Before 1066 From before Roman times, slavery was prevalent in Britain, with indigenous Britons being routinely exported. Following the
Roman conquest of Britain, slavery was expanded and industrialised. After the fall of Roman Britain, both the
Angles and
Saxons propagated the slave system. One of the earliest accounts of slaves from
early medieval Britain come from the description of fair-haired boys from
York seen in
Rome by
Pope Gregory the Great, in a biography written by an anonymous monk. Pagan Angles and Saxons were known to be exported from the British Isles over the English channel to Arras and Tournai and then across France to the Mediterranian via the great slave port of Marseilles. It is known that the Frisian slave dealers visited Anglo-Saxon London during the 7th and 8th centuries to purchase slaves, which they then sold along the river ways to the German cities and Southward to Paris. In 870, Vikings besieged and captured the stronghold of
Alt Clut (the capital of the
Kingdom of Strathclyde) and in 871 most of the site's inhabitants were taken, most probably by
Olaf the White and
Ivar the Boneless, to the
Dublin slave markets.
Maredudd ab Owain (d. 999) is said to have paid a large ransom for the return of 2,000 Welsh slaves. Anglo-Saxon opinion eventually turned against the sale of slaves abroad: a
law of Ine of Wessex stated that anyone selling his own countryman, whether bond or free, across the sea, was to pay his own
weregild in penalty, even when the man sold was guilty of a crime. Nevertheless, legal penalties and economic pressures that led to default in payments maintained the supply of slaves, and in the 11th century there was still a slave trade operating out of
Bristol, as a passage in the
Vita Wulfstani makes clear. The
Bodmin manumissions preserves the names and details of slaves freed in
Bodmin (then the principal town of
Cornwall) during the 9th and 10th centuries, indicating both that slavery existed in Cornwall at that time and that numerous Cornish slave-owners eventually set their slaves free.
Norman and medieval England According to the
Domesday Book census, over 10% of England's population in 1086 were slaves. While there was no legislation against slavery,
William the Conqueror introduced a law preventing the sale of slaves overseas. In 1102, the church
Council of London convened by
Anselm issued a decree: "Let no one dare hereafter to engage in the infamous business, prevalent in England, of selling men like animals." However, the Council had no legislative powers, and no act of law was valid unless signed by the monarch. Contemporary writers noted that the Scottish and Welsh took captives as slaves during raids, a practice which was no longer common in England by the 12th century. Some historians, like
John Gillingham, have asserted that by about 1200, the institution of slavery was largely non-existent in the British Isles. Academics such as Judith Spicksley, have argued that forms of slavery did in fact continue in England between the 12th and 17th centuries, but under other terms such as "serfs", "villein" and "bondsmen", however the serf or villein differed from the slave in that they could not be purchased as a moveable object who could be removed from his land; meaning that instead serfdom was closer to the purchasing of rental titles today than to true slavery. De facto slavery in the form of forced labour did still occur though, as in the carrying away of over a thousand children from Wales to be "servants", which is recorded as taking place in 1401.
Transportation Transportation to the colonies as a criminal or an
indentured servant served as punishment for both great and petty crimes in England from the 17th century until well into the 19th century. A sentence could be for life or for a specific period. The penal system required convicts to work on government projects such as road construction, building works and mining, or assigned them to free individuals as unpaid labour. Women were expected to work as domestic servants and farm labourers. Like slaves, indentured servants could be bought and sold, could not marry without the permission of their owner, were subject to physical punishment, and saw their obligation to labour enforced by the courts. However, they did retain certain heavily restricted rights; this contrasts with slaves who had none. A convict who had served part of his time might apply for a "ticket of leave", granting them some prescribed freedoms. This enabled some convicts to resume a more normal life, to marry and raise a family, and enabled a few to develop the colonies while removing them from the society. Exile was an essential component, and was thought to be a major deterrent to crime. Transportation was also seen as a humane and productive alternative to
execution, which would most likely have been the sentence for many if transportation had not been introduced. The transportation of English subjects overseas can be traced back to the English
Vagabonds Act 1597. During the reign of
Henry VIII, an estimated 72,000 people were put to death for a variety of crimes. An alternative practice, borrowed from the
Spanish, was to
commute the death sentence and allow the use of convicts as a labour force for the colonies. One of the first references to a person being transported comes in 1607 when "an apprentice dyer was sent to Virginia from
Bridewell for running away with his master's goods." The Act was put to little use despite attempts by
James I who, with limited success, tried to encourage its adoption by passing a series of Privy Council Orders in 1615, 1619 and 1620. Transportation was seldom used as a criminal sentence until the
