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Ireland and the Making
of Britain
capital punishment. The dooms of Ina forbade the men
of Wessex to sell a countryman beyond the seas, even if
he were really a slave or justly condemned to slavery:
"If anyone sell his own countryman, bond or free, tho
he be guilty, overseas, let him pay for them according to
his wer." 1
The place overseas from Wessex was mani-
festly Ireland. The prohibitions are repeated down to
Ethelred's "that Christian men and condemned be not
sold out of the country, especially into a heathen nation;
and be it jealously guarded against that those souls perish
not that Christ bought with his own life" in which we
sense the admonition of Irish clerics against a traffic dis-
honoring alike to the principals and the victim. They
are more forcibly exprest in the canons and penitentials
of the English Church. Archbishop Theodore prohibited
the selling of children into slavery by parents after the
age of seven. Ecgberht of York threatened with excommunication
on the sale of a child or of kinsfolk.
The Danes, after they had defeated the English, herded
them together, and attached them to themselves as body
slaves and personal property. A great many of them
they sent over the sea and delivered to continental deal-
ers. William of Malmesbury says of Canute's sister,
the wife of Godwin, that "she was in the habit of purchasing
companies of slaves in England and sending them
into Denmark; more especially girls whose good looks
and age made them of greater value that she might
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accumulate money by this horrible traffic." The invad-
ing French from Normandy and the other French prov-
inces, following the Danes, took advantage of the general
degradation of the country and the wealth of Franco-Nor-
iStubbs, Select Charters, p. 61.
2De Gestis Regum, Lib. II, c. 13 (Giles edition, p. 222).
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