by Ian Mortimer
Slavery is an ancient institution, and medieval slavery had its origins in the Roman Empire. The Roman legal principle of dominium held that ownership of things went far further than simply owning them; it extended to doing what you liked with them – and ‘things’ included people. After the Western Roman Empire broke up in the fifth century, each of the new kingdoms that emerged applied its own limits to this principle, and both slaves and slave owners fell under the kingdom’s own laws. Different rules developed about whether a free woman who married a slave became a slave herself and vice versa; or whether a man who married a slave not knowing her status was at liberty to leave her. In some places a man was entitled to sell his wife into slavery, thereby annulling the marriage. If a man sold himself into slavery, it did not necessarily follow that his wife and children also became slaves, for they had been born free; but nor did they necessarily retain their freedom. In some kingdoms, a man who killed his slave had to perform penance, its severity depending on whether the slave was guilty of transgression or the master was just indulging himself. Some laws required a man who had two sons by one slave girl to set her free. Certain regions accepted that slaves could keep any money they earned, so that they might buy their freedom. The laws of King Ine of Wessex, adopted by Alfred the Great, laid down that if a master forced his slave to work on a Sunday, the slave was automatically set free and the master fined thirty shillings.
Among all these variations, there is one fundamental difference that distinguishes the slave from the unfree villein or serf of the feudal system. The lord of a manor could impose restrictions on what his serfs did, whom they might marry, where they could go and what land they worked, but this was by virtue of their attachment to the manor. The serf was bound to the land, and his services and duties were inherited, transferred or sold with it. It was therefore an indirect form of servitude, and that implied several other important differences. The powers of the lord were limited by custom, and the serfs on a manor thus enjoyed certain rights. A slave, on the other hand, was property, pure and simple. He or she could be bought and sold independently of his or her spouse, or they might be transferred as a pair. He or she could be beaten, maimed, castrated, raped, forced to work all hours (except, as mentioned, in some kingdoms, on Sundays) and even killed, without any measure of recrimination against the owner. It wasn’t simply the case that slaves were second-class citizens. The peasants were the second-class citizens. Slaves weren’t citizens at all.
You would have thought that the Christian Church might have suppressed slavery. It was torn, however. On the one hand there was the view expressed by Pope Gregory the Great in the late sixth century: that mankind was created free by nature and therefore it was morally just to restore men and women to the freedom to which they had been born. On the other, there were men like St Gerald of Aurillac three centuries later, who freed many slaves at the time of his death but while alive regarded them as his property – as is shown by his very unsaintly threats to mutilate a number of them for not being sufficiently obedient.7 Part of the problem was that, as we have seen, the Church had limited influence in the early eleventh century, and lacked the power and means to hold unscrupulous lords to moral account. But the fundamental issue was that slaves were property. If the Church was reluctant to give away its own property, how could it urge wealthy individuals to give up theirs? In towns such as Cambrai, Verdun and Magdeburg, the bishop was even paid a tax on the sale of every slave. In order to grow and exert its authority, the Church needed the help of wealthy individuals whose prosperity depended on the labour of slaves. Such men were unlikely to support a Church that denied them their wealth. The Church was thus trapped between its moral mission and its need for money and influence.
So what changed over the course of the eleventh century? To answer this question we must examine why people were enslaved in the first place. To begin with, men and women captured in war were frequently sold as slaves. This was standard practice both within Christendom and beyond the periphery. Christian English slaves were sold to Denmark in the reign of Cnut. English slaves, captured by pirates, were sold in Ireland. Irish and Welsh slaves were sold in England. Our word ‘slave’ derives from the Slavs, who had not yet been converted to Christianity and were thus very vulnerable to the raids of Christian slavers. But not all enslavement was due to war: some people sold themselves into slavery. That slavery could be a self-inflicted condition may come as a shock to us today but sometimes people had no choice: they sold themselves or members of their family to avoid starvation. For others still, slavery was a form of punishment. A robber caught stealing might be made his victim’s slave rather than being put to death. In some kingdoms, traitors were punished with a sentence of slavery. Clergymen who attempted to justify slavery argued that it was more merciful to enslave a criminal or defeated soldier than to hang him. Hrabanus Maurus, the author of one of the books to be found in the bishop’s house in Crediton in 1001, stressed this very fact.