Piracy Act 1717, "An Act for the further preventing Robbery, Burglary, and other Felonies, and for the more effectual Transportation of Felons, and unlawful Exporters of Wool; and for declaring the Law upon some Points relating to Pirates", established a seven-year penal transportation as a possible punishment for those convicted of lesser felonies, or as a possible sentence to which capital punishment might be commuted by royal pardon. Criminals were transported to North America from 1718 to 1776. When the American revolution made transportation to the Thirteen Colonies unfeasible, those sentenced to it were typically punished with imprisonment or hard labour instead. From 1787 to 1868, criminals convicted and sentenced under the Act were transported to the colonies in Australia. After the
Irish Rebellion of 1641 and subsequent Cromwellian invasion, the English Parliament passed the
Act for the Settlement of Ireland 1652 which classified the Irish population into several categories according to their degree of involvement in the uprising and the subsequent war. Those who had participated in the uprising or assisted the rebels in any way were sentenced to be hanged and to have their property confiscated. Other categories were sentenced to banishment with whole or partial confiscation of their estates. While the majority of the resettlement took place within Ireland to the province of
Connaught, perhaps as many as 50,000 were transported to the colonies in the West Indies and in North America. Irish, Welsh and Scottish people were sent to work on sugar plantations in
Barbados during the time of Cromwell. During the early colonial period, the Scots and the English, along with other western European nations, dealt with their "
Gypsy problem" by transporting them as slaves in large numbers to North America and the Caribbean. Cromwell shipped
Romanichal Gypsies as slaves to the southern plantations, and there is documentation of Gypsies being owned by former black slaves in Jamaica. Long before the
Highland Clearances, some chiefs, such as
Ewen Cameron of Lochiel, sold some of their clans into indenture in North America. Their goal was to alleviate over-population and lack of food resources in the glens. Numerous Highland
Jacobite supporters, captured in the aftermath of the
Battle of Culloden and rigorous Government sweeps of the Highlands, were imprisoned on ships on the
River Thames. Some were sentenced to transportation to the Carolinas as indentured servants.
"Slavery and bondage" in Scottish collieries For nearly two hundred years in the
history of coal mining in Scotland, miners were bonded to their "maisters" by a 1606 Act "Anent Coalyers and Salters". While this was loosely referred to as "slavery", this was not actual chattel slavery, in which people could be legally bought, owned and sold, but rather a form of forced labor and serfdom. The
Colliers and Salters (Scotland) Act 1775 stated that "many colliers and salters are in a state of slavery and bondage" and announced emancipation; those starting work after 1 July 1775 would not become slaves, while those already in a state of slavery could, after 7 or 10 years depending on their age, apply for a decree of the Sheriff Court granting their freedom. Few could afford this, until a further law in 1799 established their freedom and made this slavery and bondage illegal. The slavers got their name from the
Barbary Coast, that is, the Mediterranean shores of North Africa—what is now Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. There are reports of Barbary slave raids across Western Europe, including France, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, England and as far north as Iceland. Villagers along the south coast of England petitioned the king to protect them from abduction by Barbary pirates. Item 20 of The
Grand Remonstrance, a list of grievances against
Charles I presented to him in 1641, contains the following complaint about Barbary pirates of the Ottoman Empire abducting English people into slavery:
Enslaved Africans , showing two African boys, carrying money bags. The privateer
Sir John Hawkins of
Plymouth, a notable
Elizabethan seafarer, is widely acknowledged to be "the Pioneer of the English Slave Trade". In 1554, Hawkins formed a slave-trading syndicate, a group of merchants. He sailed with three ships for the Caribbean via
Sierra Leone, hijacked a Portuguese
slave ship and sold the 300 slaves from it in
Santo Domingo. During a second voyage in 1564, his crew captured 400 Africans and sold them at
Rio de la Hacha in present-day Colombia, making a 60% profit for his financiers. A third voyage involved both buying slaves directly in Africa and capturing another Portuguese slave ship with its cargo; upon reaching the Caribbean, Hawkins sold all his slaves. On his return, he published a book entitled
An Alliance to Raid for Slaves. It is estimated that Hawkins transported 1,500 enslaved Africans across the Atlantic during his four voyages of the 1560s, before stopping in 1568 after a battle with the Spanish in which he lost five of his seven ships. English involvement in the
Atlantic slave trade only resumed in the 1640s after the country acquired an American colony (
Virginia). Slavery was informally recognized on British soil, though slaveowners lacked some of the explicit property rights afforded overseas. By the mid-18th century,
London had the largest African population in Britain. The number of black people living in Britain by that point has been estimated by historians to be roughly 10,000, though contemporary reports put that number as high as 20,000. Some Africans living in Britain would run away from their masters, many of whom responded by placing advertisements in newspapers offering rewards for the returns. A number of former black slaves managed to achieve prominence in 18th-century British society.
Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780), known as "The Extraordinary Negro", opened his own grocer's shop in Westminster. He was famous for his poetry and music, and his friends included the novelist
Laurence Sterne,
David Garrick the actor and the
Duke and
Duchess of Montague. He is best known for his letters which were published after his death. Others, such as
Olaudah Equiano and
Ottobah Cugoano were equally well known, and along with Ignatius Sancho were active in the
British abolition campaign.
Runaways We know of several hundred enslaved Africans that escaped captivity while in Britain. While very little is known about most of the escapees, some insight can be gained into the lives of some, through 17th and 18th century newspaper adverts. • James Williams, born into slavery in North America circa 1735, escaped twice from Captain Isaac Younghusband of the ship "Pleasant”. After his first attempt, he spent several months as a free man in the British Army, as a drummer in Sir Robert Riche’s Dragoons. His enslaved status was discovered and he was discharged and returned to Captain Younghusband. Back on board the "Pleasant", James remained only a few days before successfully escaping again. • Stephen Walcott was employed by Abel Dottin Senior in the county of Oxfordshire. He fled from Abel Dottin's home, called 'English' near Nuffield with his companion John Phillip. The first newspaper advert seeking his capture and return appeared on September 10, 1759. It is evident he arrived in London at the beginning of August as he was baptised in St. Andrew's of the Wardrobe parish church on the 6th. His baptism record describes him as a Creole, confirming he was born in the West Indies, most likely in Barbados where the Dottin family owned several plantations, including Farley Hall/Grenade Hall. Abel Dottin senior died shortly after placing the advert and passed all of his property to his son and namesake, who placed another advertisement seeking the return of his property but this time referring only to Stephen. Ship's payroll books for 1760, prove he secured a job on the Royal Navy hospital ship Phoenix until September 29, 1761, when he was discharged after his status as an enslaved man was discovered. He was taken to the
Poultry Compter prison to await Dottin's arrival but, taking advantage of an eleven day delay, he escaped from prison and was still free when Dottin placed his last advert on the 18th of December. • A group of young men of African heritage escaped from Stanton’s Dockyard, Deptford in 1759. Known by the pseudonyms Boatswain, Johnny Mass, Jack Black and Harry Green, these four men ran from captivity aboard the Hampden packet ship, while she was being repaired. The ship’s commander, Richard Mackenzie, believed they had made their way to Gravesend intending to board another vessel. • John Lewis, was an enslaved African belonging to Captain James Reid, a mariner trading with Grenada who lived in East Lane, Rotherhithe. In April 1768, John returned to London on board the Lord Holland, East Indiaman – a merchant ship trading with India and China, lost the following year en-route to Madras. A few months later he absconded from the Reid house. An able seaman and servant, fluent in both English and French, he was highly valued. Captain Reid offered a significant reward of 5 guineas and expenses for his recapture and return, the equivalent of £500 today. • Not all enslaved individuals in Britain were African. The word 'black' was used in 17th and 18th century newspaper adverts to describe people from many different non-white cultures. In 1764, a young girl known as Henny or Henrietta, described as an ‘East India Black girl’ (possibly from Bengal) lived with Ebenezer Mussel and his 23 year old wife, Sarah in
Aldgate House,
Bethnal Green. Ebenezer was well known as a Justice of the Peace, and was also an influential book collector. Henny ran away from the Mussel's just moments before her baptism at
St Matthews Church, Bethnal Green. • Christmas Bennett was a woman of colour, of an uncertain age, who found herself
contracted to work for a Mr Gifford of Brunswick Row, Queen Square Great Ormond Street for an unknown number of years. In February 1748, after Christmas had been missing for three days and not returned, Mr Gifford placed an advert in the newspaper for more information about her whereabouts, though he was already aware that third parties could be hiding her somewhere around Whitechapel. :Brunswick Row was next to the
Foundling Hospital. A brickmaker called John Gifford is recorded in the Hospital accounts between 1739 and 1750. Gifford had expanded his business by building and renting houses on the site, from which the Hospital received an income. It is unclear whether Christmas was contracted to work as a household domestic servant, or in some other role relating to Gifford's brick and construction business. As an indentured employee she was contractually required to fulfil the term of her employment, whatever her legal status. In a flooded market, servants of all backgrounds commonly broke the terms of their employment and left without notice if a better position became available elsewhere. • Ann Moor was an enslaved woman of colour in London, who ran away from Lieutenant Colonel John Perry on 22 October 1720. After Ann had been gone for over 10 days, Perry placed an advert in the newspaper seeking information about her whereabouts. He stated that if she returned of her own free will she would be ‘kindly received’. Perry placed a second advert on 25 February 1721, requesting the address of an informer in order to pay a reward and giving
