Читать книгу Slaves and Englishmen - Michael Guasco - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

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The Nature of a Slave: Human Bondage in Early Modern England

Such as have made forfeit of themselves

By vicious courses, and their birthright lost

’Tis not injustice they are marked for slaves.¹

In late 1583 Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s principal secretary, dispatched a thirty-year-old Oxford cleric named Richard Hakluyt to France to search out information that could be used to promote royal support for the development of English colonies abroad. Walsingham, who had been a backer of Martin Frobisher’s voyages of discovery during the 1570s and would give aid to John Davis during the 1580s, was one among a growing number of luminaries who believed that England needed to accelerate its overseas activities. Elizabethan England faced an array of challenges. Nearby, colonization efforts in Ireland had recently entered a much more violent stage as the English struggled to put down a series of local rebellions, particularly those that had plagued the Munster Plantation during the previous fifteen years. England’s northern frontier was hardly more secure as the apparent machinations of Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Catholic allies encouraged the view that Elizabeth’s grasp on the throne was tentative, at best. The Catholic threat to Tudor rule in England was especially vivid across the English Channel, where thousands of Protestants had recently been killed by rampaging Catholic mobs during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572. The revolt of Dutch Calvinists against the Spanish Habsburgs may have loomed even larger as English shipping and, especially, its woolen industry were hamstrung by a surge in piracy and the closing of traditional trading ports like Antwerp. And, of course, there was Spain, with whom England would soon enough be at war because of all of these things. Walsingham was but one among many English leaders who believed that England was endangered and it was therefore with a great sense of urgency and a desire to ensure England’s very survival that he commanded Hakluyt to learn all he could about the world beyond the western horizon.²

Despite outward appearances, Hakluyt was an obvious choice for the job. As the namesake of his older and more renowned cousin, young Hakluyt was already connected to a group of people urging the nation to take a more active role in the Americas and throughout the world. During the 1570s, he had begun to gather information about the Northwest Passage from foreign authorities, including the celebrated mapmakers Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator. In 1581, Hakluyt engaged both Walsingham and Sir Francis Drake, who had only recently returned from his circumnavigation, in discussions about establishing a lectureship in navigation. A year later, he made an even bigger mark when he published Divers Voyages Touching the Discovery of America, a collection of accounts edited and translated by Hakluyt himself designed to promote overseas colonization.³ Hakluyt may have been working in the shadows of other writers, translators, and editors, such as Richard Eden and Richard Willes, and may not have been as celebrated as some of his contemporaries, such as John Dee and Sir Philip Sidney, but he was nonetheless a man on the rise.⁴

Upon returning from his fact-finding mission in 1584, Hakluyt sat down and composed “A particuler discourse concerninge the greate necessitie and manifolde commodyties that are like to growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne discoveries lately attempted” or, as it is more commonly known, “A Discourse of Western Planting.” Hakluyt’s “Discourse,” which he presented to Walsingham and Queen Elizabeth in October, precisely detailed the need for a more comprehensive overseas policy based on the acquisition and settlement of permanent colonies in the Americas. He claimed that colonization was the only way to stem the tide of Spanish expansionism, that it would project Protestant Christianity into a region where the Catholic Church presently exercised a spiritual monopoly, and that it would generate innumerable economic and demographic rewards. Central to Hakluyt’s argument was the idea that North American colonies would be the engine of England’s rise to national greatness, just as overseas conquests had aided Spain’s emergence as a global power during the previous century.

Considering Spain and Portugal’s grip on the Americas, just how England could dislodge the Catholic powers would seem to have been problematic. Not so, Hakluyt argued. The secret, he suggested, lay not simply in English power but in the inherent weaknesses in Spanish colonial policies characterized by “more then barbarous and savage endeles cruelties.” Rehashing a litany of accusations, largely drawn (often verbatim) from Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevíssima relación de la destruyción de las yndias (1552), which had been translated and published in English as The Spanish Colonie in 1583, Hakluyt claimed that a “people kepte in subjection desire nothinge more then freedome. And like as a little passage geven to water it maketh his own way, so give but a small meane to such kepte in tyranie, they will make their own way to libertie, which way may easely be made.” Because Spain ruled “the Indies with all pride and tyranie,” Indians and Africans would “joyne with us or any other moste willinglye to shake of[f] their moste intollerable yoke.” Indeed, they “have begonne to doo yt already in divers places where they were lordes heretofore.” With English encouragement to help root out their oppressors, it would be “like as when people of contrarie nature at the sea enter into Gallies, where men are tied as slaves, all yell and crye with one voice liberta, liberta, as desirous of libertie & freedomme.” Because the Spanish could only lay claim during their tenure to have “exercised moste outragious and more then Turkishe cruelties in all the West Indies,” and future English colonialism would be characterized by “humanitie, curtesie, and freedomme,” a foreign policy premised on the establishment of English colonies in the Americas could only succeed.⁵

Hakluyt’s references here to the brutality of the Spanish conquest have subsequently become familiar elements of the notorious Black Legend and a predictable part of a document that was drafted at a time when so many Englishmen believed that their lives and liberties were imperiled.⁶ Less familiar are his uses of the language of slavery, galleys, Turkish cruelties, and the intolerable yoke of bondage. But as striking as Hakluyt’s choice of words may seem in retrospect, they were unremarkable for the period and likely would not have confused English readers had this private document been distributed more widely. Indeed, Hakluyt could toss about references to these different forms of human bondage without explanation because he understood that both his immediate audience and the English public at large had well-formed and often quite sophisticated ideas about slavery. A few prescient souls were able to perceive the developing plantation system on the horizon, involving as it did a commitment to chattel slavery, but few people living at the time thought about slavery as a labor system or a way of organizing human populations in terms of superficial phenotypical categories. Both the received wisdom of the ages and contemporary experience suggested that slavery could manifest itself in a variety of ways and that it was a characteristic feature in many parts of the world. It was hardly shocking, then, when Hakluyt claimed that Spanish America was besotted by slavery.

Slavery, for all intents and purposes, was alive and well in England even if actual slaves were hard to find. Slavery lived in England’s most important texts: the Christian Bible, where bondage was both a defining spiritual theme and an acknowledged historical condition, and the classical works being read in both Latin and newly fashionable English translations by England’s educated elite. Slavery also existed in English society as a contemporary social issue that manifested itself, variously, in the lingering vestiges of manorial villeinage, in intermittent proposals to expand galley slavery, and even as a practical solution to a range of social ills that plagued the nation. Thus, when English men and women wrote or talked about slavery, when they heard references to it from the pulpit or from government officials, they were not necessarily inclined to dream up something far off, foreign, or characterized by groups of people whose race, nation, ethnicity, or religion set them apart. Instead, slavery made Englishmen think, and worry, about themselves as individuals and a nation whose personal liberty and collective autonomy hung in the balance.

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Sixteenth-century Englishmen liked to claim that they were uniquely free, yet slavery was undoubtedly an integral part of their national story. In particular, the idea of slavery resonated in English religious and intellectual circles. Indeed, it would have been difficult to avoid the issue, if only because slavery pervaded the nation’s most ubiquitous text, the Christian Bible. Literate English men and women may have been especially aware of the specific contents of the Bible as a result of the publication of the Geneva Bible in English in 1560.⁷ The Geneva Bible was laced with references to slaves and slavery and established human bondage as an apt metaphor for the complete submission of humankind and particular individuals to God. Throughout the book of Exodus, one could read of the children of Israel who “sighed for the[ir] bondage and cryed” (2:23) in an Egypt so miserable and cruel that when Moses told them that Yahweh would free them of their burdens and lead them to a better place they could not listen, “for anguish of spirit & for cruel bondage” (Exodus 6:9). But even as the Bible could be read as a story of liberation, of God freeing his chosen people from slavery, the Old Testament also granted tacit justification for the legality of human bondage, provided it conformed to certain religious precepts. The book of Leviticus, for example, made it clear that slaves should come from foreign nations and that “ye shal take them as inheritance for your children after you, to possesse them by inheritance, ye shal use their labours for ever: but over your brethren the children of Israel ye shal not rule one over another with crueltie” (Leviticus 25:44–46).⁸ The New Testament, particularly the letters of Paul, also endorsed slavery as a legitimate human institution and contained injunctions that upheld the status quo, such as the assertion that slaves must “counte their masters worthie of all honour, that the Name of God, and his doctrine be not evil spoken of” (1 Timothy 6:1).⁹ Resistance to earthly slavery, in this instance, was an affront to God.