A number of social developments brought this situation to an end. First there was the Church’s promotion of peace. With a diminished level of conflict, there were fewer opportunities to enslave one’s enemies. There was also a long period of economic growth: wasteland was cleared, marshland drained and new manors founded, and there was an altogether greater volume of trade. It stands to reason that if the two principal causes of enslavement were cultural conflict and extreme poverty, and Europe experienced less of both, then slavery was likely to decrease. Increased prosperity also led to the growth of urban life in Germany, France and Italy in the late eleventh century; slaves could now run away to a large town and sell their labour. In addition, lords were less keen to take responsibility for feeding slaves who were not productive; the feudal peasant, bound to the land, who worked for the lord for free but fed himself, was a more economic unit. On top of these factors, the growing wealth and power of the Church gradually allowed it to strengthen its moral stand. The Peace of God movement included the provision that slaves who ran away at its gatherings could be permanently free. The practice of punishing criminals with enslavement also began to disappear. Finally there was the impact of individual rulers’ policies. Several contemporary writers state that William the Conqueror firmly believed that slavery was barbaric and that he took measures to stop the trade in slaves.8 At the end of his reign, 6 out of 28 men in the manor of Moreton were still described as slaves (servi), but in the country as a whole, slaves represented about 10 per cent of the population. The Church reinforced the Conqueror’s anti-slavery message after his death. In 1102, the Synod of London declared that ‘never again should anyone engage in the infamous business, prevalent in England, of selling men like animals’. By that time slavery had all but disappeared from France, central Italy and Catalonia.9 Although it persisted in the Celtic countries for another century or so, and in eastern Europe for much longer, the practice of selling human beings in the marketplace, which had been normal in the West since prehistory, was rapidly coming to an end.
Structural engineering
The fourth great change of the eleventh century still characterises the towns we live in today. Broadly speaking, in 1001, buildings in Western Europe were small and architecturally unambitious, conforming to the style and scale of examples of Roman construction that had survived from the ancient world. Most cathedrals were barely the size of a large parish church today, with wooden roofs no more than 40 feet above the ground. By 1100, however, architects and structural engineers had transcended the limits of their Roman forebears, developing the style we know today as Romanesque. Hundreds of huge buildings, some with vaulted ceilings over 70 feet high and towers of over 160 feet, had been built across Europe; hundreds more were under construction. Similarly, in 1001, there were very few defensive buildings that we would recognise as a castle; by the end of the century, there were tens of thousands. In the eleventh century, people in Europe learnt to build strong walls and lofty towers – and they did so in every corner of Christendom.
/> By now it will hardly come as a surprise to learn that the growing ambitions of the Church were a major influence on these developments. The rebuilding of Cluny, the Burgundian church at the heart of the rapidly spreading Cluniac order, had started in 955. When it was dedicated in 981, it was enormous – breathtakingly so for the time – with seven bays in its nave and side aisles. In the early eleventh century, it carried on growing and acquiring new features, such as a narthex and a tunnel-vaulted ceiling (which was good for carrying plainsong). Another huge tunnel-vaulted church was simultaneously under construction at the abbey of St Philibert in Tournus, 20 miles from Cluny, and in 1001, work began on the church of St Bénigne in Dijon, 80 miles to the north. The reason why these magnificent early Romanesque churches first appeared in Burgundy may have been a desire to build fireproof stone buildings after the attacks of the Magyars in the middle of the tenth century. On the whole, however, the motivation for new construction normally comes down to money, and Cluny certainly had plenty of it. The routes from Italy to northern France passed through the region, bringing merchants and pilgrims – and their cash. But whatever the reason, these three churches, completed in the first two decades of the eleventh century, proved hugely influential. In the case of Cluny, this was because priors from daughter houses regularly returned to the order’s mother house. They now wanted a church of their own like that of Cluny, and from here word spread beyond the limits of the Cluniac family.
