Slavery in Europe during Antiquity and the First Millennium

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-69
Author(s):  
Stefan Brink
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
First Millennium

In this chapter I give an overview of research on slavery (for some parts) of Western Europe in the first Millennium: The Roman Empire, Francia, Anglo-Saxon England, Ireland and Visigothic Spain. The difficulties of properly defining the legal status—whether free or unfree—for terms such as coloni, villani, bordari, cottari, famulus, servus etc. are discussed, and it is shown that in some areas and during some periods the legal status can differ. This is to serve as a background for our discussion of a Scandinavian slavery.

scholarly journals Variation in the Continuity of Land-Use Patterns through the First Millennium AD in Lowland Britain

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Stephen Rippon ◽  
Ralph Fyfe
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Roman Empire ◽  
Causal Effect ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Land Use Patterns ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
Use Patterns ◽  
Land Use Types ◽  
First Millennium

AbstractThis paper explores the contribution that palaeoenvironmental evidence, and in particular palynology, is making to our understanding of landscape evolution in Britain during the 1st millenniumAD. This was a period of profound social and economic change including a series of invasions, some associated with a mass folk migration. Archaeologists and historians continue to debate the significance of these events, and palaeoenvironmental evidence is now starting to provide an additional perspective. Key to this has been obtaining pollen sequences, although there remains a need for more evidence from lowland areas, alongside higher resolution sampling and improved dating. It is suggested that although the 1st millenniumADsaw some significant long-term shifts in climate, these are unlikely to have had a significant causal effect on landscape change in lowland areas (both in areas with and without significant Anglo-Saxon immigration). The analysis of pollen data from across Britain shows very marked regional variations in the major land-use types (arable, woodland, improved pasture, and unimproved pasture) throughout the Roman and Early Medieval periods. While Britain ceasing to be part of the Roman empire appears to have led to a decline in the intensity of agriculture, it was the ‘long 8th c.’ (the later 7th to early 9th c.) that saw a more profound change, with a period of investment, innovation, and intensification, including an expansion in arable cultivation.

ENTRUSTING WESTERN EUROPE TO THE CHURCH, 400–750

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 37-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Wood
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Classical World ◽  
Economic Basis ◽  
Major Break ◽  
Simple Change ◽  
The Church

ABSTRACTAlthough there had been substantial donations to the church in the course of the last two centuries of the Roman Empire, the amount of property transferred to the episcopal church and to monasteries in the following two and a half centuries would seem to have been immense. Probably rather more than 30 per cent of the Frankish kingdom was given to ecclesiastical institutions; although the Anglo-Saxon church was only established after 597, it also acquired huge amounts of land, as did the churches of Spain and Italy, although the extent conveyed in the two peninsulas is harder to estimate. The scale of endowments helps explain the occasional criticisms of the extent of church property, and also the secularisations and reallocation of church land, and indeed suggest that the transfer of property out of the control of the church in Francia and England in the eighth century may have been greater than is often assumed. The transfer of land should probably also be seen as something other than a simple change of ownership. Church property provided the economic basis for cult, for the maintenance of clergy, who were unquestionably numerous, and for the poor. In social and economic, as well as religious terms, this marked a major break with the Classical World.

From Black Death to Black Hole

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcin Piatkowski
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Black Hole ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Black Death ◽  
European Continent ◽  
The Past

In this chapter I explain why Poland and most countries in Eastern Europe have always lagged behind Western Europe in economic development. I discuss why in the past the European continent split into two parts and how Western and Eastern Europe followed starkly different developmental paths. I then demonstrate how Polish oligarchic elites built extractive institutions and how they adopted ideologies, cultures, and values, which undermined development from the late sixteenth century to 1939. I also describe how the elites created a libertarian country without taxes, state capacity, and rule of law, and how this ‘golden freedom’ led to Poland’s collapse and disappearance from the map of Europe in 1795. I argue that Polish extractive society was so well established that it could not reform itself from the inside. It was like a black hole, where the force of gravity is so strong that the light could not come out.