Other often-cited religious authorities similarly elaborated on the subject of slavery. Most notably, within the Christian tradition, theologians debated whether either the condition or the institution of slavery was natural. St. Augustine of Hippo’s conception of slavery as a consequence of man’s fall from a state of innocence was typical of the views expressed by the early church fathers and those who followed them during the first millennium. In the City of God, a work first published in English in 1610, Augustine recounted that, before man’s fall from a state of grace, God made man “reasonable,” and wished for human beings to rule “onely over the unreasonable, not over man, but over beastes.” Servitude was only subsequently “layde upon the backe of transgression. And therefore in all the scriptures wee never reade the word, Servant, untill such time as that just man Noah … layd it as a curse upon his offending sonne. So that it was guilt, and not nature that gave originall unto that name.” Slavery, in Augustine’s schema, was brought upon mankind not by God’s design but by man’s actions. Slavery was therefore a natural condition insofar as human beings no longer lived in a world of God’s original design.¹⁰

The centerpiece of Augustine’s explanation for slavery—the “transgression” to which he referred—was Noah’s curse. According to Genesis 9:21–27, as it appeared in the 1560 edition of the Bible, Noah became intoxicated on the ark and “was uncovered in ye middes of his tent. And when Ham the father of Canaan sawe the nakednes of his father, he tolde his two brethren without. Then toke Shem and Japeth a garment and put it upon bothe their shulders and went backward, and covered the nakednes of their father.” When Noah awoke “from his wine, and knewe what his yonger sonne had done unto him” he said “Cursed be Canaan: servant of servantes shall he be unto his brethren. He said moreover, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant.” In case there was any doubt about the severity of the punishment, a marginal notation was attached to the phrase “servant of servantes” reading: “That is, a moste vile slave.”¹¹

Whether St. Augustine’s work was read widely in England, his characterization of slavery as a product of sinfulness remained the dominant strain of thought within Christian theology for more than a thousand years and Augustine continued to influence English theologians well into the seventeenth century.¹² Western Europeans also leaned heavily on secular sources. In the twelfth century, Europeans famously rediscovered Aristotle’s Politics, a work that was subsequently influential in the thirteenth-century writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, who incorporated many of Aristotle’s ideas into Christian thought. Aristotle’s treatment of the subject of slavery in his Politics, ultimately translated into English from an older French source, was therefore doubly important in early modern England. Here, readers could learn that slavery was not only natural, it was part of a “universal natural pattern” in which those with the capacity to reason should rule over those whose “function is the use of their bodies and nothing better can be expected of them.” Aristotle even declared that it was “nature’s purpose to make the bodies of free men to differ from those of slaves, the latter strong enough to be used for necessary tasks, the former erect and useless for that kind of work, but well suited for the life of a citizen of the state.”¹³

Working within the confines of Augustinian doctrine, Aquinas maintained the presumption that slavery could not have existed before the Fall, yet he allowed that natural disparities existed among individuals based on sex, age, strength, and wisdom. Aquinas believed that “the condition of men in the state of nature was not more honourable than the condition of the angels. Yet among the angels some lord over others.” Hierarchy and dominion almost certainly existed in a state of nature, something repeatedly urged in Tudor sermons on the ever popular theme of obedience.¹⁴ Therefore, the emergence of full-fledged slavery and mastery, much less dependency and bondage, in the post-lapsarian world could only be viewed as a logical extension of things and not necessarily inconsistent with, much less contrary to, natural design. In rationalizing the legitimacy of slavery this way, Aquinas challenged Roman and earlier Christian ideas, both of which suggested that slavery was inconsistent with natural law. Aquinas therefore lined up much more closely with Aristotle in his assertion that slavery was in accord with what he called the second intention of nature and that it ultimately benefited both masters and slaves.¹⁵

The influence of the Bible and Christian thought clearly shaped the meaning of slavery throughout Tudor and early Stuart society, even as they often did so on the continent as well. Nonetheless, other intellectual reference points shaped English society’s ideas and attitudes about slavery, many of which tended to characterize slavery as commonplace but not necessarily a product of natural law. Most elite Englishmen, for example, including not only many gentry and professionals but also a few of the “middling sort,” were remarkably well-informed about human bondage through their university or grammar school education in the classics. Legal and political slavery were important themes in the writings of Sallust and Cicero, whose works were routinely used in the instruction of Latin.¹⁶ Livy’s Romane Historie and Tacitus’s Germania were also fundamental and popular reference sources for English knowledge about classical slavery. Indeed, both works were laced with references to slaves performing mundane tasks; they considered how people fell into a state of bondage or, in Livy’s case, might be manumitted, and they commented on the propriety of slavery as an institution. Significantly, they were not available only in their original language; these works also underwent English translations near the end of Elizabeth’s reign, which allowed the texts to reach an even wider audience.¹⁷

For educated Englishmen—a small but rapidly growing cohort in the last decades of the sixteenth century—the essence of classical slavery was contained in the Roman Digest, a collection of legal writings compiled by the Roman Emperor Justinian during the sixth century. Here readers could discover the rather straightforward convention that there were three classes of men: “free men, and set against those slaves and the third class, freedmen, that is, those who had stopped being slaves.” These categories, however, were a product of civil society. Roman law was premised on the idea that slavery was legitimate insofar as it could be legalized, but it was also essentially unnatural. Thirteenth-century jurist Henri de Bracton [Henry of Bratton] articulated this idea clearly when he wrote that servitude was “an institution of the jus gentium, by which, contrary to nature, one person is subjected to the dominion of another.” By this logic, the bondman could actually be a free man because “with respect to the jus gentium they are bonds, [but] free with respect to the jus naturale.” Educated Englishmen, whose knowledge of bondage had been primarily informed by Latin texts, therefore were instructed with the idea (and presumably accepted) that the essence of slavery involved being in potestate domini, in the possession of another. The Roman Digest also encouraged the view that, although human bondage was against nature (i.e., it could not exist in a perfect world), it could be justified under the law and reasonably applied in appropriate circumstances. Fundamentally, then, it was an idea of slavery that had nothing to do with harsh physical treatment, essential or superficial differences in character or appearance, or labor demands.¹⁸

The Roman Digest was also central to emerging English, and broader European, conceptions of freedom. According to Roman law, “Manumission means sending out of one’s hand, that is, granting freedom. For whereas one who is in slavery is subjected to the hand (manus) and power of another, on being sent out of hand he is freed of that power. All of which originated from the jus gentium, since, of course, everyone would be born free by the natural law, and manumission would not be known when slavery was unknown.”¹⁹ From this perspective, freedom was incomprehensible without reference to its antithesis in history, law, and social status. All free humans were therefore more accurately termed “freed” humans in recognition of the larger and longer history of human bondage out of which the much more recent innovations, such as the concepts of freedom and liberty, emerged.²⁰

The idea that slavery was an unnatural condition, a product of the law of man rather than the law of nature, was also supported in other popular contemporary texts. The French political theorist Jean Bodin, for one, provided a clear analysis of both the history and the inherent problems of slavery in his Six Bookes of a Commonweale, a work that first appeared in England in 1606. Bodin was concerned with whether slavery could exist in a commonwealth or, to be more specific, whether a commonwealth could endure as long as it condoned slavery. Like a growing number of authors of his day, Bodin’s treatment began with the Aristotelian conclusion that slavery was natural. Bodin, however, contrasted this view with the contention that lawyers, “who measure the law not by the discourses or decrees of Philosophers, but according to the common sense and capacitie of the people, hold servitude to be directly contrarie unto nature.” He acknowledged that slavery appeared at first glance to be natural, based on its ancient and seemingly universal history, but slavery was also fundamentally irrational. For example, slavery “is well agreeing unto nature” when a strong, ignorant man yields his obedience unto a wise and feeble man. But what could be more unnatural than for “wise men to serve fools, men of understanding to serve the ignorant, and the good to serve the bad?”²¹ This possibility elicited some of the strongest language a century earlier in Thomas More’s Utopia when he ridiculed the idea that “a lumpyshe blockhedded churle” with “no more wytte than an asse” could possess “manye wyse and good men in subjection and bondage” simply because he was wealthy. Conversely, give gold “to the moste vile slave and abject dryvell of all his housholde, then shortly after he shal go into the service of his servaunt.”²² If slavery were theoretically natural, then, it could manifest itself in a fashion that ran contrary to nature.

