Chapter 20 - Slavery in Northern Europe (Scandinavia and Iceland) and the British Isles, 500–1420

Summary

The societies of medieval Northern Europe were slave-holding societies that revered military prowess and expressed wealth and power through symbols of warrior-hood. They were intensely hierarchical and patriarchal societies in which control, guardianship and naked power over people equated with status. Despite the growth of governmental and religious institutions, they remained societies obsessed with notions of honor and shame, with lineage and kinship, identity and belonging. This chapter explores some problematic historiographical assumptions around the diminishing significance of slavery in these cultural contexts, arguing that only when we acknowledge and recognize the slave-holding nature of these societies are we are better able to understand them. Close analysis of the lifestyle, attitudes, and cultural conceptions of the slave-holder and the enslaver are therefore essential. Indeed slave-holding behaviours are evident in a wide range of medieval sources including sagas, poetry, myths, chronicles, legal texts, manorial records, wills and manumissions as well as penitentials, sermons and hagiography. These sources reveal that enslaved people were regarded as the weakest, most dishonorable and degraded of all individuals. Paradoxically, they highlight that the marginalisation of enslaved human beings was extremely important for these communities - underpinning broader power relations and defining and reinforcing the boundaries of community identity and belonging.