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Appendices
man nobles was said sometimes to spring from the breed-
ing of Anglo-Saxon slaves for the market.1
The testimony bearing on the traffic points to an inde-
scribable demoralization among the English and brings
home some of the herculean difficulties with which the
Irish missionaries had to contend in a milieu where brutal
and suicidal excess had resulted in dissolving the foun-
dations of even natural virtue and decency. Thus Wil-
liam of Malmesbury, describing conditions in England,
remarks: "Unnatural as was such conduct it was often
the fact that heads of families, after seducing the women
of their household, either sold them to other men or to
houses of bad repute." 2
In the Latin life of Wulstan,
bishop of Worcester (d. 1022) founded on the Anglo-
Saxon life of Coleman, we are told that it was a common
sight all over England to see long trains of young
men and women of the English chained together and
marched by slave dealers to the neighboring ports to be
shipt to Ireland as slaves.3 The unfortunates were
purchased by slave-drivers from their own families and
were treated with a cruelty that made them, as the biography
tells us, an object of pity even to the barbarous
West Saxons through whose villages they were marched
on their way to the sea.* The native vendors of the girls
were in the habit of putting them in a condition of
i The Irish Scots in North Britain, in line with their compatriots in Ireland,
were large owners of English slaves. Thus Symeon of Durham (Historia
Regum, II, 192) observes: "Scotland was filled with slaves and handmaids
of the English race so that even to this day cannot be found, I do not say a
hamlet, but even a hut, without them." Symeon explains this large slave
population by the captures of prisoners after the Battle of Carman (1018)
in the course of which the Irish forces in Scotland inflicted a terrible
defeat on the English; but the explanation is obviously insufficient. The greater
number of the slaves must have come from trading between the Irish in
Scotland and the English.
2De Gestis Regum, Lib. Ill (Giles, ed., p. 279).
3 Videres et gemeres concatenates sunibus miserorum ordines et utriusque
sexus adolescentes (Anglia Sacra II, p. 268).
< Barbaris miserationi essent (Ibid.).
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