Another religious inspiration for the new architecture was the Reconquista, the recapture of Spain from the Muslims. Santiago de Compostela, in the kingdom of León, had been a major pilgrimage destination since the ninth century, but in 997, it had been sacked by Almanzor, the military ruler of Muslim Spain. Almanzor had died in 1002, and the caliphate of Córdoba never fully recovered from the infighting that followed. The Christian kingdoms of Spain saw their chance and went on the offensive, pushing the frontier deep into Spain and securing the land for the Christian faith by building castles and churches. They encouraged knights to come to fight in their religious war. Pilgrims could once more make the journey to Santiago de Compostela in relative safety. A number of impressive Romanesque churches were constructed along the main routes that these travellers took through France on their way to Spain, at Tours, Limoges, Conques and Toulouse, as well as at the final destination itself. These towns gathered money from those who visited and spent it on enlarging their churches, so that future knights and pilgrims should stand in awe at the wonder of God. As the century went on, the successes of the Reconquista encouraged ever more visitors, whose donations further fuelled the church-building boom.
The Romanesque style spread with extraordinary rapidity from central France, as patrons and masons elsewhere saw what they might now build in stone. In Normandy, Duke William oversaw the consecration of Jumièges Abbey in 1067, and together with his wife he founded two large abbey churches at Caen. The Holy Roman Empire also embraced the new fashion eagerly, shifting away from Carolingian-style churches towards the construction of massive Romanesque cathedrals like that at Speyer, begun about 1030, where the emperors were now buried. The huge wealth generated in Italy by the emerging merchant states of Pisa, Florence, Milan and Genoa ensured that southern Europe did not miss out. Pisa Cathedral was begun in 1063, and the 160-foot (48.8-metre) nine-stage tower of Pomposa Abbey dates from the same year. Venice, which had always looked to Constantinople and the East rather than to France for inspiration, also began to build on a massive scale. St Mark’s Basilica was begun in 1063, and although it was designed along Byzantine lines, in its scale it was clearly influenced by the new churches of France and Germany. By the end of the eleventh century, even England had been caught up in the fever of building cathedrals and abbey churches. Nothing of any significance had been constructed before the Norman Conquest, but that momentous event was the start of many important rebuildings and foundations. The Cluniacs began to build their first monastery in England at Lewes in about 1079. Apart from Edward the Confessor’s church at Westminster, every single cathedral and abbey church in the kingdom was rebuilt within fifty years of the Normans’ arrival.10 The lasting marks of this transformation include parts of St Albans Abbey (now Cathedral, begun c.1077), Gloucester Abbey (now Cathedral, begun 1087), Winchester Cathedral (begun 1079), Durham Cathedral (begun 1093) and Norwich Cathedral (begun 1096).
So what, you might ask: does it matter? After all, exchanging one building style for another is hardly a huge change in the way people live their lives. But the importance here lies not in the symbolism of building loftier churches, but in the technology that made them possible – innovations in structural engineering. Building high churches of stone, with vaults capable of withstanding the attacks of savage Magyars intent on burning everything in their path, had obvious military uses. Thus it should come as no surprise that the development of large-scale Romanesque architecture runs hand in hand with that of the castle.