Theological, philosophical, and legal treatises kept slavery alive in the minds of many early modern Englishmen, but they tell us little on their own about slavery’s resonance in contemporary society. What gave these printed sources real significance, then, was the conviction that slavery, natural or otherwise, was not simply an abstract consideration. Englishmen believed they could speak with authority about human bondage, in part, because it was an important piece of their national story. In 1576 the English cleric William Harrison was commissioned to write a Description of Britain for Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Ireland.²³ Harrison’s task was to provide a historical overview of England and Scotland down to 1066, and the story he had to tell was nothing short of a catalog of successive waves of invasion, violence, and subjugation. “Manie sorts of people,” he claimed, “have come in hither and settled themselves here in this Ile.” The island’s first inhabitants were “a parcell of the linage and posteritie of Japhet, brought in by Samothes [1,910 years] after the creation of Adam.” After several hundred years, “Albion the giant … repaired hither with a companie of his owne race proceeding from Cham” and reduced Japhet’s descendants “into miserable servitude and most extreame thraldome.” The giants of Albion were subsequently conquered by “Brute the sonne of Sylvius with a great traine of the posteritie of the dispersed Trojans…” The Romans came next, and “with them came all maner of vice and vicious living, all riot and excesse of behaviour into our countrie.” The Scots, “a people mixed of the Scithian and Spanish blood” who were “given to the eating of mans flesh,” also plagued Britain around the time of Christ. The Saxons soon followed, having been “sent for by Vortiger” in the fifth century “to serve him in his warres against the Picts” (a people about whom Harrison claimed to know little except that “they were setled in this Ile long before the time of Severus, yea of Caesar”). In time, the Saxons managed to get “possession of the whole, or at the leastwise the greatest part of our countrie; the Britons in the meane season being driven either into Wales and Cornewall, or altogither out of the Iland to seeke new habitations.”

Matters hardly improved during the eleventh century, Harrison observed, when the Danes and Norman French descended on the British Isles. The Danes, who invaded Britain under the leadership of Canute in 1015, were characterized by their “lordlinesse, crueltie, and insatiable desire of riches, beside their detestable abusing of chast[e] matrons, and young virgins (whose husbands and parents were daile inforced to become their drudges and slaves …).” In their wake came the Normans, “a people mixed with Danes” who “were so cruellie bent to our utter subversion and overthrow, that in the beginning it was lesse reproch to be accounted a slave than an Englishman, or a drudge in anie filthie businesse than a Britaine.” Harrison lamented: “Oh how miserable was the estate of our countrie under the French and Normans, wherein the Brittish and English that remained, could not be called to any function in the commonwealth… Oh what numbers of all degrees of English and Brittish were made slaves and bondmen, and bought and sold as oxen in open market!” The ancient Britons were particularly devastated. Had not Edward the Confessor, the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king of England, “permitted the remnant of their women to joine in mariage with the Englishmen … their whole race” would have died off and “thereby the memorie of the Britons utterlie have perished among us.”²⁴

Harrison’s work was emblematic of the patriotic zeal increasingly evident in the historical works being produced by sixteenth-century Englishmen. Tudor and Stuart scholars believed that an ancient and honorable past was a critical part of their collective effort to characterize England as a great and free nation. Harrison’s story reveals, however, that it was difficult to determine what exactly constituted the core of the English or British past. Should Tudor Englishmen emphasize that the first inhabitant of their island was a grandson of Noah (Samothes) or the son of Neptune (Albion)? Perhaps there was more honor in Brutus, reputedly the grandson of Aeneas and liberator of enslaved Trojans? What about the Anglo-Saxons and Norman French? Each group offered a way of establishing the antiquity and greatness of the English nation by linking England directly with a Bibilical, Greek, or Roman past.²⁵ However scholars may have gone about their historical reconstructions, though, there seemed to be no denying that subjugation, captivity, and slavery were integral components of England’s national story.

If slavery was part of England’s past, as Harrison’s narrative suggested, it also appeared in a number of guises during the early modern era, including the defining religious conflict of the time. The English cleric and ardent nationalist John Bale liked to imagine that England was the new Holy Land in his attacks on the Roman church. He censured Catholic bishops and characterized the English as a people “cruelly enslaved by the tyrannical papists, who made them suffer far more than the Israelites did when enslaved by Pharoah.” In his anti-French tract, the English bishop John Aylmer prayed that the God who defended his children of Israel from their enemies might “defend us from the slavery and misery of that proude nacyon, that cruel people, and tiranous rulers.”²⁶ Slavery also factored into the overheated rhetoric generated by English patriots in their struggles against the continental Catholic powers. During the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), Elizabeth rallied her nation by warning that Spain and the papacy were preparing to invade England and to “overthrow our most happy estate and flourishing commonweal, and to subject the same to the proud, servile and slavish government of foreigners and strangers.” Worse still, Elizabeth suggested, the pope was plotting to incite the English “to betray and yield themselves, their parents, kindred, and children … to be subjects and slaves to aliens and strangers.” The conflict between England and Spain, between Protestants and Catholics, was easily couched as a struggle between freedom and slavery and it fed into the notion that the English were, ipso facto, antislavery.²⁷

References to human bondage in religious and political contexts could not have had the same rhetorical force without the myths of English freedom and the struggle against enslavement that pervaded competing versions of English history. Indeed, one argument for the resiliency of the so-called “British History”—the mythohistorical narrative that identified England’s forebears with ancient Greece—was that it lent credence to the assertion that the English were God’s chosen people. Like the biblical Jews, the British History emphasized that the English nation had emerged from a state of bondage in the Mediterranean and had continued to struggle against re-enslavement ever since the arrival of the English in Albion. As the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth told the story, Brutus had led the enslaved Trojans against their Greek captors. Their decision to resist entailed great hardship, but the Trojans preferred to “have their liberty, rather than remain under the yoke of … slavery, even if pampered there by every kind of wealth.” In the poet Michael Drayton’s panegyric to the “God-like Brute … of the race of Troy,” the hero returned to Greece only to find his Trojan cousins enslaved and

there, by Pandrasus kept, in sad and servile awe. Who when they knew young Brute, & that brave shape they saw, They humbly him desire, that he a meane would bee, From those imperious Greeks, his countrymen to free.²⁸

