AS Conquest

[Ray Hendon]

----- Original Message -----
From: <JoatSimeon at aol.com>
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2000 1:56 PM

> In a message dated 12/6/00 9:34:33 PM Mountain Standard Time,
> rayhendon at satx.rr.com writes:

> << From my limited study of Saxons, Jutes and Angles, slavery (in the Roman
>  sense of definition) was not practiced among these peoples.

> -- well, that's extremely odd, since the language has a word which translates
> precisely as "slave", and slaves were an export from England in the
> pre-conversion period, and as late as the Domesday Book about 10% of the
> population are listed as slaves. (With the highest proportion in the western
> shires).

> In fact, slavery was a universal (but not overwhelmingly important)
> institution in all the pre-Christian Germanic societies; slaves were
> generally war-captives or their children.

The time period you refer to is after the Saxons, etc had become established
in England.  Before they came, however, their community groups did not have
a slave institution that was even remotely like the Roman counterpart.
First, "slaves" in Saxony were temporary--not permanent.  Recall in Rome
that once a person became a slave they, and all their children were slaves
until released by their owner, if ever.  The Saxons allowed slaverey for
their people to be wiped from the slate, so to speak, within seven
generations when full citizenship would be restored.  Personally, I think
their word for slavery would be closer to the English word for "bankrupt."
Also, the children of Saxon slaves were not necessairly slaves, whereas in
Rome they were.

Recall that the Pope who arranged to send the first Roman Catholic
missionaries to England did so when he observed the beauty of English
children for sale in a Roman slave market.  It looks to me as if the Saxons
adapted some Roman institutions, but England never became anything like Rome
in becoming completely dependent on slaves to do much of the grunt work.
The Saxons were used to doing things for themselves, like all
self-sufficient farmers, and slavery was not a viable way of working small
farms, pastures and woodlands in north-west Europe.  The Teutons were, in
general, much more egalatarian than the Romans, and they never seem to have
departed from this attitude.

You might know of another semantical oddity between Saxons and Romans: the
word "king," was not in the Saxon vocabulary, it seems,  until well after
the Roman incursions into Saxony.  I think it was Caesar who pointed out
that when he was negotiating with a Saxon "king" the Saxon objected to being
called that word.  He insisted that his position was that of "wise man."
The Saxons, it seemed, did temporarily appoint a person who had virtual
total power when war conditions came about, but a more precise definition of
this position would equate it with the Roman word "dictator," which itself,
of course, does not conform to the contemporary English word dictator.  We
use the word dictator in meaning more closely associated with the Roman word
for tyrant.  And unless conquored by another tribe, tyrants were not an
institution in pre-Roman Saxony.