The Church set the example of the manumission of its slaves.[71] At the Council of Cealchithe (816) it was unanimously agreed that each prelate at his death should bequeath one-tenth of his personal property to the poor, and set at liberty all bondsmen of English descent whom his Church had acquired during his administration, and that each bishop and abbot who survived him should manumit three of his slaves, and give 3s. to each. The laity followed the example. In the English wills published by Thorpe[72] a considerable number occur in which the testator gives freedom to serfs, e.g. Queen Æthelflæd sets free half of her men in every vill; Wynflæd gives a long list of serfs by name who are to be freed, and the freedom of penal serfs is given in nine other wills.
Still the institution continued. At the end of the Saxon period, a thriving trade in the export of English slaves was carried on at Bristol, till Bishop Wulstan put an end to it. The Twenty-ninth Canon of the Synod of Westminster, held under Anselm in 1102, enacted that there should be no buying and selling of men in England as heretofore, as if they were kine or oxen. But this did not put a stop to it. Slaves were bought and sold by Church dignitaries as late as the fourteenth century, as we shall see in a later chapter, and the status of serfdom continued to the sixteenth century.
Coronation of Harold by Archbishop Stigand. Bayeux tapestry.
CHAPTER VI.
THE NORMAN CONQUEST.