Geoffrey’s History can be read as a narrative retelling of the ongoing struggle of a people, of ancient and noble heritage, to resist the efforts of successive waves of enemies to enslave them. Geoffrey devoted significant attention to Julius Caesar, who is said to exclaim that “[t]hose Britons come from the same race as we do, for we Romans are descended from Trojan stock… All the same, unless I am mistaken, they have become very degenerate when compared with us.” When Caesar demanded the capitulation of the Britons, however, King Cassivelaunus refused on the grounds that to do so would signal an end to British liberty and freedom, in both the political and physical meanings of the terms. And in a dramatic statement of defiance, the king of the Britons (or, perhaps more accurately, Geoffrey) rebuked Caesar, asserting that “[i]t is friendship which you should have asked of us, not slavery. For our part we are more used to making allies than to enduring the yoke of bondage. We have become so accustomed to the concept of liberty that we are completely ignorant of what is meant by submitting to slavery.” Eventually, of course, the Britons were overawed, but not before they repelled the Romans on two separate occasions. For this, Geoffrey lauded England’s ancestors, who “went on resisting the man whom the whole world could not withstand. They were ready to die for their fatherland and for their liberty.”²⁹ Subsequently, during Arthur’s reign, Geoffrey characterizes Roman efforts in battle as “their utmost [effort] to deprive you of your freedom.” “No doubt,” Arthur contends, “they imagined, when they planned to make your country pay them tribute and to enslave you yourselves, that they would discover in you the cowardice of Eastern peoples.” Thus, Arthur’s many victories were not simply evidence of English martial valor or courage. Arthur’s victories were cast by Geoffrey as a defense of English liberty and part of the ongoing struggle to prevent the (re)enslavement of Englishmen by foreign powers.³⁰

The anti-slavery theme of Geoffrey’s History continued to operate in later works written in the tradition of the British History, especially in accounts of the Norman Conquest and the reign of King John. Perhaps one of the more well-known traditions of this era was the equation of William the Conqueror’s rise to power with the imposition of the Norman Yoke. The English antiquarian and historian William Camden, although he questioned many aspects of the British History, lauded Britons’ resistance to bondage once they were confined to Wales, where “with like honour of fortitude, for many hundred years repelled the yoke of both the English and Norman slavery.” Antiquarian William Lambarde, among others, associated specific regions of England with freedom and the Conquest. Lambarde wrote in his Perambulation of Kent that the common people were no “more free, and jolly” than in Kent because “Kent was never vanquished by the Conquerour, … [and] there were never any bondmen … in Kent.” Lambarde also cited the medieval contention that “it is holden sufficient for a man to avoide the objection of bondage, to say, that his father was born in the Shyre of Kent.”³¹ And, on the theme of Kentish liberty, Michael Drayton wrote:

O noble Kent, quoth he, this praise doth the belong, The hard’st to be controld, impatientest of wrong. Who, when the Norman first with pride and horror sway’d, Threw’st off the servile yoke upon the English lay’d; And with a high resolve, most bravely didst restore That liberties so long enjoy’d before. Not suffring forraine Lawes should thy free Customes bind, Then onely showd’st thy selfe of th’ ancient Saxon kind. Of all the English Shires be thou surnam’d the Free, And formost ever plac’t, when they reckned bee.³²

The British History was well known and often cited in sixteenth-century England, but a growing number of historians and antiquarians, like Camden, questioned its veracity. Based on linguistic and other documentary evidence, a competing “Anglo-Saxon History” emerged that offered a somewhat different but certainly no less heroic story about the relationship between the English nation and human bondage. Anglo-Saxonists rooted the English past in northern Europe rather than in Greece. With Tacitus as his guide, William Camden extolled English freedoms by recounting how, while the Roman period witnessed the enslavement of the British to Roman invaders, “Germany had shaken off the yoke of obedience, and yet were defended by a river only, and not by the Ocean.” To be sure, ancient Britons stood up against the Romans who had kept them as “captives and slaves” and “vowed to recover and resume their liberty.”³³ But even more honor could be found among Anglo-Saxon forebears, who had not only put up a good fight but also had triumphed in their efforts to remain free. Unlike the Britons, who had been conquered by the Romans, the Anglo-Saxonist Richard Verstegan remembered, Germans “were never subdued by any, for albeit the Romans with exceedingly great cost, losse & long trooble, might come to bee the comaunders of some parte thereof; yet of the whole never.”³⁴

Whether ancient Britons had been enslaved or Anglo-Saxons had always been free, the moral of these stories remained the same: “The nature of our nation is free, stout, haultaine, prodigall of life and bloud,” boasted Sir Thomas Smith in the 1560s, “contumelie, beatings, servitude and servile torment and punishment it will not abide.” William Harrison echoed Smith in his preface to Holinshed’s Chronicles by claiming that Englishmen cherished freedom to such a degree that they would sooner suffer death than “yield our bodies unto such servile halings and tearings as are used in other countries.” For this reason, Harrison claimed, “our condemned prisoners [go] cheerfully to their deaths, for our nation … cannot in any wise digest to be used as villeins and slaves, in suffering continually beating, servitude, and servile torments.” Englishmen detested slavery so much, Harrison added, that “if any [slaves] came hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they become so free of condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterly removed from them.”³⁵ As far as English patriots were concerned, there was no overstating the case: one could not be both English and a slave, England was the fountainhead of liberty, and where there was England, there could be no slavery.

English scholars may have disagreed on the particulars, but their collective effort to chart the history of England contributed to a language of slavery and a broader understanding of human bondage in early modern England. Competing arguments continued to circulate about whether slavery was an institution buttressed by natural law, as the Aristotelian tradition would have it, or the law of man, as the Roman Digest characterized the situation. However, Englishmen uniformly celebrated their national rejection of slavery and liked to claim that England itself was enlivened by the struggle against slavery. But just how widely did these ideas circulate? Historical and antiquarian writings could inform popular conceptions of human bondage to a limited degree.³⁶ Therefore, how people may have developed thoughts about slavery, including both what it meant to be a slave and what slavery entailed for a society as a whole, must be conceptualized beyond the important but limited confines of religious and intellectual traditions.

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Whatever rhetoric existed about the sacrosanct freedoms of Englishmen, there was a remarkable disparity between the pious proclamations made for public and transnational consumption and social practice in English cities and the countryside. The mythological freeborn Englishman who would rather suffer death than endure bondage actually inhabited a society where human bondage was perpetuated by conscious design. Indeed, just as Tudor Englishmen were increasingly inclined to insist that they were unique in both a global and European context in their commitment to liberty, there was a perceptible rise in the incidences of human bondage within England and some serious discussion that the nation could benefit from the application of certain kinds of slavery in unique circumstances.

If slavery was rare in Tudor England, it had been much more common in earlier eras. As late as the eleventh century, at least 25,000 slaves, roughly 10 percent of the total population, could be found scattered throughout England.³⁷ In certain counties, such as Cornwall and Gloucester, the number of slaves was significant, perhaps comprising more than 20 percent of the population. Even so, it is difficult to argue that the plight of slaves in medieval England was exceptionally harsh. The use of slaves (nativi or servi) in agricultural labor had been common throughout the medieval period, yet the social and economic status of slaves in England does not appear to have been all that different from the lower orders of free society (the villani, bordarii, and cotarii). Human bondage may therefore have been an even more galling issue to the English because they were a favored target for slave traders during the medieval period. The future St. Patrick, who was born in southwestern England, was famously taken and sold into slavery in Ireland while still a teenager. The Venerable Bede, writing in the eighth century, reported that the soon-to-be Pope Gregory the Great was first introduced to Englishmen in a Roman slave market when he came across “some boys put up for sale, with fair complexions, handsome faces, and lovely hair” who identified themselves as Britons. William of Malmesbury, a twelfth-century Benedictine monk and historian, recorded that some medieval English rulers were “in the habit of purchasing companies of slaves in England, and sending them into Denmark; more especially the girls, whose beauty and age rendered them more valuable.” In the northern regions, according to eleventh- and twelfth-century English chroniclers, “whoever seemed suitable for work” by invading Scots, was “driven bound before the enemy” and “Scotland was filled with English slaves.”³⁸