Explaining the Epigraphic Habit in the Roman Empire: The Evidence of Epitaphs

1990 ◽  
Vol 80 ◽  
pp. 74-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth A. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Over Time

It is now notorious that the production of inscriptions in the Roman Empire was not constant over time, but rose over the first and second centuries A.D. and fell in the third. Ramsay MacMullen pointed this out more than five years ago, with conclusions more cautionary than explanatory: ‘history is not being written in the right way’, he said, for historians have deduced Rome's decline from evidence that–since it appears only epigraphically–has merely disappeared for its own reasons, or have sought general explanations of decline in theories political, economic, or even demographic in nature, none of which can, in turn, explain the disappearance of epigraphy itself. Why this epigraphic habit rose and fell MacMullen left open to question, although he did postulate control by a ‘sense of audience’. The purpose of this paper is to propose that this ‘sense of audience’ was not generalized or generic, but depended on a belief in the value of romanization, of which (as noted but not explained by MacMullen's article) the epigraphic habit is also a rough indicator. Epitaphs constitute the bulk of all provincial inscriptions and in form and number are (generally speaking) the consequence of a provincial imitation of characteristically Roman practices, an imitation that depended on the belief that Roman legal status and style were important, and that may indeed have ultimately depended, at least in North Africa, on the acquisition or prior possession of that status. Such status-based motivations for erecting an epitaph help to explain not only the chronological distribution of epitaphs but also the differences in the type and distribution of epitaphs in the western and eastern halves of the empire. They will be used here moreover to suggest an explanation for the epigraphic habit as a whole.

Transformations of Identity and Society in Anglo-Saxon Essex

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Mirrington
Keyword(s):  
North Sea ◽  
North Atlantic ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Cultural Affiliation ◽  
Profound Influence ◽  
North Western

Transformations of Identity and Society in Anglo-Saxon Essex: A Case Study of an Early Medieval North Atlantic Community presents the results of a comprehensive archaeological study of early medieval Essex (c.AD 400-1066). This region provides an important case study for examining coastal societies of north-western Europe. Drawing on a wealth of new data, the author demonstrates the profound influence of maritime contacts on changing expressions of cultural affiliation. It is argued that this Continental orientation reflects Essex’s longterm engagement with the emergent, dynamic North Sea network. The wide chronological focus and inclusive dataset enables long-term socio-economic continuity and transformation to be revealed. These include major new insights into the construction of group identity in Essex between the 5th and 11th centuries and the identification of several previously unknown sites of exchange. The presentation also includes the first full archaeological study of Essex under ‘Viking’ rule.

scholarly journals Studentification in the postsocialist context: The case of Cracow and the Tri-City (Gdansk, Gdynia and Sopot)

Geografie ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 120 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-209 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Murzyn-Kupisz ◽  
Magdalena Szmytkowska
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Metropolitan Areas ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Research Results ◽  
Geographic Scope ◽  
Western European

For over a decade, the term studentification has been used to denote the process of urban changes linked with the presence of student populations in urban centres. This text broadens the geographic scope of research into studentification using two Polish metropolitan areas as case studies, analysing and comparing research results to existing findings referring to Western European and Anglo-Saxon settings. Using the example of Cracow and the Tri-City (Trójmiasto), two significant centres of higher education in Poland, the paper presents empirical evidence indicating that while some aspects of students’ impact on Polish cities are similar to trends observed in Western Europe and non-European Anglo-Saxon countries, the colonisation of Polish cities by students nonetheless displays some unique features strongly influenced by the post-socialist context in which such cities and their student populations function.

