1215: The Year of Magna Carta Ebook by Danny Danziger Read Free Book Online

investment needed to make radical innovations. In this climate of financial rationality, it was possible to reckon that using slave labour was not cost-effective and should be abandoned. Slavery in Britain had not disappeared with the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. On the contrary it was still flourishing when William I conquered England in 1066. As in Roman times much of the hardest work was done by slaves: ploughing by male slaves, grinding corn with hand mills by slave women. In a slave-owning society, such as Anglo-Saxon England, a master who killed his own slave was guilty of a sin, but not of a crime. Slaves were bought and sold at market – human flexibility meant that one healthy male might cost as much as a plough team of eight oxen. Captured slaves were among the most desirable profits of war. But William I came from Normandy, where slavery was already a thing of the past, and he disapproved. He put an end to the slave trade. Gradually slaves became more expensive to acquire. For centuries an occasional rich lord on his deathbed had been moved to free slaves as an act of Christian piety, but now – at long last – traditional notions of charity went hand in hand with the profit motive. In return for burdensome, often full-time services as ploughmen and shepherds, slaves were freed and given small tenements. By the 1120s Englishmen looked upon slavery as a barbarous custom happily no longer practised in their modern and civilised society. A hundred years before Magna Carta granted rights to freemen, an even more fundamental kind of freedom had been established.
    The lords of the Magna Carta generation were able, however, to win a victory in the law courts whose effect was to create serfdom – a condition which many have believed to be just a new kind of slavery. Economic and social circumstance inevitably meant that some people were much less free than others. Those tenants who owed rent in the form of long hours of work on their landlord’s estates had little freedom of choice about how they spent their days. A tenant who was not allowed to leave his holding or give his daughter in marriage without his lord’s permission – a permission for which he had to pay – felt a frustrating lack of freedom. Such tenant farmers were significantly less free than those who owed cash rents and could earn their money as they chose. Some tenants were prosperous farmers; others were churls or peasants. It had always been part of the morality of kingship that the king and his courts would protect freemen against unjustified oppression – but never to the extent that they would help ‘peasants’ loosen the ties that bound them to their lords. So, the king’s judges formulated a new set of rules whose effect was to disbar half the population of England from access to the public courts. Those tenants who owed the heaviest services to their lords were told that they did not have the right to have their disputes heard in the royal courts as freemen did. In this sense they were unfree, and legally classified as serfs or villeins; and so were their children and their children’s children. From now on their disputes, whether with each other or with their lords, could only be heard in the manorial courts – the lords’ own courts.
    Records kept by these courts, the court rolls, survive from the late thirteenth century onwards. There is no doubt that this arrangement suited the landlords. ‘The churl should always be well plucked for he is like a willow that sprouts better the more often it is pollarded.’ Even so, in law there were limits to the oppression of serfs by their lords. No lord was legally entitled to kill or mutilate his serf, as owners could their slaves. Although a serf and his family were in effect bought and sold when the land on which he lived, his villein tenancy, was bought and sold, no individual serf was separated from his or her family and taken to market to be sold in the way that slaves –