A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons Read Online Free PDF Page A

assumes, beautiful and certainly a woman of spirit and ambitionsince Clovis married her. When he died a few years later, Queen Balthildis became regent for their son Chlotar III and, incidentally, a campaigner against the slave trade. She was a generous benefactor of the monastic movement and in particular the convent of Chelles, near Paris, which she richly endowed and where she may have retired when ousted from the regency in 665. It became a favourite nunnery with English novices of noble birth.
    Such a career was, of course, sensational. Few slaves became queens! And many people, even modest husbandmen, might own slaves. War was not the only route to slavery. It might be imposed as a sentence for a criminal offence: Clause 7 of the Laws of Ine of Wessex provides that if a man’s wife and family connive at his thieving they may all be sent into slavery. In times of famine people might render themselves voluntarily into servitude. But slaves could gain their freedom. And in the laws of Alfred they even had some privileges; they were allowed holidays on four days of the year so that they might sell, if they wished, any gifts they had received as charity. The ceremony of manumission marked the transition by the giving of weapons. Freedom brought obligations as well as privileges; the freeman had the right to take his oath, he was ‘law-worthy’; he might also be called upon to give his oath as an oath helper to support his lord at law. He also had the right to defend himself and his own, as well as the duty to defend his lord when called upon to do so. But if a kinsman or his lord were killed a freeman had not only the legal right, but also the moral obligation, to exact a life in revenge or settle for the blood money, the ‘wergild’, awarded by the law. However, even the ties of kinship and the pursuit of a blood feud took second place to the obligations of lordship.
    Slavery was the big divide and wergild (literally ‘man price’) was the big test as to which side of it one stood. On either side there were degrees of social standing but one thing does seem to have been absolute: to whom was a person’s wergild paid in case of injury or death? If you or your kin received the payment you were free.If the money was paid to your lord or master you were a slave ( theow). The list of charges found in the laws of Ine for the king’s British subjects ( wealhs ) has, at the bottom of the heap, the landless man valued at no more than 50 shillings. He was taken to be the equivalent of a slave. Above him the scale rises to a landowner with a value of 600 shillings, the highest British rating. The equivalent figure for his English subjects would be twice that.
    The West Saxons were pushing back the frontiers of British Dumnonia, which meant enlarging the British population within their frontiers and subject to their authority. In modern terms, discrimination against these new subjects by wergild values may seem unacceptable; however, insofar as a man without a wergild had no standing at all in law, the Welsh/British population was now in principle within the system.
    Wergild was basic to that system in all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. Not only was it the blood money due to a victim or his or her family in case of injury or death, it was also the measure of compensation payable by him/her in the case of serious breaches of the law and the value of the oath required to clear him/her of the accusation. In short it was his/her value at law; if charged with some major offence, one had the right to vindicate oneself by finding ‘oath helpers’ of sufficient standing to swear to one’s innocence.
    Above the unfree we find a broad swath of social ranks in the loose category of the ‘ordinary free man’ or ceorl. Historians disagree over the exact extent of the freedoms he enjoyed, the degree of his economic and judicial obligations to his lord and his actual economic standing. His standing seems to have varied according to time and