SLAVERY IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND

Contents

Pre 1066

Viking raids

Middle Ages

Transportation

Workhouse slavery

Barbary pirates

African slaves

Triangular trade

Judicial decisions

Abolition

Modern evaluation

References

Pre 1066

During and after Roman times, the practice of slavery was common in England. Anglo-Saxons continued and expanded their slave system, sometimes in league with Norse traders.^[1] Chattel slavery of English Christians was discontinued when William of Normandy conquered England in 1066. ^[2][3]

Viking raids

In Ireland, the disorganized locals were easy pickings for Viking raids, and many were taken as slaves. As the Vikings themselves began settling in Ireland, the random raids decreased, the new settlements becoming the focus of the trade instead. Eventually, the slave trade fizzled out as English and European markets dried up.

Middle Ages

According to the Domesday Book census in 1086, 10% of England's population was enslaved.^[4] The trade in serfs and slaves in England was abolished in 1102.^[5][6] The legal force of the event is actually open to question. The Council of Westminster, a collection of nobles, issued a decree: "Let no one hereafter presume to engage in that nefarious trade in which hitherto in England men were usually sold like brute animals." However, the Council had no legislative powers, and no act of law was valid unless signed by the monarch. and the last form of enforced servitude (villeinage) had disappeared in Britain by the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Transportation

Slavery resurfaced in that century as a form of punishment against Catholics. As many as 100,000 Irish men, women and children were forcibly taken to the colonies in the British West Indies and British North America as indentured servants after the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland.^[7] In the 17th century, slavery was used as punishment by conquering English Parliament armies against native Catholics in Ireland. Between the years 1659 and 1663, during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland by the New Model Army, under the command of Oliver Cromwell, thousands of Irish Catholics were forced into servitude. Cromwell had a deep dislike of the Catholic religion, and many Irish Catholics who had participated in Confederate Ireland had all their land confiscated and were transported to the British West Indies as indentured servants.
It was not uncommon for Scottish Highlanders and other Scotsmen to be forcibly taken and transported abroad at this time either. The need for labor in the Virginia plantations and West Indies allowed unscrupulous individuals to "press gang" unwary or naïve locals onto ships, bound for the Americas. Once at their destination, these people were indentured to plantation owners against their will. They were released eventually, unlike Africans similarly employed. Yet few could ever make enough money to buy passage back to Scotland, from whence they had come. These actions were justified because the persons in question were labeled as indigent, and under a 1652 law such people could be deported to overseas colonies. ^[8]

Workhouse slavery

From the 17th century to the 19th century workhouses took in people whose poverty left them no other alternative, and they were employed under slave conditions. Workhouses took in abandoned babies, usually presumed to be illegitimate, and when they grew old enough, they were used as child labour; children famously exploited in the workhouse include Charles Dickens's fictional ''Oliver Twist'' and real life Henry Morton Stanley. Only in 1833 and 1844 were the first general laws against child labour, the Factory Acts, passed in England.^[9]

Barbary pirates

Villagers along the south coast of England petitioned the king to protect them from abduction by Barbary pirates. Item 20 of The Grand Remonstrance,^[10] a list of grievances against Charles I and presented to him in 1641, contains the following complaint about Barbary pirates of the Ottoman Empire abducting English people into slavery:
:"20. And although all this was taken upon pretense of guarding the seas, yet a new unheard-of tax of ship-money was devised, and upon the same pretense, by both which there was charged upon the subject near £700,000 some years, and yet the merchants have been left so naked to the violence of the Turkish pirates, that many great ships of value and thousands of His Majesty's subjects have been taken by them, and do still remain in miserable slavery."

African slaves

The first Englishman recorded to have taken slaves from Africa was John Lok, a London trader who, in 1555, brought to England five slaves from Guinea. A second London trader taking slaves at that time was William Towerson whose fleet sailed into Plymouth following his 1556 voyage to Africa and from Plymouth on his 1557 voyage.
Despite the exploits of Lok and Towerson, Admiral Sir John Hawkins of Plymouth, one of most well known of the Elizabethan sea-farers, is widely acknowledged to be "The Pioneer of the English Slave Trade", a respectable title in his time and centuries afterwards, but nowadays a badge of infamy. In 1554-1455, Hawkins formed a slave trading syndicate of wealthy merchants, sailed with three ships for the Caribbean via Sierra Leone, hijacked a Portuguese slave ship and sold the the 300 slaves from it in Santo Domingo - making a profit despite having two ships seized by the Spanish authorities. A second voyage in 1564 involved the kidnapping of about 400 Africans and selling them at Rio de la Hacha, despite the strong opposition of the local Spanish authorities (who did not object to slave trading as such, but to an Englishman breaking into the market), thus making a 60% profit for his financiers. A third voyage involved both buying slaves directly in Africa and again capturing a Portugese ship with its cargo. On his return, he published a book entitled ''An Alliance to Raid for Slaves'' - in effect, a kind of "how to" manual for slave traders following him.

