense spending into an economic investment.

Which isn't to say economic slaves weren't bought and sold, just that demand for them was weak and likely the trade only existed because acquiring them was a "free" byproduct for a seller who acquired them while conducting raids aimed at acquiring liquid wealth and potential concubines. As in, a viking group may have raided a village with the specific intent of seizing any valuables and young women, but figured that they might as well take the young men too because they could at least get something in exchange for them. Demand for agricultural economic slaves was low because the productivity of early medieval agricultural workers was extremely low. Once the Christian church turned against concubinage and extra-marital relationships in general, the demand for slaves disappeared, reducing the incentive to raid and thus the incidental production of economic slaves. Which is a corollary of the argument the OP article proposes for the decline in Norman slavery.

Bottom line, a relatively narrow class of wealthy traders and viking raiders in Ireland would have been purchasers in the slave markets, even though the country as a whole wasn't especially wealthy and did not need to be for the slave trade to exist.

The Normans were the great "levelers" of society. Yes, they may have raised up the slave, but they also deprived many others of their historical rights, say, of "sake and soke."

Sake was the right to hold low court on your own land.

Soke was the right to pay your taxes and infeudate yourself to the lord of your choice. There was an entire class of Anglo-Saxons known as "sokesmen." They practically disappeared overnight, historically-speaking.

Normans placed severe restrictions on your infeudation. None of this "I'll withhold my allegiance simply because my local baron is a tyrant" thing. Nope. Doesn't matter. Good, bad or evil, you owe your fealty to the local ruler.

So, while the Normans may have been a relief for the very, very bottom, they were very, very bad for the equivalent of the "middle class" of commoners.

but did "the middle class" exist back then?

I thought "middle class" arose out of the bourgeois class later on?

It's like when I realized that slaves under christianity were not horribly abused as they were part of the church but simply didn't own very many things

slavery became awuful around things like deciding black people were closer to animals so it was ok to exploit them but really they were competing, or rather, trying to keep up with steam-based looms which were much faster at processing cotton so pick that cotton faster *cracks whip *

If being raped, castrated or stoned to death was not horribly abused, I don't know what is.

> but did "the middle class" exist back then?

Not as we would recognize it today, but there were always merchants, craftsman and petty gentry that would have a measure of freedom and earning that serfs did not have the ability to achieve.

when I read Road to Wigan Pier I realized that the 20th Century British term "middle class" had an almost unrecognizable meaning compared to what Americans think of as "middle class"

So the first thing you need to figure out, to answer the question "did the middle class exist back then" is: which cultural definition of middle class are we even using to begin with?

What’s that definition?

I’ve always heard that it was the class in between the upper class/nobility, and the working class. That is, the class that isn’t able to just indefinitely stop working and sustain itself by things they own. But also isn’t living paycheck-to-paycheck and forced to work. Professionals in lucrative careers and successful small business owners. This makes more sense to me that the sort of typical misapplication to people around median income in the US.

Around median income is already a thing we have a name for (we can call it median income), and it tells us approximately nothing about their position in terms of labor relations or social class.

Working class people should unionize, they should band together to prevent exploitation. Middle class people don’t have to worry about exploitation, they can walk if they want to. They should form guilds and professional societies, to keep unqualified pretenders out of their fields.

"Middle class" is super-poorly defined. Marxists use it to mean petit bourgeoisie (ie people who own capital, plus professionals, so right from the start you have an anomaly, in that, say, a doctor is middle class even if they don't own anything; it's not purely capitalists). As you say Americans tend to use it to mean 'practically everybody'. The British definition has always been complex and is at this point probably complex enough that it's impossible to fully pin down; a huge part of it is _self-identification_ (there are plenty of British millionaires who consider themselves working class).

I mean, I kinda get it, if you want to retire in the US you probably need a million dollars at least (although, not just in the bank, spread throughout retirement funds and real estate). So I could see a working class millionaire. Technically a retiree is living off their wealth, but IMO that’s an edge case.

"Middle class" is often used as a translation of "bourgeoisie" from "bourgeois" which literally means "town dweller" ie. a city dweller.[0] It also means "someone who belongs to neither the aristocratic, clerical, nor military classes."[0] This distinction was useful because the Three Estates system grouped both city dwellers and peasants into a single class (the third estate).[1] Similarly the English word "middle class" was at one point used by Marxists to describe non-aristocratic, non-working class urbanites and equated middle class directly with "bourgeoisie."[2] This class included factory owners who could be richer than the average noble. Our modern usage of "middle class" would never include factory owners, bankers etc. but this definition did.

You end up with something like this:

Old: Nobles -> "Middle class" -> Peasants

Marxist: -> Nobles -> "Middle class" -> Working Class

In both of these, "middle class" means "Not a noble. Could be a rich merchant"

Modern: Rich -> "Middle class" -> Working class

Here, "middle class" means "Middle income. Owns a house or an expensive apartment." "Working class" is the common term used here but also includes people that do not work.

