Open [38.2 MB]

Appendices
1
ery are numerous in the sixth. In Irish medieval literature
there are numerous references to slaves brought from
beyond the sea to Ireland, most of whom must have been
English. In the sixth century Jewish slave dealers were
in the habit of selling in Gaul, Italy and other countries
slaves obtained in England. The story is well known of
the English slaves in the market place at Rome whose fair
hair and complexion, differing from those of the South,
drew Gregory's attention. The Pope also in 595 wrote
to Candidus, a priest in Gaul, enjoining him to redeem
English slaves who might be trained as monks and sent
to Rome, 2
and some commentators believe that it was this
letter of Gregory's that gave rise to the obviously
apocryphal angel-story of the slave boys
in Rome. St.
Eligius of France is recorded as buying and ransoming
English slaves. St. Aidan, the apostle of Northumbria,
as we have seen, used most of his superfluous wealth in
the redemption of Anglo-Saxon males and made some of
them auxiliaries in the regeneration of the aborigines of
the island.
Slaves began to be exported from England almost from
the period of its settlement by tribes from Germany.
There had been a certain amount of traffic in British
slaves during the Roman period, as the biographies of
Irishmen bearing on that period bear witness, but this
earlier traffic was on a scale very much smaller than that
which the English traffic attained. Selling men beyond the
seas is mentioned in the Kentish laws as an alternative to
1 William of Malmesbury talks of the practice (morem) as "vetustiseimum"
"inveteratum," and handed down from ancestors to their descendants
(a proavis in nepotes transfusum) (Anglia Sacra II, p. 258).
2 "We desire thy Love to procure with the money thou mayst receive
clothing for the poor or English boys of about seventeen or eighteen years
of age, who may profit by being given to God in monasteries" (Epistles of
St. Gregory, Book VI, Ep. VII, Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, Vol. XII, p.
190).
303