The castle became the physical embodiment of feudalism. When a king endowed a lord with a manor, he thereby made the lord responsible for the safe keeping of the people who lived there. And to protect their land, its people and their produce, from the late tenth century lords started building fortified residences in stone and wood. The earliest castle we know of is Doué-la-Fontaine, which was fortified about 950, probably as a result of the rivalry between the counts of Blois and the counts of Anjou. At the beginning of the eleventh century, Fulk Nerra built Langeais and more than a dozen other castles in his county of Anjou. These were mostly square stone donjons with thick walls and entrances at first-floor level, to withstand enemy attacks. An impregnable castle meant that it was very unlikely that a lord would lose control of his territory, even if it was overrun by his enemies. All he had to do was wait until they ran short of food or were off guard, so they would abandon the siege or could be beaten in a surprise attack. Castles thus quickly became the nails by which kings and lords could fasten control on a region and ensure its longterm security and stability. Throughout the century, as improvements in structural engineering led to higher and stronger towers, so a lord’s feudal ties to his land grew stronger.
Just how important the castle was in Europe can be seen by what happened in regions that had to do without them. In 711, the Visigothic kingdom of Spain had simply melted under the heat of the Muslim invasion, having no castles in which the population could take shelter. As we have seen, the Viking and Magyar attacks of the ninth and tenth centuries left local communities helpless. And Norman chroniclers ascribe the failure of the English resistance in 1066 to their lack of castles. The only defences that William the Conqueror had to negotiate were the old walled burghs – fortified towns – but these were few and far between. Although the gates were barred against William at Exeter in 1068, the citizens were not strong enough to man such a long wall and withstand his forces. Soon after their surrender, William built a castle to control the city. In London, he constructed three castles to exert his authority, the Tower being the outstanding survival, and at York he built two castles to guard the city. In all, by 1100, more than 500 castles had been built in England. The country had changed from being an almost defenceless kingdom to one bristling with towers. The same change took place throughout Europe. In every city in Italy, for example, the tall towers of the most powerful families reached up like outstretched arms proudly punching the sky. It became increasingly difficult for one king simply to conquer another’s land by force alone. The conquest of Normandy by the French in 1204 and that of English-controlled Gascony in 1453 prove that it was not impossible, but in most places the land was so heavily defended with castles that success depended on more than mere military prowess; it required the local lords to change sides. In this way feudalism’s physical manifestation contributed to the security of Europe, and further strengthened the peace that was beginning to spread through Christendom.
Conclusion
We have seen how some of the key features that we associate with the medieval pe
riod – papal supremacy, parish organisation, monastic orders, castles and great cathedrals – were barely present in 1001 but fully formed by 1100. But the old world came to an end in other ways too. The eleventh century saw a profound change in the nature and extent of war and violence, and the beginning of the end of slavery. What is perhaps most extraordinary is the degree to which the Church took a role in all these things. Even the end of the Viking invasions can ultimately be associated with the influence of the Church, as Christianity spread into Scandinavia and beyond.
What did all that mean for my predecessors in Moreton? Over the course of the century, priests would have visited more regularly, building the first church here around the year 1100. It was a small structure, dark inside, with a crudely carved granite frieze around the outside showing the tree of life, abstract swirls and mythical monsters. Primitive though it may have appeared to a traveller from Byzantium, it connected Moreton permanently to the rest of Christendom. As elsewhere in Christian Europe, here parishioners heard sermons on morality and godliness as part of their way of life. After the seat of diocesan administration had shifted to Exeter in 1050, the building of a new cathedral there brought learning to the region on an unprecedented scale. From the time of its foundation, there were at least 55 books in its library, donated by Bishop Leoffic. The building of a royal castle not only established Norman control, through the watchful eye of the king’s sheriff, it also impressed the king’s authority on the city. All the major Norman lords with lands in Devon had houses in Exeter, and in 1087 it attracted a new Benedictine monastery. The city’s market grew accordingly to serve the expanding population, and this in turn encouraged the clearing of woods and moorland in order to grow more produce. Those leaving Moreton no longer had to fear the Vikings, and the prosperity of Exeter meant they had many reasons to make the 13-mile journey more regularly. Doing so, with newly minted silver pennies in their purses, would have made them aware that they were no longer eking out a living at the very fringe of Christendom; they were part of a much larger whole.