2. An Overview of the Old English Semantic Field SLAVE and Its
2.2 The Semantic Field SLAVE
No consensus has been reached agreeing which lexemes fall within the semantic field SLAVE in Old English. This is partially a result of the neglect of the linguistic and literary aspects of slavery
during this period, and partially due to the methodological issues attached to resources such as Bosworth and Toller’s Dictionary. A ‘modern word’ search of the Thesaurus of Old English for slave returns a variety of results, some labelled ‘slave’, others described by a number of different labels which are insufficiently well differentiated from ‘slave’, such as ‘a bought servant’ or ‘an enslaved person’. The list includes all the basic roots which we would expect to find: þeow (in both strong and weak forms), wealh, þræl, mann, æht, and hæft, as well as less common items such as inbrydling,
gop, and ceapcniht. However, as it reproduces the errors of Bosworth and Toller’s Dictionary, it
omits some important items such as the largely poetic scealc, and, most critically, esne.79 Similarly,
the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary lists a number of terms under ‘society > authority > fact of being subject to authority > slavery or bondage > [noun]> slave’. For the Old English period, however, it lists only ‘theow’ and ‘thrall’. ‘Esne’ is listed, rather confusingly, under the date 1819 (the publication of Ivanhoe), although the dictionary entry describes it as ‘the Old English designation of a class of domestic slaves’.80 It therefore omits both wealh and þegn,
alongside less common terms. Neither of these resources, therefore, provides an accurate picture of the semantic field of slavery in Old English.
Pelteret’s first appendix, entitled ‘The Old English Terminology of Servitude and Freedom’ is the most complete study of this semantic field available at the present time. Described as ‘a semantic analysis of the terminology of servitude and freedom employed in Old English’, it covers about sixty pages and approximately 160 headword items.81 It is a comprehensive glossary of this
vocabulary and a useful initial resource, as it includes features such as etymologies, phonological
79 Roberts and Kay, Thesaurus of Old English, accessed from <http://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk>, s.v. ‘slave’ [accessed 28th June 2014]. Other errors include the treatment of wilh as a separate lexeme from wealh, when it is in fact a variant of the latter found in some versions of the West Saxon gospels and the Heptateuch (Bosworth and Toller, Dictionary, p. 1224).
80 Kay, Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, accessed from <http://public.oed.com/historical-
thesaurus-of-the-oed/>, s.v. ‘slave’ ⒃; Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), accessed from <http://www.oed.com>, s.v. ‘esne’ [accessed 28th July 2014]. All subsequent references to the Oxford English Dictionary are given in the form ‘OED, s.v. “x” ’ and refer to the online version.
histories, and an exploration of the multiple senses of complex words.82 However, its sheer breadth
makes great depth of semantic analysis impossible, and Pelteret is consequently heavily reliant on the pre-existing dictionary entries for certain items. This is particularly noticeable in his entry on
esne, where he declares that ‘the esne was in a better position than a slave’, and goes on to define
‘slave’ as one of its lesser senses.83 This is clearly reliant on Bosworth and Toller’s definition of the
esne, which makes unfounded claims placing the esne in precisely this position.84 Semantic analysis
is not the focus of Pelteret’s wider study, and, due to the range of material covered, his supposed analysis is often little more than a broad overview, without the attention needed to uncover the subtleties of usage between authors and dialects.
Out of the 160 or so items which Pelteret covers, a significant number are not concerned with slavery but with freedom. These include the nineteen members of the lis- family, such as the compounds lisend and on-lisend which are used of Christ as the Redeemer.85 The freo- family is
similarly substantial, and some items such as freo-wine, while etymologically related to the concept of freedom, have become bleached of this meaning. On the other hand, sundor-freodom and
sundor-freols are concerned with the grant of lands rather than of persons.86 Pelteret also includes
single items which relate to the treatment of slaves, such as the verbs for buying, selling, and stealing slaves, including ge-bicgan, ‘to buy someone into a state of slavery’87 and for-stelan, ‘to steal
(a person)’.88 Of Pelteret’s 160 items, twenty-two items or groups of items89 are used to denote
82 See, for instance, the entries on esne and wealh in Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 271-74, 319-22, 327-28 respectively.
83 Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 271-7⒊
84 Bosworth and Toller, Dictionary, p. 25⒏ See Chapter 4 for the full text of this definition and extensive discussion of its flaws.