Transmission, Transplantation, and Diffusion in the Latin West

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor J. Katz ◽  
Karen Hunger Parshall
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Western World ◽  
Intellectual Culture ◽  
Latin West ◽  
Royal Courts ◽  
Mathematical Sciences ◽  
Gerbert Of Aurillac ◽  
And Diffusion

This chapter follows the growth and development of the intellectual culture in the West after a period of decline roughly concurrent to that of the decline of the Roman Empire. It explores the intellectual reawakening of the Western world following the efforts of the clergyman Gerbert of Aurillac, who transmitted classical and Islamic learning and strove—through his innovative use of the abacus, celestial spheres, and armillary spheres of his own fabrication—to raise the level of learning of the mathematical sciences in the Latin West. Among his students was a generation of Catholic scholars who went on themselves to establish or to teach at cathedral schools and to influence educational reforms in royal courts throughout western Europe.

Mobility in Prehistory and Early Historic Times

2019 ◽  
pp. 103-121
Author(s):  
D. W. Harding
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Material Culture ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Culture Contact ◽  
Migration And Invasion ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Dna Analyses ◽  
Documentary History ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
North Western

For most of the twentieth century migration and invasion were the default explanation of material culture change in archaeology. This model was largely derived from the record of documentary history, which not only recorded the Gaulish diaspora of later prehistory but the migrations that resulted in the breakup of the Roman Empire. The equation of archaeological distributions—the formula ‘pots = people’—was a model adopted and promoted by Gordon Childe, and remained fundamental to archaeological interpretation into the 1960s. Thereafter diffusionism was discredited among British prehistorians, though less so among European archaeologists and classical or historical archaeologists. Even the Beaker phenomenon became a ‘cult package’ rather than the product of settlers, and it is only as a result of more recent isotopic and DNA analyses that the scale of settlement from the continent introducing Beakers has begun to be demonstrated. Other factors in culture contact including long-distance trade have long been evident, for example, from the distribution of finds of Baltic amber from Northern and North-Western Europe to the Mediterranean, or the distribution of continental pottery and glass via the western seaways in the post-Roman period.

Feudal Modes

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A. Hinton
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Anglo Saxon ◽  
Feudal Society ◽  
Anglo Norman ◽  
Chess Piece ◽  
Female Presence ◽  
Time To Learn

The trend away from ornamented brooches, rings, and swords that demonstrates changing social pressures and expression during the eleventh century was maintained in the first half of the twelfth. The Anglo-Norman aristocracy had considerable wealth for its castles and churches, but the spending power of the Anglo-Saxon majority was very much diminished by the impositions that followed the Conquest. Social relations among the former were based primarily on land, and although sentiments of personal loyalty were defined by oaths of fealty, there is no record of gift-giving from lord to retainer other than the increasingly formalized bestowal of arms. Towns were growing both in size and number, but only a few merchants were really rich, and the peasantry in the countryside was increasing in number but had decreasing opportunity for individual advancement. Excavations at castles and other baronial residences generally yield the evidence of martial appearance and activity that would be expected, like spurs, and slightly more evidence of wealth, with coins a little more profligately lost, than at other sites. There are also luxuries like gilt strips, from caskets of bone or wood, and evidence of leisure activities, such as gaming-pieces; chess was being introduced into western Europe, and appealed to the aristocracy because it was a complicated pastime that only the educated would have time to learn and indulge in. Furthermore, it could be played by both sexes, though ladies were expected to show their inferior skill and intelligence by losing to the men; it echoed feudal society and its courts; and it could be played for stakes. An occasional urban chess-piece find, not always well dated, shows that a few burgesses might seek to emulate the aristocracy. Other predominantly castle finds include small bone and copper-alloy pins with decorated heads that have been interpreted as hairpins, as at Castle Acre, attesting a female presence, but other personal ornaments are infrequent. Some pictures in manuscripts suggest that in the early twelfth century the highest ranks of the aristocracy were wearing brooches. These were probably conventional representations, however, as there are no valuable brooches or finger-rings in the archaeological record, as there had been earlier.

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