Slaves and Englishmen. Michael Guasco
on a number of occasions, the Crown made individual or sweeping manumissions, or attempted to compel English lords to free the bondmen in their possession. Tudor monarchs, however, often met fierce resistance when they tried to convince English lords to free their bondmen. In 1538, Henry VIII’s minister, Thomas Cromwell, requested the Earl of Arundel to manumit one of his bondmen. Arundel resisted, however, responding that Thomas Goodfreye “is in truth my bondman, as all his progenitors have been, and if I made him free it would be to the prejudice of my inheritance for ever. I should be glad to gratify you otherwise in a better thing.” Cromwell was equally unsuccessful in convincing Dr. John London to manumit the Alweyes family, bondmen in his college’s possession in Colern. London, who had previously been encouraged in this endeavor by Sir Henry Long and the Bishop of Winchester, protested that the college’s governing statutes would allow him to “alienate neither land nor bondmen.” But, even if he could liberate the family, he was not inclined to do so because the head of the family, the “reve and overseer of my college wood, wastes the woods and conceals the rents.” London, it seems, believed that some people deserved bondage.53
Although Tudor monarchs sympathized with the plight of their bound subjects, they rarely did more than issue polite requests for the manumission of villeins not in the Crown’s possession. In 1507, Henry VII stretched the limit of prerogative when he granted a charter for three new Welsh counties that proclaimed a general manumission for the local nativi. This exceptional case of a Tudor monarch liberating his subjects’ property angered some of his lords, who expressed their displeasure when they subsequently rejected the general bill concernes Manumissionem sevorum vocat. Bondmen.54 Thus, the best hope for bondmen with aspirations of free status was for the estate to which they were bound to fall into royal hands. In 1550, Edward VI commissioned Sir Richard Sakevile, chancellor of Augmentations, to manumit “those vyllaynes and nefes aswell regardant to our honours lordeshippes and mannours as otherwyse in gros not yet manumysed and dyscharged of their bondage.” Later, Sakevile came to terms with William Cuckoo, “bocher,” and his brother John, “villeins regardant” to the manor of Ersham. After paying £3.6.8, “William and John and their sequela” were manumitted and given rights to their goods and lands. Although they had to pay for their freedom, and although manumissions were often compulsory, evidence suggests that Tudor monarchs were eager to destroy villeinage once and for all in part because of the perception that it was a form of domestic slavery. In what may have been the most important reason of all, simply “hating slavery (servituti odientes)” moved Edward VI to manumit four Suffolk men in 1551.55
Elizabeth followed in the footsteps of her father and half-brother when she attempted to resolve the status of “divers and sundry of our poor faithful and loyal subjects” who had been “born bond in blood and regardant to divers and sundry our manors and possessions within our realm of England.” In 1574, she ordered that the bondmen in four counties be “enfranchised and made free, with their children and sequels.” In 1575, Elizabeth licensed Sir Henry Lee, a minor courtier at the time, to free additional bondmen. Lee’s first order of business was to determine how much money the queen’s villeins would be required to pay for their freedom. Once Lee and the bondmen in question came to an agreement, a charter of manumission was drawn up espousing the firm belief that “God created all men free by nature, and the law of man placed some under the yoke of servitude.” Thus, it would be “a pious thing, and acceptable to God and consonant with Christian charity” to free all bondmen. To this end, and for the greater good of his own and the royal coffers, Lee rounded up and manumitted at least 137 families, comprising nearly 500 individuals, between 1575 and 1580.56
Tudor initiatives like these aside, unfree Englishmen—villeins—continued to inhabit England well into the sixteenth century and they continued to be preyed upon by dissolute lords. One English lord, Edward Stafford, even went so far as to try to seize the mayor of Bristol, Richard Cole, as his villein during the 1580s. Still, the continuing presence of a small number of villeins did not diminish the widespread notion that England was, by nature, a free nation. In 1567, for example, Cartwright’s Case in the Star Chamber addressed the possibility of holding a Russian in bondage. Cartwright “brought a slave from Russia … for which he was questioned; and it was resolved that England was too pure an air for slaves to breathe in.” England was hardly unique in asserting its “free air,” but the case did demonstrate the powerful belief among jurists that everyone under common law was free by nature of their Englishness. At the same time, the notion that the English nation was free did not necessarily mean that human bondage was entirely unacceptable. As the Cartwright ruling asserted, England was no place for slaves, but the relics of medieval forms of human bondage could not be totally destroyed so long as English freedom also included the right of individuals to defend their ownership of human property.57
The history of domestic bondage in the sixteenth century highlights the paradoxical relationship between Englishness and slavery, for what offended most during this period was not the propriety of slavery but the arbitrary nature of a system of human bondage based entirely on descent. How, Englishmen might wonder, was it possible to be born both free (by virtue of being born in England) and in bondage (by descent)? Repeated references to the idea that God had created human beings free and that only the law could take that away undermined villeinage, especially when bondmen could assert that their condition was tantamount to slavery. Moreover, if England was, by nature or tradition, a free nation, then the continuing existence of villeinage—an institution that defined some people as unfree by birth alone—was a troublesome indicator that the barrier between slavery and Englishness was not as impenetrable as national mythologizers would have it. In this light, the Tudor government’s manumission efforts in the sixteenth century could be interpreted not simply as a scheme to extort those with no rights or a generous plan to liberate individual bondman—as they surely were—but as a much bigger effort to free England, once and for all, from the stain of natural slavery. If English men and women were to be enslaved, there had better be a good reason why and neither birth nor lineage made any sense in the increasingly ideologically charged climate of the day.
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The religious and intellectual legacy of slavery and decaying domestic institutions like manorial villeinage were not the only ways that Englishmen may have experienced bondage, or imagined slavery, in a domestic setting. Englishmen were also able to witness and experience slavery as a penal institution during the sixteenth century. Penal slavery, however, differed from villeinage in a number of crucial ways. Unlike villeins, penal slaves were not born into bondage, rather they were reduced to slavery as a form of punishment resulting from their own actions. Penal slavery was clearly punitive, but it is even more interesting because it was also envisaged, in some circles, as a progressive form of individual improvement and social control. The idea of slavery as a positive, virtue-instilling institution was most clearly revealed in Thomas More’s Utopia, which first appeared in a number of Latin editions after 1516. Subsequently, two English translations by Ralph Robinson were published in England in 1551 and 1556. Although More’s text was not explicitly concerned with the subject of human bondage, he addressed the subject thoroughly. In particular, as a result of his critique of the arbitrary and harsh punishments suffered by common thieves (which included the death penalty) More suggested alternative ways of dealing with criminal behavior. In this vein, in Book One, More lauded the more humane and practical punishment of common criminals in Persia among a group of people styled the “Polylerites.”58 Instead of death, thieves in this fictional land were condemned to be “common servauntes to the common wealth.” Lest there be any confusion about the degraded status of these “serving men,” as they are termed in Robinson’s English translation, these criminals were clearly marked. They were to be “apparailed in one coloure,” their hair was “rounded a lytlte above the eares. And the typpe of one eare is cut off.” Moreover, Polylerites rigidly constrained bondmen whom they “locked in theyr chambers” at night, whipped for indolence, declared that they “may touch no weapons,” and threatened with death if they “intende[d] to runne awaye,” much less “do it in dede.” Nonetheless, bondmen were otherwise treated gently, for their “punyshement intendeth nothynge elles, but the destruction of vices, and savynge of menne: wyth so usynge, and ordering them, that they can not chuse but be good.” Thus, “everye yeare divers of them be restored to their