85 Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 263-64, 271, 296-98, 302, 3⒙ 86 Pelteret, Slavery, p. 262, 265, 269, 274-91, 303-0⒋ 87 Pelteret, Slavery, p. 26⒌
88 Pelteret, Slavery, p. 27⒌
89 The word-family þeow, including verbs, adjectives, feminine nouns, and various compound nouns, comprises one such group (Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 269-70, 302-03, 3305-16, 318-19, 323, 329-30).
chattel slaves themselves: æht, ambiht-mæcg, birele, cniht, cyre-lif, esne, fostor-cild, fostorling, hæft-
incel, ham-byrde, inbyrdling, mægden-mann, mann(a), mennen, scealc, þegn, þeow(a), þir, þræl, þyften, wealh, and wencel.90 While Pelteret treats all these terms as equally relevant, some more obviously
denote SLAVE, while others are occasionally used of slaves without SLAVE becoming part of their core meaning. The birele seems to be a slave in Æthelberht,91 but the word itself does not denote a
slave; it is an occupational term: ‘cup-bearer’.92 The cognate verb, byrelian, means ‘to pour out, give
to drink, serve’.93 Pelteret himself admits that the masculine equivalent denotes ‘a cup-bearer or
butler’,94 and we can assume that the primary denotation of the feminine form here is occupational
rather than legalistic. Along with such occupational terms, we can also exclude some other categories of terms, including items which refer to specific traits of some slaves (such as fostorling and ham-byrde), those which usually refer to human beings generally (manna and most of its cognates),95 and those which similarly refer to non-socio-economic groups (cniht). Having excluded
these, it becomes clear that the core set of items which denote SLAVE is much smaller:96 æht,
ambiht-mæcg, esne, hæft-incel, mennen, scealc, þegn, þeow(a), þir, þræl, þyften, wealh, and wencel, along
90 Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 261-62, 264, 266-74, 289-90, 293-94, 298-305, 308, 316-17, 319-23, 325, 327-28). While Pelteret gives ‘drunc-mennen’ as a separate headword (Pelteret, Slavery, p. 269), it cannot reasonably be regarded as semantically separate from the theoretical phrase ‘drunc mennen’. Semantically, the first element functions in parallel to the adjectives ‘wonfeax’ and ‘dol’ (Riddle ⒓8-9, The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book, ed. by Craig Williamson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), p. 74. All references to the riddles are to this edition, parenthetically in the body of the text. Where it is necessary to refer to other editions of the riddles, I give the reference in footnotes. I treat mennen separately from man and other derivatives thereof because it is semantically distinct (Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 300-01).
91 Pelteret, Slavery, p. 26⒍
92 Thomas Northcote Toller, An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary: Supplement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), p. 1⒕ Similarly, Pelteret includes the word dæge (‘baker, dairymaid’) in his glossary, but as he does not cite ‘slave’ as a meaning of this term, it is not included here (Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 268-69). Other entries which Pelteret includes but which he does not cite as denoting SLAVE are also omitted.
93 Bosworth and Toller, Dictionary, p. 13⒏ 94 Pelteret, Slavery, p. 26⒍
95 Pelteret, Slavery pp. 298-32⒌
96 The other terms cannot be excluded entirely from the terminology of slavery, as they do, on occasion, refer to slaves, but this is incidental to their true denotation.
with their various cognates. Thus, we can condense a core vocabulary denoting chattel slaves which comprises thirteen lexemes or small groups of lexemes from Pelteret’s glossary of 160 items.
Although the high levels of phonological and orthographical variation exhibited by some of these terms makes it difficult to give a definitive number of occurrences, some are much more frequently attested than others.97 Scealc, which is extremely regular, occurs thirty-eight times in
total, fewer than any of the lexemes which form the basis of the present study.98 At one extreme,
þir appears only twice, as does ambiht-mæcg.99 Hæft-incel appears only once.100 Æht is reasonably
common: its headword form occurs sixty-two times, and searches for the declined forms find more attestations. However, as æht denotes property in general, the majority of these appearances do not refer to human chattels; thus it is much less significant as a slave word than these numbers suggest.101 At the other end of the scale, the form ‘þeow’ returns 248 instances in the Dictionary of
Old English Corpus, and ‘ðeow’ returns eighty-six.102 Wider searches for the strictly regular forms
of the masculine West Saxon strong paradigm of þeow reveal 1,188 forms in the extant corpus.103 97 See ⒉5 for a discussion of the different forms of þeow, which shows a particularly marked degree of variation.