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, largely as a result of long-term economic, social, and religious transformations, Anglo-Norman lords unfettered their enslaved plowmen and oxherds.³⁹ Similarly, the practice of preying on English men and women to serve as slaves in foreign lands also diminished. Nonetheless, a perpetual and an inheritable unfree status continued to characterize the lives of many of the lower orders of late medieval English society. Rather than liberating their slaves outright, masters simply reclassified many of their bondmen as serfs.⁴⁰ Parallel to this transition from slavery to serfdom was the simultaneous reduction in status under the law of a group of people categorized as free in the Domesday Book at the end of the eleventh century—the villani. Serfdom and villeinage, terms often imprecisely used interchangeably, actually have distinct points of origin in the English past. Serfs, in general, were the descendants of enslaved peoples from the Conquest Era (those listed as nativi, or the unfree by birth, in the Domesday Book). Thus, although the medieval legal scholar Andrew Horn characterized villeins rather innocuously in the late fourteenth century as “cultivators of the fee, dwelling in upland villages,” he pitied the plight of serfs who, as “servi a servando,” could not own anything in their own name—“they do not know in the evening what service they will do in the morning, and there is nothing certain in their services. The lords may put them in fetters and in the stocks, may imprison, beat and chastise them at will, saving their lives and limbs.” If legal slavery perished in medieval England, then, human bondage involving physical and psychological coercion, as well as other traditional characteristics of unfreedom, persisted.⁴¹

Although some observers continued to emphasize distinctions between the originally free villeins and the serfs who descended from slaves, these subtleties became increasingly irrelevant as the customary exactions of legal unfreedom were applied to both groups in the late medieval period. Even in Horn’s lifetime, English lords expected villeins to labor on their behalf, pay death duties (heriot), pay their lords upon the marriage of a son or daughter (merchet), pay for permission to sell livestock (toll), and pay an annual tax (arbitrary tallage). English lords treated villeins and serfs equally as chattel. Lords, or masters, could even exercise the customary prerogative common to all slave cultures of selling their bondmen. Certainly, some villeins benefited from protective rights that prevented them from lapsing into a state of categorical slavery. Despite the common-law notion that the property of bondmen was ultimately the lord’s property, many villeins also acquired their own property and defended it in their own name, according to the medieval doctrine of possession.⁴² Still, their legal status placed them in a precarious position and there was often little they could do to protect themselves from persistent or opprobrious lords.

Technically, villeins were not slaves, but many of those who remained in the archaic condition seem to have believed there was little in their status to distinguish them from that lowliest of conditions. Bondmen and their sympathizers were quite vocal about the abuses they suffered and repeatedly pointed out the problem of reconciling the rights of freeborn Englishmen with the rights of English lords over their human property. In the fourteenth century, Geoffrey Chaucer asserted in the homily of the Parson’s Tale that bondage was not a natural condition and condemned those who “taken they of hire bond-men amercimentz [i.e., a discretionary penalty or fine], whiche myghten moore resonably be cleped extorcions than amercimentz. Of which amercimentz and raunsonynge of boonde-men somme lordes stywardes seyn that it is rightful, for as muche as a cherl hath no termporeel thing that it ne is his lordes.”⁴³ John Fitzherbert reiterated this point in 1523 when he mentioned that despite manumissions, “in some places bondemen conynue as yet.” Worse, he continued, “there be many freman taken as bondmen, and their lands and goodes taken from them so that they shal nat be able to sue for remedy, to prove them selfe fre of blode.” Fortunately, for sixteenth-century bondmen, Tudor monarchs generally sympathized with villeins and several blanket manumissions were issued during the era as the Crown sought to clear the landscape of the remnants of a system of perpetual and inheritable bondage.⁴⁴

Precisely because of the perception that there was a relationship between villeinage and slavery, aggrieved Englishmen, many of whom found themselves subject to the whims of others because of their tainted bloodlines, were able to find recourse to justice in the Court of Common Requests, a body that was frequently referred to as the “Court of Poor Men’s Cases.” In Netheway v. Gorge (1534) the Court of Requests was confronted with a case that exemplified the plight of bondmen who, according to tradition, had no right to personal property. Sir Edward Gorge, lord of the manor of Walton in Somersetshire, dispatched an agent to purchase an ox from the plaintiff, William Netheway. Gorge’s agent agreed to pay 29s. for the ox, but when Netheway demanded payment the money was withheld. Gorge informed the court that the plaintiff was his bondman and, therefore, the ox was already his property. The court conceded the legitimacy of this claim, but it also recognized that public opinion forbade the enforcement of the dated notions of villeinage. Thus, the royal commissioners pressured the defendant in this case to pay the full value of the disputed ox.⁴⁵

In other words, although the government was clearly inclined to side with supposed bondmen, based in great part on the increasingly powerful notion of the presumptive freedom of Englishmen, the continuing legitimacy of villeinage under the law allowed for abuses during the Tudor era. In 1535, John Bourchier, who would become the first Earl of Bath a year later, seized goods valued at £400 from a man named Burde. Bourchier made no pretense of purchase in this case; as in the case of Netheway v. Gorge, this was just another example of the legal spoilation of a purported bondman. In response, then, Burde petitioned the Council of the West in 1539, which ordered the restitution of the disputed goods. The first Earl of Bath had died the previous year, but his son took up the fight by not only disregarding the order but also seizing additional items in October 1540. Eventually the plaintiff petitioned King Henry VIII directly and in February 1541 the order to pay for the seized items was endorsed by a writ of Privy Seal from Hampton Court. Still, the earl refused to comply until the threat of a fine prompted him to restore the goods in 1544. Even so, in the less assured political climate following Henry’s death in 1547 and the subsequent downfall of Protector Somerset in 1549, the earl once again seized horses and cattle from Burde. In this last instance, before the records fall silent, the Earl of Bath defended his actions by emphasizing that he and his father had been within their rights all along because the ancestor who had enfranchised Burde’s ancestor had exceeded his legal right—he could actually only liberate for the term of his own life; upon his death, though, the subsequent Earls of Bath could legally reclaim the family’s legacy.⁴⁶

The Bourchier family was not the first to claim that the manumissions of a previous generation were nonbinding. In the case of Carter v. the Abbot of Malmesbury in 1500, the plaintiff complained to the Court of the Star Chamber that he could not be held against his will because his grandfather had been liberated. The Abbot of Malmesbury, who seized Carter, threw him in prison, and confiscated his substantial holdings in sheep and cattle, defended his actions by claiming that Carter was not free man but a “vylleyne and bondman regardaunt.” Carter, however, produced witnesses to corroborate his claim he had been treated cruelly and that his grandfather had been manumitted. Although the records again fall silent, it seems likely that Carter succeeded in passing the litmus test of descent. Without absolute proof that the ancestors of the person claimed were villeins, no English lord could hold an individual in bondage. Even if servile linkage was established, the maternal line of descent was disallowed and only one male was considered insufficient evidence. At the same time, one free male progenitor typically cleared an entire family of the stain of bondage. In effect, the burden of proving whether an individual was bound or free was increasingly falling in the hands of the lords. The presumption of freedom was clearly ascendant in sixteenth-century England.⁴⁷

The language used by the Abbot of Malmesbury reveals an important distinction concerning the present condition of bondmen in Tudor England. Legal differentiation among different kinds of bondmen that had existed in the past furthered the widespread notion that there were no slaves in England by the sixteenth century. Most, if not all, slaves had in fact been manumitted, or enserfed, nearly four centuries earlier and few people remained in an actual state of either serfdom or villeinage. Nonetheless, some English writers were careful to specify the precise nature of the bondmen that could be found in Tudor society. Sir Thomas Smith, Queen Elizabeth’s occasional ambassador to France and Secretary of State in the 1570s, produced an entire chapter on the subject in his De Republia Anglorum. Smith declared that, according to Roman tradition, there were two kinds of bondmen, “one which were called servi, [who] were bought for money, taken in warre, left by succession, or purchased by other kinde and lawful acquisition, or else borne of their bonde women and called vernae.” Collectively, Smith noted, these people were known in England as “villeins in gross,” while the others were called “adscripticij glebae, or agri censii. These were not bond to the person, but to the mannor or place, and did followe him who had the manors. Those in our lawe are called villaines [regardants].” For the benefit of his continental audience, Smith claimed that he never encountered any of the first type in the realm, and of the second kind, “so few there be, that it is not almost worth the speaking. But our lawe doth acknowledge them in both those sorts.”⁴⁸ Smith conceded, then, that slavery existed in England although only in a theoretical sense or as a legal artifact.

