The Medieval Studies Collection includes 132 titles that offer a comprehensive journey through the medieval period. This digital platform provides global access to essential texts from the Manchester Medieval Sources series and other pivotal translations, serving students and academics worldwide.
The collection offers first-hand accounts illustrating medieval life, many available in English for the first time, and includes texts covering significant historical events such as the Black Death and the Norman invasion. It features extensive introductory and explanatory materials to help users navigate and interpret the sources, as well as resources addressing linguistic challenges and diverse interpretations within these texts.
| Key series |
| Manchester Medieval Studies |
| Manchester Medieval Sources |
| Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture |
| Gender in History |
| Artes Liberales |
| Collection year | Titles |
| 2025 titles | 6 |
| 2023/4 titles | 12 |
| 1991-2022 titles | 104 |
| Total collection | 132 |
| Keywords |
| Law and religion |
| Escapism |
| Literary texts |
| US, European authors |
| Emotion |
| Race |
| Motherhood, female role, shame |
| Kings, monarchs and serfdom |
| Illness |
| Immigration |
| Everyday life, lived experience from below |
| Prejudice, antisemitism |
| Apparatus of power |
| CE period up to c 1500 |
| European history |
| History and archaeology |
| Literary studies: ancient, classical & medieval |
| Literary studies: poetry and poets |
| Literature: history and criticism |
| History of religion |
SDG coverage
Medieval studies collection
This chapter serves as a companion to Chapter 1, with a focus on regions other than the British Isles and the Czech lands. Slave labour in the Viking world, Rus, Francia, Hungary, Byzantium, and the Islamic world varied widely, ranging from small-scale agricultural work in the North Atlantic to eunuchs and slave soldiers in Iberia and the Middle East. Discussion of each of these regions pays special attention to instances in which British, Irish, and Slavic slaves are distinguishable, as in the case of saqāliba (Slavic) eunuchs and soldiers in the Umayyad caliphate and Irish slaves in Iceland. The regions themselves can be separated into two categories: centres of demand and transit zones. The Islamic world, Byzantium, and the Viking world served as the principal centres of demand that required the importation of vast numbers of foreign slaves, particularly in the tenth century. Francia, Hungary, and Rus served primarily as transit zones connecting the areas of supply to the centres of demand, and did not themselves experience comparable increases in the demand for slaves.
The ninth and tenth centuries saw significant external demand for slaves and increases in the raiding that created them within the slaving zones of the British Isles and east central Europe. This chapter examines the connections between areas of demand and supply to further explore the context of the rise, peaks, and denouement of slave trading out of our two slaving zones. This encompasses the period of Viking settlement and trade expansion in the British Isles, as well as the consolidation of the English kingdom and the Danish conquest. In the Czech lands, slave trading is set against the backdrop of the Přemyslid dukes’ political ascendancy and shifting alliances and the development of Slavic and Hungarian states. These various contexts, some deliberate and some coincidental, enabled the establishment of long-distance trade routes that indirectly connected areas of supply with areas of demand. Exploration of these routes highlights the diversity of people involved and the variety of destinations of enslaved people.
The introduction draws attention to the study of slave trading and its importance as a phenomenon separate from the institution of slavery. It also outlines the objectives of the book, the sources and ideas around which it is constructed, and the contribution of a comparative study over a long chronology. Because slaving activities were linked to demand both within a society and outside it, they could operate on very different terms from those of slavery as a local legal or social institution. External demand could dictate the scale and targets of enslavement; an increase in slave raiding need not indicate a local increase in demand, and nor does the movement away from slave labour need to correlate with the end of slave trading. It is therefore imperative that we understand how early medieval slaving functioned in its own right, and not only as a facet of slave-holding practices. A second section outlines the place of this work relative to other studies of historical enslavement and slave trading, especially what has been undertaken regarding the early Middle Ages. It discusses the ways in which significant conclusions are presented in case studies and how broader historiographical trends, namely Marxist theory and ideas of Christian amelioration, have skewed our perspective of slave trading in medieval Europe. A further section on methodology highlights the predominant types of sources used, both textual and archaeological, and some of the major problems and limitations inherent in them.