98 DOE Corpus, using a ‘fragmentary’ search for ‘scealc’ [accessed 30th July 2014]. No other orthographic or phonological variants return any results.
99 Pelteret, Slavery, p. 26⒋
100 Pelteret, Slavery, p. 28⒐ Many of the more ‘marginal’ terms such as ham-byrde are also only attested a handful of times (p. 290).
101 DOE Corpus, using a ‘whole word’ search for ‘æht’ [accessed 30th July 2014]; Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 261-6⒉
102 DOE Corpus, using a ‘whole word’ search for these forms [accessed 30th July 2014].
103 DOE Corpus, using a ‘whole word’ search for ‘þeow’, ‘þeowes’, ‘þeowe’, ‘þeowas’, ‘þeowa’, ‘þeowum’, ‘ðeow’, ðeowes’, ‘ðeowe’, ‘ðeowas’, ‘ðeowa’, and ‘ðeowum’ [accessed 30th July 2014]. This does not even begin to take into account non-standard spellings, the weak form of the noun, non-West Saxon forms, or the female forms. The need for further exploration of þeow is an important consequence of the present study, but we must also ask ourselves, given the wide range of spellings and its near-homophony with other terms, ‘to what degree continued systematic searching is justified, or whether we have reached the point at which further research is likely to be inordinately time-consuming, and fruitful only through luck’ (Elizabeth Knowles, How to Read a Word [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010], p. 81). Careful planning would be needed to avoid such fruitlessness. By itself, þeow alone would form the basis for a companion-study to this present work.
The semantic field supports both major and minor terms, in addition to a number of lexemes which refer to slaves without necessarily denoting them. The three lexemes on which this study focuses are mid-level terms in a purely numerical sense, neither the most nor the least common items in this field. Qualitatively, they share features in common with one another and with þeow, the numerically dominant lexeme, but also show distinctive areas of divergence:104
Table 1: A Comparison of Slave Words in Old English: Þeow, Wealh, Þræl, Esne
Þeow Wealh Þræl Esne
Appears in placenames - + + + Feminine form + + _ _ Appears in poetry + + _ + Appears in Northumbrian gospels + _ + + Used in servus
Dei and related
metaphors + + + + Appears in Wulfstan + - + + Appears in Ælfric + + + - Denotes SLAVE in Proto- Germanic + - - -
104 This chart is based on the material discussed elsewhere in this study. In the case of þeow, additional material is drawn from Pelteret, Slavery, pp. 269-70, 301-02, 305-15, 318-19, 323, 329 and a ‘begins with’ search of the DOE Corpus for ‘þeow’ and ‘ðeow’ [accessed 30th July 2014].
Þeow Wealh Þræl Esne Other socio- economic denotation in Proto-Germanic - _ - + Attested with related sense in other Germanic languages + - + + Appears in laws + + + + Appears in riddles + + - + Appears in West Saxon (excluding Wulfstanian texts) + + - + Appears in Middle English Dictionary + + + - Appears in PDE - + + -
On the one hand, esne shares its West Saxon and poetic role with wealh; on the other, its predominance in the Anglian dialects leads to similarities with þræl. The texts and circumstances in which all three case-study terms appear point to the flexibility of this semantic field and to the continuing integration of new terminology into the lexicon. Dialect plays a key role in the shaping and reshaping of this vocabulary, and the usage of these terms is very rarely discrete. Consideration of these three words thus covers the full range of diverse contexts in which Old English slave words occur and the full range of semantic changes which these words undergo, including the development of the semantic field after the end of the Old English period. Esne in particular undermines the perceived dominance of þeow, but both wealh and þræl contextualise this revelation, as they, too, are used in ways which indicate the complexity of the situation. The rapid spread of
of slavery. Meanwhile, wealh was an extremely early loanword, entering the language in the Proto- Germanic period as an ethnonym. Its unique semantic development in Old English demonstrates the powerful role which semantic convergence played in creating the synonymy which is a striking feature of the vocabulary of slavery, and illustrates the connections between slavery and other facets of society.