Thread by @jessnevins

Edward Colston's statue going into the drink is a good thing. More power to your elbows, those responsible.

But this shouldn't be forgotten: English slavery didn't start with Colston, or even the 1640s. Slavery is as English as a pint of bitters & y'all need to embrace this. 1/

I say this with affection, Brits, my fam, my dudes. I say this as a white guy from Boston who grew up in a sundown town & whose high school mascot was an anti-Algonquian stereotype. Before repentance begins, acknowledgment--full acknowledgement--of all sins has to be made. 2/

I'll always be repenting, and I hope Blighty can begin doing so as well.

Hwæt. England exported slaves before the Romans arrived: Irish, Welsh, Picts, various native Briton ethnicities. One reason the Romans went to England to begin with was to profit from the slave trade. 3/

The Romans stepped up the slave trade, although they began enslaving *everyone* on the island, including the powerful tribes who'd sold the most slaves before the Romans arrived.

One theory why the Romans wiped out the druids was that druids killed too many potential slaves. 4/

The Romans left Britain for good in the 5th century. The slave trade continued. (Post-Roman Britain was not, despite what was taught for a long time, "Dark Age Britain." Things fractured a bit--you had the 50 Kingdoms of Britons--but Britain's part in int'l trade continued). 5/

Around the middle of the 5th century the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes (three Germanic tribes) began the invasion & occupation of England, which lasted for 150+ years.

When people talk about the "Anglo-Saxons," that's who they're talking about. 6/

There's no easy way to say this: the Angle/Saxon/Jute invasion was accompanied by genocidal treatment of the native Britons. Statistics for the death toll are purely theoretical, but whatever the number it was a significant percentage of the entire population. 7/

(The Jutes eventually got theirs).

Britons who weren't killed ended up being enslaved. The Angles & Saxons & Jutes (A/S/J) were big on slavery & there were a lot of peoples in the British Isles who could be enslaved & the A/S/J settlers needed slaves for the farms. 8/

(The Britons limped along, much reduced in number and always victimized by the A/S/J but never going away. Exeter even had a proto-medieval-Jewish-ghetto arrangement, the "British quarter," where the Britons could enforce their own laws--this was 8th & 9th century). 9/

The Jutes faded away through attrition, assimilation, and a final Saxon massacre in the late 7th century, so the Angles & Saxons held sway after that.

They enslaved the Irish, the Picts, the Welsh, the Britons, each other, and any foreign traveler they could catch unawares. 10/

Many of the slaves ended up on Anglo-Saxon farms, doing the jobs that the Anglo-Saxon farmers didn't want to do. Other slaves were sold to foreign slave traders, and ended up in Marseille or the slave markets of North Africa.

This is part of the Anglo-Saxon heritage. 11/

Anglo-Saxon slavery was less cruel than the US version, but no one would ever mistake it for kind, and its overall savagery was noted by foreigners, although in comparison to the Viking brand of slavery it was merciful. 12/

The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had rules for how slaves had to be treated. One rule was that slave masters had to feed slaves. That's why some individuals & families sold themselves into slavery--their own farms went bad, the crops died, and the choice was starvation or slavery. 13/

Others sold themselves into slavery to pay off debts.

Sidenote: the southern dialect Old English word for slave, "wealh," originally meant "foreign slave," then meant "Celtic slave," then just meant "the Welsh." 14/

What we do know about the numbers is this: in 1086, when the Domesday Book was compiled at the request of William the Conqueror--at a time when slavery was dwindling--10% of England's population were slaves, with the numbers, in places like Cornwall, reaching as high as 25%.
15/

Before the Viking invasion (865), numbers would have been much higher. Anglo-Saxon society was mostly agricultural & jobs on the farms were brutally hard--for example, there was no yoke for oxen or horse yet, so plowing fields was done by someone physically pushing the plow. 16/

And then the Vikings came, & slaves ended up looking back on Anglo-Saxon slavery as the good old days.

I've been reading & writing about Vikings the past several months, and you don't do that without some affection for your subject...but their brand of slavery was vicious. 17/

The death rate of Viking slaves ("thralls") was extraordinarily high, as noted by contemporary observers. Slaves were killed in religious rituals. When their owners died (someone had to serve the owners in the afterlife). When someone was bored or having a temper tantrum.
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It's rare that the bodies of Viking slaves are found intact in archaeological sites. Evidence of abuse is everywhere on the skeletons. Many are missing their heads. (No one's sure why so many slaves were beheaded--but we don't know a lot about Viking religious ceremonies).

19/

Viking invasion of Britain, tl/dr version: population explosion in Scandinavia + shortage of available women + environmental changes = Viking expansion in the late 8th & 9th centuries. Vikings expanded east into what was later Russia and west into England.

