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.
* * *
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 freedome: throughe the commendation of their patience.”59
The reasonable—or “worthy and commendable” as Robinson’s marginal note indicates—system of slavery More located in Persia agreed with the one More’s fictional traveler, Raphael Hythloday, encountered in Utopia.60 More treated the subject of human bondage quite carefully in Book Two, choosing even to give the subject of slavery its own section heading.61 Utopians acquired slaves through well-defined channels. First, they did not “make bondemen of prisoners taken in battayle” unless it was a “battaylle that they foughte themselves.” Second, Utopians purchased convicted criminals, or those in “other landes [who] for greate trespasses be condemned to death.” A third group of slaves consisted of “their owne men,” whom “they handle hardest” because “they being so godlye brought up to vertue in soo excelente a common wealth, could not for all that be refreined from misdoing.” Finally, Utopians sometimes allowed a “vile drudge” from another country to “chuse of his owne free wyll to be a bondman among them.” Utopian slaves, then, were men who suffered such a fate as a result of just wars, because of criminal behavior, or by choice. As More makes clear, Utopians were discriminating when it came to their slaves; neither another nation’s prisoners of war nor the “bondmens children” could therefore be counted among the enslaved.62
More also characterized Utopian slavery as a purposeful institution, equally so for the enslaved themselves and for Utopian society as a whole. To be sure, bondage was a “miserable & wretched condition” involving “al vile service, all slavery, and drudgerie.” At the same time, human bondage could also be viewed as a progressive, virtue-instilling practice that existed as much to redeem wayward individuals as it did to punish them. Because slavery was characterized as an institution that was neither accidental nor capricious, because slavery was something that bondmen could be said to have brought upon themselves by their actions, slavery was less a labor system than it was a social system. Thus, “they, which take theire bondage pacientlye, be not lefte hopeles. For after they have bene broken and tamed with long miseries, if then thei shew such repentaunce … theire bondage either be mitigated, or else cleane released and forgeven.” And anyone who chose to enslave himself, More added, “they neither hold him against his wyll” or “send him away with emptye handes.”63
If slavery was ideally a temporary condition for the enslaved, it was nonetheless an integral institution for the proper functioning of the Utopian social order. More imagined, for example, that slaves served a fundamental role in Utopian society by insulating the social order from instability by assigning the most pernicious tasks to slaves. Butchering, hunting, and other “laboursome toyle & base business” were performed by bondmen. Hunting and butchering were singled out as particularly unpleasant and dehumanizing endeavors because “they thinke, clemencye the genteleste affection of our nature” which would “lytle and lytle … decaye and peryshe” were free Utopians to perform them. The remarkable virtue of Utopians was, in an important sense, preserved by slavery. Individual slaves might be redeemed, but while they served the needs of Utopians they were a visible reminder of the barbarity and degeneracy of the outer world. Indeed, in the performance of these necessary labors, Utopian slaves were as close to brute “beastes” as humanly possible. Although redemption was the ideal, then, More did not hesitate to suggest that one distinguishing characteristic of slaves was their proximity to the animal world. Therefore, if they “doo rebell and kicke againe, then forsothe they be slayne as desperate and wilde beastes, whom neither prison nor chaine could restraine.”64
Utopian slavery was a model of human bondage that served to instill a sense of virtue on Utopian society. The sense of honor enjoyed by freedom-loving Utopians necessitated the shame of slavery. There could be no real liberty without real slavery, even if it only served as a visible reminder of what was at stake in society. How else would Utopians appreciate what they had?65 It was this conception of slavery, as a mechanism by which degenerate individuals could be reformed and redeemed, that was expressed most famously in Tudor society in 1547 when Parliament passed its most extreme penal measure to date, possibly authored by a young Sir Thomas Smith, to attack “idle beggars and sturdy vagabonds.” With this act (which was soon repealed), slavery could be imposed on recalcitrant individuals who refused to work; any competent man “not applying them self to some honest and allowed arte, Scyence, service or Labour” could be taken for a vagabond and enslaved for two years. The master would have absolute control over the diet of his bondmen, and could “cawse the saide Slave to work by beating, cheyninge or otherwise in such worke and Labor how vyle so ever it be.” The slave could also be leased, sold or bequeathed, as “any other of the master’s movable goodes or Catelles.” Nonetheless, this conception of slavery differed from the subsequent New World model, primarily in its purpose, because rather than creating a class of slaves to satisfy labor demands, this law was about the potential laborers themselves. With the 1547 act, Parliament intended to punish but also hoped to instill a sense of virtue, frugality, and hard work and to make workingmen out of idle men.66
Galley slavery was the most infamous form of penal slavery in Europe and the Mediterranean. Not surprisingly, it appeared in England, though it seems to have been talked about much more than it was used because traditional oared galleys were not especially practical in the high winds and rough seas of the North Atlantic. European visitors asserted outright that the English, “do not use galleys, owing to the strong tide of the ocean.” Still, the English government experimented with galleys for a brief period between the 1540s and 1620s. During his later years, Henry VIII attempted to purchase a coastal defense force of ten fully equipped and furnished galleys from Emperor Charles V. When that effort failed, subsequent monarchs simply recommissioned galleys captured from
