In 1661, the Barbadian Assembly passed the first comprehensive slave code in the English Americas to ‘better manage its profitable but unruly slave society’. The Act was entitled ‘An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes’. The Barbadian slave code was the ‘premier slave code in the English colonies’ by early eighteenth century due to its central role in launching slave codes throughout the English slave holding territories such as Jamaica, Antigua and South Carolina. This codified legislation was an innovation of English police law, property law, laws of villeinage, martial law and various vagrancy regulations. This paper delves into pre-colonial English society to identify various laws comparable with colonial slave legislation, examining whether these influenced the various slave codes, to decipher what exactly was adapted, borrowed or transplanted into the colonial slave laws. The Slave Act's preamble stated that the law's purpose was to ‘protect them (the slaves) as we do men's other goods and chattels’. Confirming that African slaves would be legally treated and seen as chattel property. English Property law and villeinage are the epicentres of the origin arguments as both contribute to the slaves as chattel phenomenon. Hence, this presentation also analyses and ascertains slave status definition in colonial West Indian law. Ultimately, transplantation was central to development within colonial legislation, not only legal transplants from England to the colonies but throughout the Atlantic world. What this inter and intra connectivity of laws meant for the region’s development is the essence of this research.

The first part of this chapter draws attention to some largely overlooked passages in the early twelfth-century legal compilation, Leis Willelme. This largely consists of Old English laws but contains some additions which were designed to remedy the deficiencies of those laws when it came to disciplining the peasantry. They would also, if put into effect, have considerably undermined the traditional system of vouching to warranty. The second part of the chapter describes a late twelfth-century view of how matters were settled between the newcomers and the indigenous landholders in the aftermath of the Conquest. Richard FitzNigel’s ‘Dialogue of the Exchequer’ describes a fractured process, one of negotiation and re-negotiation before ‘lawful agreements’ were arrived at, conveying ‘inviolable right’. That this became an accepted narrative, justifying e social relationships throughout society appears in Bracton’s doctrine of villeinage in the thirteenth century and that of the author of ‘the Mirror of Justices’ early in the fourteenth.

This chapter suggests that while the landholding elite had developed a strong sense of itself as a distinct social group with interests in common, peasants were slower to do so. Part of the explanation for this may lie in the fact that there were some obvious distinctions between those who worked in exchange for holdings on manorial inlands and those with independent farms on the hidated land of the warland. Reasons why collective action employed in resistance to landlord demands took a long time to build in England at a time may have included Norman violence, or the threat of it. Pressure on peasants after the Conquest could well have taken some time to build up, as new lords took time to consolidate, let alone increase, what they expected their tenants to provide. Many peasants in the eleventh and early twelfth centuries would have had no reason to regard themselves as members of an inferior class: feudal tenure did not distinguish peasants from the rest of the free: it took the work of lawyers constructing the law of villeinage, case by case, to do that. Only when the manor became fully effective as an economic unit would peasants would become capable of acting as a ‘political’ community with a common interest.