>Around median income is already a thing we have a name for (we can call it median income),

Nobody uses this term. For example, nobody would say they are a "median income" family. Additionally, not all of what people today would consider "working class" work for other people, and cannot join a union. For example, street vendors often do not make much money[3] and it does not make much sense to categorize them as "middle class" because they are not being exploited by their employer (as they have no employer). Unions exist for highly skilled jobs as well, such as air traffic controllers, which make $137,380 per year on average.[4][5] Defining "middle class" as someone who "doesn't need a union" (taking how to qualify that as given) also leaves open the question of what the "upper class" means in that scenario, being that we are not using income as the barometer for class in favor of union status. Would the street vendor be "upper class" if he had a worker? If anything, I would say we already have a term for what you are essentially describing: "unskilled labor." Unskilled laborers need unions more than skilled ones. This is a direct effect of unskilled laborers making less money due to lack of a marketable skill.

>it tells us approximately nothing about their position in terms of labor relations or social class.

It actually tells us a great deal about social class. People of similar incomes will live in their own neighborhood whether or not they have that money from being in a union or from a non union job (leaving the definition of that aside). It is all decided by income level. Living in a middle class suburb is a vastly different experience from living in an apartment in a poor neighborhood in the city.

Lastly, the "right" definition is not really important as much as explaining what you mean by that word when you use it. In the context of history, as in this article, the definition definitely matters.

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bourgeois#French

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estates_of_the_realm#Third_Est...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_class#History_and_evolu...

[3] https://hunterurbanreview.commons.gc.cuny.edu/the-smallest-o... - this article says the average salary for street vendors in NYC is $14,000 which I think is too low to be correct but I can imagine many are making less than average salary.

[4] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/transportation-and-material-moving/a...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Air_Traffic_Controlle...

You don't need to answer that, in fact, I explicitly handwaved it away. The question is - is there a class between the elites and the serfs, and the answer is always yes. There are always people that the elites need in order to operate a successful polity, but those people are not part of the ruling class.

Hot take: slavery was actually always awful.

Hard agree. It is true that being a slave in one culture is much better experience than others. But that’s only a matter of degree.

Example: You intentionally killed someone and are convicted of it. You have done a bad thing. The how and why only determines your sentence, not whether or not you committed a crime

> "the middle class"

I assume small landholders, yeomen etc. and such would be the equivalent of the middle class in such a society.

> slaves under christianity were not horribly abused as they were part of the church

I'm not sure that's strictly true. It of course varied by time and place and the Church tried to somewhat limit the worst abuse.

Also a clear workaround was to enslave infidels. Muslims enslaved Christians (and basically depopulate many coastal areas across the Mediterranean), in turn Christians were fine with enslaving Muslims (all though they didn't necessarily have that many opportunities) and East European pagans were fair game to everyone.

As an Eastern-European, I can definitely say that after year 1000 we were not pagans, but Christian-Ortodox, but it’s true that the Genoese and the Venetians trading us around the Black Sea called us “schismatics”, i.e. just one step above pagans.

> called us “schismatics”, i.e. just one step above pagans.

I guess technically it was a "hack" though, the Genoese bought anyone the Mongols were selling and shipped them to Egypt and other Muslim states without anyone back at home asking too many questions..

Until of course the Ottomans got right of the middle men and took over the slave trade themselves.

Depends which Eastern Europeans- Lithuania stayed pagan until the late 14th century, with some areas not being Christianised until the early 15th century.

Of course, the Lithuanians themselves might well say they're not Eastern European...

Wanted to add an aside about the Lithuanians and them not becoming Christian until the 1300s, but, as you said, some Lithuanians themselves might have said that they're not Eastern-Europeans :)

Why would they? They're Balts, and quite homogenously so. Their ancestors were likely centered a bit further East, but not that far out. And their language appears to have split off from a common ancestor of the the Slavic languages.

This is certainly a popular modern narrative.

As I read, this is pretty much what the article says. The very very bottom may have been as many as 30 % of the total population.

I was clarifying because the word "sokesman" doesn't appear in the article.

Nor does "cottar/cotter [cotarius/cotarii]" nor "bordar [bordarius/bordarii]" nor even "villein [villanus/villani]." There are a many levels of commoners in Domesday, almost all of whom suffered greatly under the Norman yoke.

Estimates vary, but...

35% of Domesday population were villeins

30% cotters and bordars

12% freeholders

~5% burghers (townspeople)

Which would leave ~20% at maximum to be slaves (servii).

>‘I prohibit the sale of any man by another outside of the country,’ says the ninth law of William the Conqueror

preventing "hands drain" so to speak. They did Doomsday book, kind of stabilized the land ownership and revenue/taxes extraction based on it, and the land needs hands to produce the revenue.

I really want to send the author to, say, Saudi Arabia to lobby for erecting slavery memorials.

I wonder how colloquial "scumbags" is in the translation from norman english.

Isn't this a quite common pattern in history repeating itself? Including the reaction of the historians, to gloss over it?

The pattern that, a cohort of a society that under previous rule didn't have any right nor representation, acquire that as a side-effect during invasion of competing faction. Often under brutal circumstances, but the effect can be clearly seen if you how a society change during such over-hauling effect.

Japans invasion of South-east Asia comes to mind. Mostly for their own benefit, installing puppet-government, but it seems to be a contributing factor to decolonization of SEA of European influence. Depending on the source you read, this is probably glossed over to great deal.

I assume you can probably find similar cases in places like Spain (Reconquest), Christianization of East/North Europe, Islamic conquest of Middle East/Indus etc.

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