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Normans and Slavery: Breaking the Bonds

Whilst many Anglo-Saxons suffered under the Norman yoke, the Conquest came with the promise of freedom for England’s slaves. The fortunes of modern Bristol were founded on slavery.

‘I go out at daybreak, goading the oxen to the field, and I join them to the plough; there is not a winter so harsh that I dare not lurk at home for fear of my master.’ So begins a famous passage written by Aelfric, a late tenth-century abbot of Eynsham, imagining the pains of an unfree ploughman. To the founding fathers of academic history – the scholars of late Victorian and early 20th-century England – the Anglo-Saxons were ‘us’, and it was from them that we derived much of our identity and culture: not only our language, but also our cherished institutions, such as our shires and boroughs, and our instinctive tendency towards freedom, fair play and democracy. ‘In their unparalleled savagery,’ wrote the half-English, half-Norman Henry of Huntingdon in the early 12th century, ‘they surpassed all other peoples.’ Another Anglo-Norman chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, concurred: ‘They arrogantly abused their authority and mercilessly slaughtered the native people like the scourge of God smiting them for their sins.’

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