Slavery in the Carolingian Empire

Rio, Alice

doi:10.1017/9781139024723.018

Cited by 3 publications

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“…102 The conspicuous display of wealth in medieval aristocratic life often involved both the exhibition of enslaved people, especially women, and the theatre of mounted warfare. 103 At the Raffelstetten market, aristocratic buyers aiming to augment their masculine image may have sought beautiful women to adorn their bedchambers and fearsome horses to ride to war. They paid about the same price for each, suggesting a fungibility between horse and human flesh put to similar symbolic purposes.…”

Section: 'If One Should Wish To Sell Slaves or Horses': The Road To M...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Human–animal entanglements in the early medieval European slave trade: re‐reading the Raffelstetten customs regulations

Christensen

2024

Early Medieval Europe

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Frankish customs regulations recorded in the tenth‐century ‘Inquest on the tolls of Raffelstetten’ have long formed a cornerstone of traditional arguments about slavery's role in the early medieval European economic revival. This paper experiments with the application of a more‐than‐human lens to the Raffelstetten record and other evidence to generate new insights into the intimate experience of enslavement and the interspecies networks of relations that shaped the slave trade and slave markets in early medieval Europe. Human and animal entanglements, as revealed in the Raffelstetten record, determined how enslaved people experienced capture, transport, and sale.

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Section: 'If One Should Wish To Sell Slaves or Horses': The Road To M...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Human–animal entanglements in the early medieval European slave trade: re‐reading the Raffelstetten customs regulations

Christensen

2024

Early Medieval Europe

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“…60 For early medieval Europe, Rio has emphasised that unfree status was 'the result of an act of labelling and not … a static object'. 61 We may ask, though, if the unconsensual imposition of the label 'slave' amid unequal power relations makes it so different from (for example) 'conscript' or 'convict'. Advocates of 'people-first' language in general could fairly respond here that we should refer to 'convicted persons' or 'conscripted persons' as well.…”

Section: Ethical Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Slaves’ and ‘Slave Owners’ or ‘Enslaved People’ and ‘Enslavers’?

Burns

2023

Trans. R. Hist. Soc.

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Studies of slavery increasingly refer to ‘enslaved people’ rather than ‘slaves’, and, to a lesser extent, to ‘enslavers’ rather than ‘slave owners’. This trend began with scholarship in the United States on plantation slavery but has spread to other academic publications. Yet ‘slave’ continues to be widely used, indicating not everyone is aware of the change or agrees with it. Despite this, few historians have justified their terminology. After surveying the extent of the preference for ‘enslaved person’, I discuss arguments for and against it. Supporters of using ‘enslaved person’ argue that this term emphasises that a person was forced into slavery – but this emphasis means it is less able to accommodate early medieval cases where people sold themselves into slavery. The accompanying preference for ‘enslaver’ over ‘master’ obscures dynamics of ownership and manumission. In addition, ‘enslaved people’ and ‘enslaver’ do not necessarily bring us away from the perspective of slaveholders to the perspective of slaves. Nor are they essential for readers to appreciate the humanity of slaves. Overall, historians should use this issue as an opportunity to reflect on the extent to which scholarship of transatlantic slavery should set the terms of debate for slavery studies in general.

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“…Carolingian examples demonstrate how and under what circumstances these challenges could have occurred, with most disputes featuring tenants forced to defend their free status in the face of lords' attempts to 'reclaim' dues and obligations supposedly owed by the tenants' ancestors. 75 However, one late-eighth-century formula from the monastery of Murbach indicates that the mancipia strove to take advantage of their landowner's legal conflict. In the confusion of the Alemannic uprising of the 740s, the unfree tenants were able to claim free status with some degree of success, and the monastery lamented the loss of these dependents in a petition to Charlemagne some decades later.…”

Section: H a L L E N G E S T O O W N E R S H I Pmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slave Resistance in Early Medieval England

Fontaine¹

2020

Anglo-Saxon England

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Considering early medieval slave resistance proves difficult, given our limited knowledge of all people of low status, especially slaves. Without oral histories, slave narratives, or strong indications of agency, we cannot confidently move beyond discussion of what slave-owners feared into what slaves intended. In lieu of broad discussion of slave agency for early medieval England, we can speak instead of the anticipated problems of slave-ownership. Elites were most concerned by behaviours which could fall into three overlapping categories of ‘problems’: those of property ownership, labour and violence. Each issue focusses heavily on legal responsibility for actions by slaves within a communal compensation-based legal system. Examination of these fears indicates that lawmakers and slave-owning elites were consistently engaged in problematizing slave-ownership, either in reaction to known slave behaviour or in anticipation of it. What emerges, then, is a situation in which both real and imagined acts of resistance helped shape ideas of power and authority both at a personal and administrative level. The expectations of slave behaviour also illuminate some aspects of slavery’s role in society.

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Slavery in the Carolingian Empire

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Human–animal entanglements in the early medieval European slave trade: re‐reading the Raffelstetten customs regulations

Human–animal entanglements in the early medieval European slave trade: re‐reading the Raffelstetten customs regulations

‘Slaves’ and ‘Slave Owners’ or ‘Enslaved People’ and ‘Enslavers’?

Slave Resistance in Early Medieval England

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