Sylvius with a great traine of the posteritie of the dispersed Trojans…” The Romans came next, and “with them came all maner of vice and vicious living, all riot and excesse of behaviour into our countrie.” The Scots, “a people mixed of the Scithian and Spanish blood” who were “given to the eating of mans flesh,” also plagued Britain around the time of Christ. The Saxons soon followed, having been “sent for by Vortiger” in the fifth century “to serve him in his warres against the Picts” (a people about whom Harrison claimed to know little except that “they were setled in this Ile long before the time of Severus, yea of Caesar”). In time, the Saxons managed to get “possession of the whole, or at the leastwise the greatest part of our countrie; the Britons in the meane season being driven either into Wales and Cornewall, or altogither out of the Iland to seeke new habitations.”
Matters hardly improved during the eleventh century, Harrison observed, when the Danes and Norman French descended on the British Isles. The Danes, who invaded Britain under the leadership of Canute in 1015, were characterized by their “lordlinesse, crueltie, and insatiable desire of riches, beside their detestable abusing of chast[e] matrons, and young virgins (whose husbands and parents were daile inforced to become their drudges and slaves …).” In their wake came the Normans, “a people mixed with Danes” who “were so cruellie bent to our utter subversion and overthrow, that in the beginning it was lesse reproch to be accounted a slave than an Englishman, or a drudge in anie filthie businesse than a Britaine.” Harrison lamented: “Oh how miserable was the estate of our countrie under the French and Normans, wherein the Brittish and English that remained, could not be called to any function in the commonwealth… Oh what numbers of all degrees of English and Brittish were made slaves and bondmen, and bought and sold as oxen in open market!” The ancient Britons were particularly devastated. Had not Edward the Confessor, the penultimate Anglo-Saxon king of England, “permitted the remnant of their women to joine in mariage with the Englishmen … their whole race” would have died off and “thereby the memorie of the Britons utterlie have perished among us.”24
Harrison’s work was emblematic of the patriotic zeal increasingly evident in the historical works being produced by sixteenth-century Englishmen. Tudor and Stuart scholars believed that an ancient and honorable past was a critical part of their collective effort to characterize England as a great and free nation. Harrison’s story reveals, however, that it was difficult to determine what exactly constituted the core of the English or British past. Should Tudor Englishmen emphasize that the first inhabitant of their island was a grandson of Noah (Samothes) or the son of Neptune (Albion)? Perhaps there was more honor in Brutus, reputedly the grandson of Aeneas and liberator of enslaved Trojans? What about the Anglo-Saxons and Norman French? Each group offered a way of establishing the antiquity and greatness of the English nation by linking England directly with a Bibilical, Greek, or Roman past.25 However scholars may have gone about their historical reconstructions, though, there seemed to be no denying that subjugation, captivity, and slavery were integral components of England’s national story.
If slavery was part of England’s past, as Harrison’s narrative suggested, it also appeared in a number of guises during the early modern era, including the defining religious conflict of the time. The English cleric and ardent nationalist John Bale liked to imagine that England was the new Holy Land in his attacks on the Roman church. He censured Catholic bishops and characterized the English as a people “cruelly enslaved by the tyrannical papists, who made them suffer far more than the Israelites did when enslaved by Pharoah.” In his anti-French tract, the English bishop John Aylmer prayed that the God who defended his children of Israel from their enemies might “defend us from the slavery and misery of that proude nacyon, that cruel people, and tiranous rulers.”26 Slavery also factored into the overheated rhetoric generated by English patriots in their struggles against the continental Catholic powers. During the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), Elizabeth rallied her nation by warning that Spain and the papacy were preparing to invade England and to “overthrow our most happy estate and flourishing commonweal, and to subject the same to the proud, servile and slavish government of foreigners and strangers.” Worse still, Elizabeth suggested, the pope was plotting to incite the English “to betray and yield themselves, their parents, kindred, and children … to be subjects and slaves to aliens and strangers.” The conflict between England and Spain, between Protestants and Catholics, was easily couched as a struggle between freedom and slavery and it fed into the notion that the English were, ipso facto, antislavery.27
References to human bondage in religious and political contexts could not have had the same rhetorical force without the myths of English freedom and the struggle against enslavement that pervaded competing versions of English history. Indeed, one argument for the resiliency of the so-called “British History”—the mythohistorical narrative that identified England’s forebears with ancient Greece—was that it lent credence to the assertion that the English were God’s chosen people. Like the biblical Jews, the British History emphasized that the English nation had emerged from a state of bondage in the Mediterranean and had continued to struggle against re-enslavement ever since the arrival of the English in Albion. As the twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth told the story, Brutus had led the enslaved Trojans against their Greek captors. Their decision to resist entailed great hardship, but the Trojans preferred to “have their liberty, rather than remain under the yoke of … slavery, even if pampered there by every kind of wealth.” In the poet Michael Drayton’s panegyric to the “God-like Brute … of the race of Troy,” the hero returned to Greece only to find his Trojan cousins enslaved and
there, by Pandrasus kept, in sad and servile awe. Who when they knew young Brute, & that brave shape they saw, They humbly him desire, that he a meane would bee, From those imperious Greeks, his countrymen to free.28
Geoffrey’s History can be read as a narrative retelling of the ongoing struggle of a people, of ancient and noble heritage, to resist the efforts of successive waves of enemies to enslave them. Geoffrey devoted significant attention to Julius Caesar, who is said to exclaim that “[t]hose Britons come from the same race as we do, for we Romans are descended from Trojan stock… All the same, unless I am mistaken, they have become very degenerate when compared with us.” When Caesar demanded the capitulation of the Britons, however, King Cassivelaunus refused on the grounds that to do so would signal an end to British liberty and freedom, in both the political and physical meanings of the terms. And in a dramatic statement of defiance, the king of the Britons (or, perhaps more accurately, Geoffrey) rebuked Caesar, asserting that “[i]t is friendship which you should have asked of us, not slavery. For our part we are more used to making allies than to enduring the yoke of bondage. We have become so accustomed to the concept of liberty that we are completely ignorant of what is meant by submitting to slavery.” Eventually, of course, the Britons were overawed, but not before they repelled the Romans on two separate occasions. For this, Geoffrey lauded England’s ancestors, who “went on resisting the man whom the whole world could not withstand. They were ready to die for their fatherland and for their liberty.”29 Subsequently, during Arthur’s reign, Geoffrey characterizes Roman efforts in battle as “their utmost [effort] to deprive you of your freedom.” “No doubt,” Arthur contends, “they imagined, when they planned to make your country pay them tribute and to enslave you yourselves, that they would discover in you the cowardice of Eastern peoples.” Thus, Arthur’s many victories were not simply evidence of English martial valor or courage. Arthur’s victories were cast by Geoffrey as a defense of English liberty and part of the ongoing struggle to prevent the (re)enslavement of Englishmen by foreign powers.30
The anti-slavery theme of Geoffrey’s History continued to operate in later works written in the tradition of the British History, especially in accounts of the Norman Conquest and the reign of King John. Perhaps one of the more well-known traditions of this era was the equation of William the Conqueror’s rise to power with the imposition of the Norman Yoke. The English antiquarian and historian William Camden, although he questioned many aspects of the British History, lauded Britons’ resistance to bondage once they were confined