Although the distinction between two different legal categories of unfreedom were useful in court cases and commentaries penned for foreign and domestic audiences, English villeins saw little in the subtle distinction between “villeinage in gross” and “villeinage regardant” to soothe their souls. Those at the bottom of the social and economic ladder prided themselves as much as elites on England’s mythical national commitment to liberty and they were not above reminding their countrymen about the anachronistic role of bondage in English society. During the spring and summer of 1549, for example, East Anglia erupted in one of the most sustained popular uprisings in Tudor England. Kett’s Rebellion, as it came to be known, began when Norfolk villagers leveled the hedges of a landlord who had enclosed a portion of the common land. The uprising was sustained, however, by a deeper concern with local issues and the perception that there was a notable absence of “good government” responsive to the needs of all people. To make their grievances clear, the rebels submitted twenty-nine articles, one of which was the brash declaration that “all bonde men … be made ffre for god made all ffre with his precious blode sheddying.”⁴⁹ Smith may have comforted himself with the notion that human bondage was exceedingly rare, but the Norfolk rebels thought otherwise.

Kett’s Rebellion was not really about slavery, of course, but the inclusion of this one brief statement attests to the scope of popular notions of English freedoms, and human bondage, during the sixteenth century. Like the western shires of Gloucester and Somerset, the East Anglian counties of Norfolk and Suffolk were the main centers of the lingering vestiges of villeinage in Tudor England.⁵⁰ One of the most important families in the region was the Howards, the dukes of Norfolk. The Howard family fell from power in 1546 when the third duke of Norfolk was attainted, which led to the family’s lands reverting to the Crown. Subsequently, twenty-six heads of families from four Suffolk manors, formerly held by the Howards, petitioned Protector Somerset for manumission. The bondmen complained about how they had been treated by the Duke of Norfolk, who had “spoiled your said oratours of any their landes and tenementes, goddes and cattalles … with such extremitie void of any compassion pietie or reason.” Bondmen were not allowed “to marrye accordyng to the lawes of god ne yet to sette any of their children to schoole or to any kynde of learnyng without exaccions and fines.”⁵¹

The grievances of Tudor bondmen ultimately bore fruit. More than forty-six former Howard family villeins would find their way to freedom through a series of manumissions enacted after 1550.⁵² Aggrieved bondmen were often successful because their interests paralleled the desire of the Tudor government to put to rest for good the last vestiges of serfdom in England. Throughout the sixteenth century, on a number of occasions, the Crown made individual or sweeping manumissions, or attempted to compel English lords to free the bondmen in their possession. Tudor monarchs, however, often met fierce resistance when they tried to convince English lords to free their bondmen. In 1538, Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, requested the Earl of Arundel to manumit one of his bondmen. Arundel resisted, however, responding that Thomas Goodfreye “is in truth my bondman, as all his progenitors have been, and if I made him free it would be to the prejudice of my inheritance for ever. I should be glad to gratify you otherwise in a better thing.” Cromwell was equally unsuccessful in convincing Dr. John London to manumit the Alweyes family, bondmen in his college’s possession in Colern. London, who had previously been encouraged in this endeavor by Sir Henry Long and the Bishop of Winchester, protested that the college’s governing statutes would allow him to “alienate neither land nor bondmen.” But, even if he could liberate the family, he was not inclined to do so because the head of the family, the “reve and overseer of my college wood, wastes the woods and conceals the rents.” London, it seems, believed that some people deserved bondage.⁵³

Although Tudor monarchs sympathized with the plight of their bound subjects, they rarely did more than issue polite requests for the manumission of villeins not in the Crown’s possession. In 1507, Henry VII stretched the limit of prerogative when he granted a charter for three new Welsh counties that proclaimed a general manumission for the local nativi. This exceptional case of a Tudor monarch liberating his subjects’ property angered some of his lords, who expressed their displeasure when they subsequently rejected the general bill concernes Manumissionem sevorum vocat. Bondmen.⁵⁴ Thus, the best hope for bondmen with aspirations of free status was for the estate to which they were bound to fall into royal hands. In 1550, Edward VI commissioned Sir Richard Sakevile, chancellor of Augmentations, to manumit “those vyllaynes and nefes aswell regardant to our honours lordeshippes and mannours as otherwyse in gros not yet manumysed and dyscharged of their bondage.” Later, Sakevile came to terms with William Cuckoo, “bocher,” and his brother John, “villeins regardant” to the manor of Ersham. After paying £3.6.8, “William and John and their sequela” were manumitted and given rights to their goods and lands. Although they had to pay for their freedom, and although manumissions were often compulsory, evidence suggests that Tudor monarchs were eager to destroy villeinage once and for all in part because of the perception that it was a form of domestic slavery. In what may have been the most important reason of all, simply “hating slavery (servituti odientes)” moved Edward VI to manumit four Suffolk men in 1551.⁵⁵

Elizabeth followed in the footsteps of her father and half-brother when she attempted to resolve the status of “divers and sundry of our poor faithful and loyal subjects” who had been “born bond in blood and regardant to divers and sundry our manors and possessions within our realm of England.” In 1574, she ordered that the bondmen in four counties be “enfranchised and made free, with their children and sequels.” In 1575, Elizabeth licensed Sir Henry Lee, a minor courtier at the time, to free additional bondmen. Lee’s first order of business was to determine how much money the queen’s villeins would be required to pay for their freedom. Once Lee and the bondmen in question came to an agreement, a charter of manumission was drawn up espousing the firm belief that “God created all men free by nature, and the law of man placed some under the yoke of servitude.” Thus, it would be “a pious thing, and acceptable to God and consonant with Christian charity” to free all bondmen. To this end, and for the greater good of his own and the royal coffers, Lee rounded up and manumitted at least 137 families, comprising nearly 500 individuals, between 1575 and 1580.⁵⁶

Tudor initiatives like these aside, unfree Englishmen—villeins—continued to inhabit England well into the sixteenth century and they continued to be preyed upon by dissolute lords. One English lord, Edward Stafford, even went so far as to try to seize the mayor of Bristol, Richard Cole, as his villein during the 1580s. Still, the continuing presence of a small number of villeins did not diminish the widespread notion that England was, by nature, a free nation. In 1567, for example, Cartwright’s Case in the Star Chamber addressed the possibility of holding a Russian in bondage. Cartwright “brought a slave from Russia … for which he was questioned; and it was resolved that England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” England was hardly unique in asserting its “free air,” but the case did demonstrate the powerful belief among jurists that everyone under common law was free by nature of their Englishness. At the same time, the notion that the English nation was free did not necessarily mean that human bondage was entirely unacceptable. As the Cartwright ruling asserted, England was no place for slaves, but the relics of medieval forms of human bondage could not be totally destroyed so long as English freedom also included the right of individuals to defend their ownership of human property.⁵⁷

The history of domestic bondage in the sixteenth century highlights the paradoxical relationship between Englishness and slavery, for what offended most during this period was not the propriety of slavery but the arbitrary nature of a system of human bondage based entirely on descent. How, Englishmen might wonder, was it possible to be born both free (by virtue of being born in England) and in bondage (by descent)? Repeated references to the idea that God had created human beings free and that only the law could take that away undermined villeinage, especially when bondmen could assert that their condition was tantamount to slavery. Moreover, if England was, by nature or tradition, a free nation, then the continuing existence of villeinage—an institution that defined some people as unfree by birth alone—was a troublesome indicator that the barrier between slavery and Englishness was not as impenetrable as national mythologizers would have it. In this light, the Tudor government’s manumission efforts in the sixteenth century could be interpreted not simply as a scheme to extort those with no rights or a generous plan to liberate individual bondman—as they surely were—but as a much bigger effort to free England, once and for all, from the stain of natural slavery. If English men and women were to be enslaved, there had better be a good reason why and neither birth nor lineage made any sense in the increasingly ideologically charged climate of the day.