Triangular trade

Main articles: Triangular trade

By the 18th Century, the slave trade became a major economic manistay for such cities as Bristol and Liverpool, engaged in the so-called "Triangular trade". The ships set out from England, loaded with trade goods which were exchanged on the West African shores for slaves captured by local rulers from deeper inland; the slaves were trasported, in conditions of inhuman crowding, through the infamous "middle passage" across the Atlantic, and were sold a considerable profit for labor in plantations; and there the ship loaded with the product of slave labor, such as sugar and rum, on their way back to England.

Judicial decisions

By the 18th century African slaves began to be brought into London and Edinburgh as personal servants. In a number of judicial decisions between slave merchants, it was tacitly accepted that slavery of Africans was legal.^[11]
In 1729 the then-Attorney General and Solicitor General of England signed the Yorke-Talbot slavery opinion expressing their view (and, by implication, that of the Government) that slavery of Africans was lawful in England. At this time slaves were openly bought and sold on markets at London and Liverpool. Slavery was also accepted in England's many colonies as well.
However, in 1772 a runaway slave named James Somerset was recaptured, and various abolitionists brought legal proceedings demanding his release, forcing a legal decision for the first time under English law as to the legality of a slave's detention. One of Somerset's lawyers, Francis Hargrave, stated "In 1569, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a lawsuit was brought against a man for beating another man he had bought as a slave overseas. The record states, 'That in the 11th [year] of Elizabeth [1569], one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in.' " He argued that the court had ruled in Cartwright's case that English Common Law made no provision for slavery, and without a basis for its legality, slavery would otherwise be unlawful as false imprisonment and/or assault.^[12] In his judgment of 22 June 1772, Lord Chief Justice William Murray, Lord Mansfield, of the Court of King's Bench, declared: "Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged." Several different reports of Mansfield's long deliberated, but ultimately very short, decision appeared, and most disagree as to what was actually said. The decision was only given orally, and so no formal written record of it was issued by the court. Abolitionists widely circulated the view that it was declared that the condition of slavery did not exist under English law, although Mansfield himself later said that all that he actually decided was that a slave could not be forcibly removed from England against his will.^[13] Mansfield had in his household and family someone who would have been covered by this ruling; his marriage was childless, and he and his wife were raising Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate mixed race daughter of his late nephew, a Navy man, and an unknown enslaved African woman.

Abolition

The Church was later implicated in slavery. Slaves owned by the Anglican Church's Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts on its sugar plantations in the West Indies had the word "society" branded on their chests with red-hot irons. When slaves were emancipated by Act of the British Parliament in 1834 the British government paid compensation to slave owners. In one case the Bishop of Exeter and three business colleagues received compensation for the 665 slaves they had to set free.

Modern evaluation

Southwark Bishop Thomas Butler, at the Anglican Church's General Synod in 2006 stated "The profits from the slave trade were part of the bedrock of our country's industrial development". Nevertheless, the profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to less than 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.^[14]

References

1. Slave Trading in Anglo-Saxon and Viking England
2.
3.
4. Domesday Book Slave
5. British History Freedom – Timeline – 12th Century
6. House of Commons Hansard Debates for 20 Mar 2007
7. BBC The curse of Cromwell
8. http://www.electricscotland.com/history/other/white_slavery.htm
9. The Life of the Industrial Worker in 19th-Century Britain
10. "The Grand Remonstrance, with the Petition accompanying it", ''Constitution Society'', URL last accessed 2006-12-06.
11. See for example, ''Butts v Peny'' (1677) 2 Lev 201, 3 Keb 785 - an action was brought to recover possession of 100 slaves. The court held that slavery was legal in England in relation to infidels and that an action for trover would lie; see also ''Gelly v Cleve'' (1694) 1 Ld Raym 147; later applying different reasoning ''Chamberlain v Harvey'' (1697) 1 Ld Raym 146 and ''Smith v Gould'' (1705-07) 2 Salk 666
12. ''Matter of Cartwright'', 11 Elizabeth; 2 Rushworth's Coll 468 (1569)[1]
13. See generally, S.M.Wise, ''Though the Heavens May Fall'', Pimlico (2005)
14. Was slavery the engine of economic growth?