Household Slavery and Service

This chapter deals with household and domestic slavery in the early middle ages. Household production was the baseline, lowest-common-denominator form of production in all regions of Europe at this time. The chapter begins by comparing two extremes, Byzantium and Ireland, to show what a wide range of social configurations and practical and symbolic needs it could correspond to. Although it is customary in the literature to think of household slavery, the one that looks least like serfdom during this period, as connected more strongly with the Roman tradition, this chapter argues that it too shows some significant new developments across the period, and differed significantly across regions, as well as, within them, across different social settings. In Francia the tendency was more and more, in the greatest lordships, to obtain such service from the more vulnerable among unfree tenant families, thus blurring the line between household service and tenancy.

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