* * *

The religious and intellectual legacy of slavery and decaying domestic institutions like manorial villeinage were not the only ways that Englishmen may have experienced bondage, or imagined slavery, in a domestic setting. Englishmen were also able to witness and experience slavery as a penal institution during the sixteenth century. Penal slavery, however, differed from villeinage in a number of crucial ways. Unlike villeins, penal slaves were not born into bondage, rather they were reduced to slavery as a form of punishment resulting from their own actions. Penal slavery was clearly punitive, but it is even more interesting because it was also envisaged, in some circles, as a progressive form of individual improvement and social control. The idea of slavery as a positive, virtue-instilling institution was most clearly revealed in Thomas More’s Utopia, which first appeared in a number of Latin editions after 1516. Subsequently, two English translations by Ralph Robinson were published in England in 1551 and 1556. Although More’s text was not explicitly concerned with the subject of human bondage, he addressed the subject thoroughly. In particular, as a result of his critique of the arbitrary and harsh punishments suffered by common thieves (which included the death penalty) More suggested alternative ways of dealing with criminal behavior. In this vein, in Book One, More lauded the more humane and practical punishment of common criminals in Persia among a group of people styled the “Polylerites.”⁵⁸ Instead of death, thieves in this fictional land were condemned to be “common servauntes to the common wealth.” Lest there be any confusion about the degraded status of these “serving men,” as they are termed in Robinson’s English translation, these criminals were clearly marked. They were to be “apparailed in one coloure,” their hair was “rounded a lytlte above the eares. And the typpe of one eare is cut off.” Moreover, Polylerites rigidly constrained bondmen whom they “locked in theyr chambers” at night, whipped for indolence, declared that they “may touch no weapons,” and threatened with death if they “intende[d] to runne awaye,” much less “do it in dede.” Nonetheless, bondmen were otherwise treated gently, for their “punyshement intendeth nothynge elles, but the destruction of vices, and savynge of menne: wyth so usynge, and ordering them, that they can not chuse but be good.” Thus, “everye yeare divers of them be restored to their freedome: throughe the commendation of their patience.”⁵⁹

The reasonable—or “worthy and commendable” as Robinson’s marginal note indicates—system of slavery More located in Persia agreed with the one More’s fictional traveler, Raphael Hythloday, encountered in Utopia.⁶⁰ More treated the subject of human bondage quite carefully in Book Two, choosing even to give the subject of slavery its own section heading.⁶¹ Utopians acquired slaves through well-defined channels. First, they did not “make bondemen of prisoners taken in battayle” unless it was a “battaylle that they foughte themselves.” Second, Utopians purchased convicted criminals, or those in “other landes [who] for greate trespasses be condemned to death.” A third group of slaves consisted of “their owne men,” whom “they handle hardest” because “they being so godlye brought up to vertue in soo excelente a common wealth, could not for all that be refreined from misdoing.” Finally, Utopians sometimes allowed a “vile drudge” from another country to “chuse of his owne free wyll to be a bondman among them.” Utopian slaves, then, were men who suffered such a fate as a result of just wars, because of criminal behavior, or by choice. As More makes clear, Utopians were discriminating when it came to their slaves; neither another nation’s prisoners of war nor the “bondmens children” could therefore be counted among the enslaved.⁶²

More also characterized Utopian slavery as a purposeful institution, equally so for the enslaved themselves and for Utopian society as a whole. To be sure, bondage was a “miserable & wretched condition” involving “al vile service, all slavery, and drudgerie.” At the same time, human bondage could also be viewed as a progressive, virtue-instilling practice that existed as much to redeem wayward individuals as it did to punish them. Because slavery was characterized as an institution that was neither accidental nor capricious, because slavery was something that bondmen could be said to have brought upon themselves by their actions, slavery was less a labor system than it was a social system. Thus, “they, which take theire bondage pacientlye, be not lefte hopeles. For after they have bene broken and tamed with long miseries, if then thei shew such repentaunce … theire bondage either be mitigated, or else cleane released and forgeven.” And anyone who chose to enslave himself, More added, “they neither hold him against his wyll” or “send him away with emptye handes.”⁶³

If slavery was ideally a temporary condition for the enslaved, it was nonetheless an integral institution for the proper functioning of the Utopian social order. More imagined, for example, that slaves served a fundamental role in Utopian society by insulating the social order from instability by assigning the most pernicious tasks to slaves. Butchering, hunting, and other “laboursome toyle & base business” were performed by bondmen. Hunting and butchering were singled out as particularly unpleasant and dehumanizing endeavors because “they thinke, clemencye the genteleste affection of our nature” which would “lytle and lytle … decaye and peryshe” were free Utopians to perform them. The remarkable virtue of Utopians was, in an important sense, preserved by slavery. Individual slaves might be redeemed, but while they served the needs of Utopians they were a visible reminder of the barbarity and degeneracy of the outer world. Indeed, in the performance of these necessary labors, Utopian slaves were as close to brute “beastes” as humanly possible. Although redemption was the ideal, then, More did not hesitate to suggest that one distinguishing characteristic of slaves was their proximity to the animal world. Therefore, if they “doo rebell and kicke againe, then forsothe they be slayne as desperate and wilde beastes, whom neither prison nor chaine could restraine.”⁶⁴

Utopian slavery was a model of human bondage that served to instill a sense of virtue on Utopian society. The sense of honor enjoyed by freedom-loving Utopians necessitated the shame of slavery. There could be no real liberty without real slavery, even if it only served as a visible reminder of what was at stake in society. How else would Utopians appreciate what they had?⁶⁵ It was this conception of slavery, as a mechanism by which degenerate individuals could be reformed and redeemed, that was expressed most famously in Tudor society in 1547 when Parliament passed its most extreme penal measure to date, possibly authored by a young Sir Thomas Smith, to attack “idle beggars and sturdy vagabonds.” With this act (which was soon repealed), slavery could be imposed on recalcitrant individuals who refused to work; any competent man “not applying them self to some honest and allowed arte, Scyence, service or Labour” could be taken for a vagabond and enslaved for two years. The master would have absolute control over the diet of his bondmen, and could “cawse the saide Slave to work by beating, cheyninge or otherwise in such worke and Labor how vyle so ever it be.” The slave could also be leased, sold or bequeathed, as “any other of the master’s movable goodes or Catelles.” Nonetheless, this conception of slavery differed from the subsequent New World model, primarily in its purpose, because rather than creating a class of slaves to satisfy labor demands, this law was about the potential laborers themselves. With the 1547 act, Parliament intended to punish but also hoped to instill a sense of virtue, frugality, and hard work and to make workingmen out of idle men.⁶⁶

Galley slavery was the most infamous form of penal slavery in Europe and the Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, it appeared in England, though it seems to have been talked about much more than it was used because traditional oared galleys were not especially practical in the high winds and rough seas of the North Atlantic. European visitors asserted outright that the English, “do not use galleys, owing to the strong tide of the ocean.” Still, the English government experimented with galleys for a brief period between the 1540s and 1620s. During his later years, Henry VIII attempted to purchase a coastal defense force of ten fully equipped and furnished galleys from Emperor Charles V. When that effort failed, subsequent monarchs simply recommissioned galleys captured from the enemy. Late in Elizabeth’s reign, England even inaugurated a modest galley-building program, leading to the construction of five vessels. Ultimately, though, English galleys were rarely used for defense. Most galleys—and there were rarely more than three suitable for use at any one time—were thought by more practical minds to “serve in dede to lytle purpose.” The Galley Bonavolia, which had been acquired from the French in 1563, helped chart the Thames estuary and worked as a tug during its otherwise ignoble career.⁶⁷