20/

(Incidentally, re: the Viking invasion of Britain, the tv show VIKINGS' reason given for it--to avenge the death of Ragnarr Loðbrók ("Ragnarr Hairy-Breeches")--is myth, not history. VIKINGS is fun, but accuracy ain't in it).

21/

From 865-878 the Vikings waged war on England--the 9th century version of modern total war. The Vikings had come not to raid & loot, but to conquer & settle, but to do that they had to sweep away the impediments who lived there. So they tried to do just that.

22/

Briefly: of the 4 major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the Vikings ended up beating 3 of them, fighting the fourth to a standstill, and settling for their own colony, the "Danelaw." Vikings being Vikings, they built slave markets (in Dublin among other places) & expanded the trade. 23/

The surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom--Wessex, soon renamed "The Kingdom of England"--went along with the new trade, because of the profits. See, the Vikings traded & raided everywhere: the Caucauses the Black & Caspian Seas, the Mediterranean. Persia. India. Maybe China. 24/

Everywhere they went they captured, bought & sold slaves. Part of the reason why was that the domestic market for slaves in Scandinavia was immense--farming in Scandinavia in the 9th century was a very chancy thing, and the Vikings couldn't have survived w/out slave labor. 25/

Part of the reason was that Viking slaves had *very* short lifespans. Average lifespan of a Viking was 40 (35 for Anglo-Saxons); average slave didn't last five years w/a Viking master.

1 thing Wessex liked about the Viking form of slavery was a Viking innovation. 25/

TW: rape

Traditional Anglo-Saxon slavery was not known to be particularly sexually exploitative. Nor were the Vikings, when they were simply raiding for loot. But when they took slaves, the Vikings raped them. (Men and children as well as women). Always.

26/

For the Vikings, the children of slaves were slaves (unless granted freedom, which very rarely happened). So pregnant slaves were more valuable than non-pregnant slaves.

The Vikings had their day, abroad & in England, but in 1066 the French Normans invaded England.

27/

Slavery was already beginning to dwindle in England when William le batard showed up, but he accelerated it thanks to Church teachings, the bad economics of slavery, and Norman incomprehension of the Viking/Anglo-Saxon practice of slavery.

28/

Y'see, the Normans thought of *everyone* on their estates as theirs; it wasn't so much that the Normans abolished slavery so much as the Normans introduced serfdom and made everyone serfs. No need for slaves any more when you had serfs to serve you.

29/

Slavery *technically* ended in the 1100s and only came back 500 years later, but in reality it just transmogrified into a different form.

And that's a brief history of slavery in England.

(Neither I nor any white USian is in a position to feel superior, of course).

30/

One last thing about the Vikings and slavery. One survey of Icelandic DNA showed that it was roughly 40% Norwegian & 60% Celtic and English. So clearly *some* Celtics & Anglo-Saxon slaves were freed by the Vikings. But this begs some questions.

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We know so little about the internals of the Viking slave trade--very little has turned up in archaeological digs, and things like slave fetters, which you'd expect to find in abundance, are nearly entirely missing. Likely melted down & repurposed. But we do know some things. 32/

Like: many Viking slaves were other Vikings, from various petty kingdoms at war; the majority of Viking slaves were either from Russia or from the British Isles--the Vikings thought Anglo-Saxon women were the prettiest in the world. HOWEVER. 33/

The Vikings were renowned for taking slaves abroad and bringing them home. "Abroad" in this case including al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) and North Africa.

What happened to those slaves after that?
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TW: rape

The female slaves would have been raped, as was Viking custom, and would have had children. And some of those children would have ended up being freed, because some always were. What happened to them?

35/

I think the freed slaves wouldn't have gone very far--I think they would have stayed in Scandinavia and lived as farmers, merchants, traders and, yes, raiders.

Now, the Vikings were prejudiced against people with dark skin. We know this from their own writings.

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Richard Cole's "Racial Thinking in Old Norse Literature: The Case of the The Case of the Blámaðr" is a very good starting place for anyone interested in this. (It wasn't as simple as racism--it was more nuanced than that).

37/

But the Vikings were used to hiring foreign mercenaries, even on pirate raids, so I think they wouldn't have resisted hiring a dark-skinned local, if he was willing and able to fight and sail.

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All of which is to say that, in my opinion, any portrayal of a bunch of Vikings should include a few with dark skin & North African ancestry.

39/fin

Oh! One more thing: multiple sclerosis is apparently predominantly a Northern European thing. Well, some scholars trace the global spread of m.s. to the Viking voyages. (See C.M. Poser's "Viking voyages: the origin of multiple sclerosis?: An essay in medical history").