Early Middle Ages
Chaos and invasion made the taking of slaves habitual throughout Europe in the early Middle Ages. St. Patrick, himself captured and sold as a slave, protested an attack that enslaved newly baptized Christians in his Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus. In the Viking era starting c. 793, the Norse raiders often captured and enslaved peoples they encountered. In the Nordic countries the slaves were called Thralls (Old Norse: Þræll).
Germanic laws provided for the enslavement of criminals, as when the Visigothic Code prescribed enslavement for those who could not pay the financial penalty for their crime, and specifically for those who committed certain crimes, . They would become slaves to their victims, often with their property.
In Carolingian Europe 10-20% of the entire population consisted of slaves. Some people sold themselves to powerful landowners in order to receive protection, work and food; one Anglo-Saxon will has a land-owner freeing those slaves who had "given her their heads for food." Anglo-Saxons continued and expanded their slave system, sometimes in league with Norse traders. About 10% of England’s population entered in the Domesday Book in 1086 were slaves. Chattel slavery of English Christians was discontinued after 1066, when William of Normandy conquered England. The slave trade in England was abolished in 1102.
The restoration of order as the early Middle Ages passed was accompanied by the transmutation of this state into serfdom, and after the earlier portions, slaves were seldom of the same country as their owner in Western Europe.
Read more about this topic: Slavery In Medieval Europe
Famous quotes containing the words middle ages, early, middle and/or ages:
“What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Oh, yes, everything’s fine. I always stop by the police station in the middle of the night to pick up my daughter.”
—Theodore Simonson. Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr.. Mr. Martin, The Blob, when he comes to pick up Jane (1958)
“Neither the Ages of Faith nor the Age of Doubt had touched him; he was Phaethon in Tuscany driving a cab.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)