Considering the checkered history of English galleys, it is remarkable how frequently galley slavery appears in the sources. Legislation and proclamations allowing for individuals to be condemned to slavery was common during the 1540s. In 1544, the king issued a proclamation ordering alien French to leave England or they would be “sent to his grace’s galleys.” A year later, the ranks of galley slaves were augmented by other “such ruffians, vagabonds, masterless men, common players, and evil-disposed persons” who crossed the government’s path. In 1548, the city of London punished Edmund Grymeston for “writing an infamous libel full of reproach” by cutting off his ears at the pillory and sentencing him “to serve in the galleys as a slave during his life.” Elizabeth’s royal government went even further by making some effort to raise a force of galley slaves. In 1586, Francis Walsingham pressed the queen’s solicitor general to make plans to condemn the most vile criminals, “being repryved from execution” to the galleys, which would “both terrify ill disposed persons from offending, and make thos that shall hasard them selves to offend in some sorte proffitable to the common wealthe.”⁶⁸

As evidence of the power and persistence of these ideas, two seventeenth-century English knights, Sir William Monson and the reformed pirate Sir Henry Mainwaring, were particularly forthright in their articulation of the advantages of galley slavery. In a discourse on pirates submitted to King James during the 1610s, Mainwaring suggested that in order to reduce the incidence of piracy in Ireland and England, it would be “no ill policy of this State, to make them Slaves, in the nature of Galley-Slaves.” “Other Christian Princes use this kind of punishment,” Mainwaring noted, “and so convert it to a public profit.” Moreover, he continued, “it is observable, that as many as make slaves of offenders, have not any Pirates of their Nation.” Monson concurred with Mainwaring, adding that pirates and other criminals “must be shaved both head and face, and marked in the cheek with a hot iron” so that others would “take them to be the King’s labourers, for so they should be termed, and not slaves.” Both Monson and Mainwaring recognized that the threat of slavery—the term even, in Monson’s case—would “terrify and deter them, more than the assurance of Death itself.” But echoing the insights found in More’s Utopia, they also asserted that slavery “will make men avoid sloth and pilfering and apply themselves to labour and pains.” And, in a best-case scenario, “it may be a means to save many of their Souls, by giving them a long time of Repentance.”⁶⁹

Of course, galley slavery never amounted to much in Britain. In 1589, Sir John Hawkins issued a memorandum on the sea charges of the Galley Bonavolia, noting that the ship required 150 slaves to fill its 50 banks. Hawkins, however, did not even feel equipped to provide a budget for food expenditures for the slaves because “we are not yett in the experyence of yt.”⁷⁰ On the few occasions when an English galley actually took to the sea, it was typically powered by free oarsmen. England’s self-styled reputation as a place void of slaves may also have limited the creation of a large force of galley slaves. When the English government returned the captured Galley Blanchard to the French in 1547, for example, Henry VIII refused to return its complement of 140 enslaved Neapolitans, Spaniards, and Gascons. For a short while, the men continued to row in chains while being encouraged by English cudgels, but Henry was advised that the galley would be “some chardge … contynewally iff his highness do kepe her styll with her sute of forsados as she ys nowe.” Viscount Lisle, England’s lord admiral, suggested instead that Henry should “gyve fredom and liberty to the sayde forsados at the leaste to as many as wold take yt wch I think wold be more worth to his [majesty] then the strength of [four] gallys if ever his [majesty] shold have any more to do with theym.” Besides endearing the former galley slaves to the English monarch, Lisle believed this measure would send a message to foreign powers who “wolbe ever in doubt to come nere unto any of the Kyngs [majesty’s] navy or ports for feare of Rendering theym selves unto his highnes.”⁷¹

From the perspective of a number English writers and policy makers, then, slavery was not something that should be rejected outright because it was inconsistent with the dignity of England. Human bondage, as most English authors preferred to label it, was a practical solution to a number of social ills that, if left unchecked, threatened to do even greater damage to the integrity of English freedoms and liberties than the institution of slavery ever could on its own. Although the most negative connotations associated with slavery galled—most particularly its abject nature—Englishmen like Ralph Robinson and Sir William Monson believed that the problem could be alleviated simply by labeling it as something else. If slavery had no place in early modern England, a system of human bondage founded on progressive, redemptive ideals was nonetheless a tantalizing notion.

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When Walsingham dispatched Hakluyt to Paris in 1583, neither man knew as much about long-distance, transatlantic navigation and colonialism as they would have liked. What they did know about and recognize when they saw it was slavery. To men like Walsingham and Hakluyt, slavery was useful to invoke because it emphasized the precarious grip England held on liberty and freedom, qualities they believed they enjoyed by virtue of their Protestant religion and English national identity. As well-educated Englishmen, they had read plenty about slavery as a result of the literary world they inhabited. Whether they studied Latin texts or contemporary works and whether they read secular histories or the Christian Bible, slavery was a subject that could not be avoided without seriously distorting the sacred and secular worlds they inhabited. That slavery had once been common but was no longer perhaps comforted some people and highlighted the triumph of English liberty in a world otherwise bound in chains, both real and metaphorical. But English men and women were also quick to recognize that the new era of domestic and international strife in which they lived threatened to undermine all that they held dear. To be English in the late sixteenth century was tantamount to being free while for others it was not, but that luxury was by no means guaranteed.

Servitude, villeinage, and penal slavery were not the same thing as the institutional system of slavery that would develop in the Atlantic world in later years, but these practices nonetheless encouraged Englishmen to think about slavery. A few individuals also chose to reconceptualize human bondage as a practical, even pragmatic, institution linked with England’s past, present, and future.⁷² Certainly, in raw numbers slavery itself was ultimately of small import, but its existence and theoretical application nonetheless reveals that, even outside the bounds of religious and intellectual circles, there were domestic reference points from which Englishmen could construct ideas about human bondage. Moreover, the existence of slavery points to a disjuncture between contemporary political rhetoric concerning the inclusive English nation and the social and cultural reality in which Englishness alone might not be enough to guarantee every individual the ideological benefits of his or her own nationhood. Freedom may have been a defining element of English national identity in the era of overseas settlement, but that did not mean that villeinage could not be justified in practice or that recalcitrant Englishmen could not be forced to labor in bondage. Penal slavery, in particular, and vagrancy legislation demonstrate the readiness of Tudor authorities to compel the lower orders to labor—not for labor’s sake but for that of society as a whole. Although Tudor elites might rhetorically eschew the arbitrary nature of slavery as perpetual and inheritable, nothing about slavery was deemed unreasonable if individuals brought it upon themselves, if the practice served a social purpose, or if it was directed toward stabilizing and preserving, paradoxically, the idea of freedom in England.

These domestic touchstones, however, did not exist in a vacuum. While English elites were ruminating on the practical application of domestic slavery or thinking about the relationship between Englishness and liberty, many of their fellow countrymen were coming to terms with the reality that the larger world in which they lived was rife with slavery. England was an island nation, but it was far from a world unto itself. As English travelers, merchants, soldiers, sailors, and others began to explore and learn more about distant lands, exotic cultures, and often mysterious peoples, they were struck by the seemingly countless ways human beings could be treated as brute beasts and cheap commodities. In many places, slavery was not so much contemplated as it was merely noted; in certain arenas, however, English travelers and writers could not resist the temptation to register a profound sense of disgust and horror at the sufferings of the enslaved. On the one hand, a fuller awareness of the prevalence of human bondage and the important role that slavery played throughout the world facilitated an emerging sense of English exceptionalism. On the other hand, slavery’s pervasiveness on the global stage presented Englishmen with new challenges, new possibilities, and a new opportunity to define the relationship between Englishness and slavery.