Slaves and Warriors in Early Medieval

The investigation of medieval slavery is still rooted in an approach first laid down by the likes of Adam Smith and John Millar over two hundred years ago. They conceptualised history as a series of stages through which societies moved, driven by the motor of increasing economic sophistication. In this conceptualisation, slavery was an economic institution and its decline in Britain during the eleventh and twelfth centuries was therefore the result of economic progress on the journey towards modern capitalism. Bolstered by the economic determinism of Marxist theory, this model has dominated historical understanding of medieval slavery up to the present day. In Slaves and Warriors in Early Medieval Britain and Ireland, Dr. David Wyatt provides an alternate view of medieval slavery. Rather than seizing on its decline as a means of demonstrating societal progress towards the present, Wyatt takes an unflinching look at its causes and characteristics in their own right. He argues that slavery was first and foremost a cultural institution rather than an economic one. As such, it was an integral part of the social fabric of early medieval societies in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Wyatt begins his study by mounting a perceptive survey of explanations for medieval slavery from the Scottish Enlightenment to the present day. In so doing, he shows how abolitionists in the 1700s and 1800s adopted the idea of Britain as a freedom-loving nation with an inherent abhorrence for slavery. When coupled with imperialist attitudes towards ethnicity which cast Europeans as superior to Africans, this rhetoric made the white slavery of the medieval period particularly unpalatable. The result has been a potent desire to marginalise the relevance of medieval slavery on the part of historians who are uncomfortable with this distasteful element of the British and Irish past. Wyatt shows that this desire was not only a hallmark of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but can also be found in the work of some of the leading medievalists of the later 1900s. This historiographical analysis is one of the book’s greatest triumphs, although Wyatt’s occasionally homogenising discussion of