African House, Leadenhall Street as his point of contact. A member of the public, who had chosen to remain anonymous and not collected payment, had provided information leading to Ann's capture and return but she had remained free for a number of months. Perry joined the Royal Navy as a teenager, becoming a lieutenant in April 1689. Scarcely a year later, he lost his right arm after a battle with a French privateer. He was promoted to captain and placed in charge of HMS Cygnet, a fireship which spent a year in the West Indies. Upon returning to London, his ship was attacked and forced to surrender. Found guilty of failing in his duty to secure his ship, he was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and given a £1000 fine. Three years later he was pardoned and acquitted by the Lords Justices. Perry’s naval career then turned towards hydraulic engineering. After several years abroad, he was contracted to stop the breach in the Thames river wall at Dagenham, which was having a severe impact on shipping and trade in and out of London. Some 300 men built three dams which were completed in 1719. At the same time Ann ran away, Perry was spending considerable time in Rye, Dover and Dublin advising and designing harbour improvements. He never married, suggesting a dependence upon Ann, who may have been the only other member of his household. His regular absences would therefore have provided ample opportunity to leave and remain undetected for such a long time. As the second advert confirms, Ann had been returned to Perry by late February 1721, but it remains unclear whether she was still with him when he settled in Spalding, Lincolnshire in 1729. He died three years later, aged 63. Perhaps coincidentally, a woman called Ann Moor was buried in Spalding in 1772.
Triangular trade By the eighteenth century, the "triangular trade" became a profitable economic activity for port cities including
Bristol,
Liverpool and
Glasgow. Merchant ships set out from Britain, loaded with trade goods which were exchanged on the West African shores for slaves captured by local rulers from deeper inland; the slaves were transported through the infamous "
Middle Passage" across the Atlantic, and were sold at considerable profit for labour in plantations. The ships were loaded with export crops and commodities, the products of slave labour, such as
cotton,
sugar and
rum, and returned to Britain to sell the items. The
Isle of Man was also involved in the transatlantic African slave trade.
Other enslaved groups during British colonialism Enslaved Indians Although the enslavement of Africans formed the largest and most documented aspect of slavery connected with Britain,
Indians also experienced forms of coerced labour under British rule. Colonial authorities often used “Indian” to describe all
South Asians, while modern historians sometimes prefer “South Asian” for precision (note that the word 'Indian' was also used to label First People Americans in British newspapers). Indian men, women, and children were transported in smaller numbers to Britain and to colonial possessions through capture, debt, or coercion. Household records sometimes described them as chattels, and newspaper advertisements occasionally listed "East Indian" slaves for sale in London and other port cities. Carter has demonstrated that enslaved Indians, including women and children, were present on islands such as
Mauritius before the nineteenth-century shift to indentured labour. Such findings complicate the narrative that Indians were introduced only as indentured workers after 1834. Their numbers were fewer than those of African captives, but they nonetheless formed part of the early colonial labour force. British authorities frequently denied that Indians were slaves, preferring labels such as "servants," "dependents," or "apprentices," which obscured
coercion. In
Butts v. Penny (1677) 2 Lev 201, 3 Keb 785, an action was brought to recover the value of 10 slaves who had been held by the plaintiff in
India. The court held that an action for
trover would lie in English law, because the sale of non-Christians as slaves was common in India. However, no judgement was delivered in the case. An English court case of 1569 involving Cartwright who had bought a
slave from Russia ruled that English law could not recognise slavery. This ruling was overshadowed by later developments, particularly in the
Navigation Acts, but was upheld by the Lord Chief Justice in 1701 when he ruled that a slave became free as soon as he arrived in England. Agitation saw a series of judgements repulse the tide of slavery. In
Smith v. Gould (1705–07) 2 Salk 666,
John Holt stated that by "the common law no man can have a property in another". (See
the "infidel rationale".) In 1729, the Attorney General,
Philip Yorke, and Solicitor General of England,
Charles Talbot, issued the
Yorke–Talbot slavery opinion, expressing their view that the legal status of any enslaved individual did not change once they set foot in Britain; i.e., they would not automatically become free. This was done in response to the concerns that Holt's decision in
Smith v. Gould raised. Slavery was also accepted in Britain's many colonies.
Lord Henley LC said in
Shanley v. Harvey (1763) 2 Eden 126, 127 that as "soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free". After
R v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett (1772) 20 State Tr 1 the law remained unsettled, although the decision was a significant advance for, at the least, preventing the forceable removal of anyone from England, whether or not a slave, against his will. A man named James Somersett was enslaved by a Boston customs officer. They came to England, and Somersett escaped. Captain Knowles captured him and took him on his boat bound for Jamaica. Three British abolitionists, saying they were his "godparents", applied for a writ of
habeas corpus. One of Somersett's lawyers,
Francis Hargrave, stated "In 1569, during the reign of
Queen Elizabeth I, a lawsuit was brought against a man for beating another man he had bought as a slave overseas. The record states, 'That in the 11th [year] of Elizabeth [1569], one Cartwright brought a slave from Russia and would scourge him; for which he was questioned; and it was resolved, that England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in'." He argued that the court had ruled in Cartwright's case that
English common law made no provision for slavery, and without a basis for its legality, slavery would otherwise be unlawful as false imprisonment and/or assault. In his judgement of 22 June 1772,
Lord Chief Justice William Murray, Lord Mansfield, of the
Court of King's Bench, started by talking about the capture and forcible detention of Somersett. He finished with: Several different reports of Mansfield's decision appeared. Most disagree as to what was said. The decision was only given orally; no formal written record of it was issued by the court. Abolitionists widely circulated the view that it was declared that the condition of slavery did not exist under
English law, although Mansfield later said that all that he decided was that a slave could not be forcibly removed from England against his will. In Scotland, the
Court of Session had ruled in the
"Tumbling Lassie" case of 1687 that slavery did not exist in
Scots law, but the case was not well-known and appeared to have been forgotten in later years. Cases were brought to the court in 1752 and 1769 by escaped slaves, but both ended before a ruling due to the death of one of the parties. After reading about Somersett's Case,
Joseph Knight, an enslaved African who had been purchased by his master
John Wedderburn in Jamaica and brought to Scotland, left him. Married and with a child, he filed a
freedom suit, on the grounds that he could not be held as a slave in
Great Britain. In the case of
Knight v. Wedderburn (1778), Wedderburn said that Knight owed him "perpetual servitude". The Court of Session ruled against him, saying that
chattel slavery was not recognised under the
law of Scotland, and slaves could seek court protection to leave a master or avoid being forcibly removed from Scotland to be returned to slavery in the colonies.
Abolition (1759–1833), one of the leaders of the movement to abolish the trade of slaves, spearheaded legislation such as the Slave Trade Act 1807. The abolitionist movement was led by
Quakers and other
Non-conformists, but the
Test Act prevented them from becoming
Members of Parliament.
William Wilberforce, a member of the House of Commons as an independent, became the Parliamentary spokesman for the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. His conversion to Evangelical Christianity in 1784 played a key role in interesting him in this social reform. William Wilberforce's
Slave Trade Act 1807 prohibited the slave trade in the British Empire. It was not until the
Slavery Abolition Act 1833 that the institution was finally abolished, but on a gradual basis. Since land owners in the
British West Indies were losing their unpaid labourers, they received compensation totalling £20 million. Former slaves received no compensation. The
Royal Navy established the
West Africa Squadron (or Preventative Squadron) at substantial expense in 1808 after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act. The squadron's task was to suppress the
Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa, preventing the slave trade by force of arms, including the interception of slave ships from Europe, the United States, the
Barbary pirates, West Africa and the
Ottoman Empire. The
Church of England was implicated in slavery. Slaves were owned by the
Anglican Church's
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPGFP), which had
sugar plantations in the
West Indies. When slaves were
emancipated by
Act of the
British Parliament in 1834, the British government paid compensation to slave owners. The
Bishop of Exeter,
Henry Phillpotts, and three business colleagues acted as trustees for
John Ward, 1st Earl of Dudley when he received compensation for 665 slaves. The compensation of British slaveholders was almost £17 billion in current money. ==Economic impact of slavery==