This chapter outlines the social and legal processes by which free people could become chattel slaves, with special attention to the potential for elasticity that could respond to fluctuation in demand for slaves. It examines the mechanisms that allowed for enslaving people from within a society, such as penal slavery and the direct sale of free people into slavery, and external mechanisms, such as captive taking in warfare and opportunistic kidnapping. Captive taking was the most flexible enslavement process, meaning that it could respond quickly to changes in demand by targeting specific numbers and types of people – options not always open to opportunistic kidnappers. A final section of the chapter looks at the targets of this process to understand who became slaves. Annals and chronicles indicate that victims were typically women and children of lower status, as high-status individuals more often had the resources and social networks necessary for ransom. The overall picture of enslavement provided by this chapter, therefore, is one in which insiders and outsiders alike contributed to the pool of tradeable slaves, and that, although captive taking normally targeted certain people, anyone was at risk of becoming a slave in this manner.
This book re-examines slave trading in the early Middle Ages from a comparative perspective, situating it at the core of economic and political development in northern and eastern Europe. In focusing on the ‘slaving zones’ centred on the British Isles and the Czech lands, it traces the forced migration of enslaved people from the point of capture to their destinations across Europe, the North Atlantic, north Africa, and western Asia. At the crux of the book is the shift of the ninth and tenth centuries prompted by increased demand, principally in the Islamic world. The desire to source more and more slaves led to changes in the practice of warfare to maximise captive taking, the logistics of slave trading, and rulers’ legal and economic relationships with slavery. By spanning the seventh through the eleventh centuries, this study traces the growth, climax, and decline of slave trading in the early Middle Ages and establishes its role as a driver of connectivity.
This chapter examines the demand for slaves and unfree labour in the British Isles and the Czech lands, serving as an introduction to slavery in these areas by outlining the types of labour performed by slaves, and their presence in agricultural or domestic, rural or urban contexts. This chapter also highlights the types of source material in which slaves, especially foreign slaves, appear, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of the source material for each region, which either enhance or skew our perceptions of slavery and its distribution. Source limitations ultimately mean that an assessment of changing demand for these regions is necessarily speculative, but the overall picture in both the British Isles and the Czech lands is one without any drastic shifts in the demand for slave labour between the seventh and eleventh centuries, though it is significant to note that slavery was present and accepted throughout this period.
The final chapter examines the ways in which rulers responded to slaving, arguing that their attempts to control the terms by which individuals could be enslaved and sold appear to have always been reactionary. From the tenth century they indicate a mounting concern in the face of escalating slaving, and this is most evident in England, where law codes and penitentials survive from the entire early medieval period, though a similar, if slower-paced, concern is hinted at by law fragments in Bohemian texts. Where centralization programmes occurred later or were poorly documented, as in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, these concerns were not codified. Although English and Bohemian rulers attempted to extend limited control over slaving in law, they were active beneficiaries of the trade through taxes and involvement in raiding.
Before the second half of the ninth century, in the British Isles and the tenth century in the Czech lands, slave trading primarily operated on a small scale and was primarily fuelled by opportunistic sales that were themselves motivated by individual circumstances or, to a lesser degree, commercial trading. Networks of liminal markets such as emporia and politically central high-status sites attracted slave sales through the concentration of merchants and buyers, and slaves could either remain locally with a buyer or be transported along long-distance trade routes. Case studies of England and Great Moravia illustrate the networks along which enslaved people were transported and the mechanisms by which slave trading operated.
This chapter demonstrates how the evidence of raiding illustrates a dramatic surge in captive-taking practices in both the British Isles and the Czech lands at a period coinciding with rising demand for foreign slaves in the Islamic world, the Viking North Atlantic, and Byzantium. Up until the late ninth century documented raiding in our slaving zones was primarily political, with captive taking serving primarily a social rather than economic function. In the late ninth and tenth centuries a dramatic shift occurs in both slaving zones, in which the escalation of raiding created huge numbers of captives that could not feasibly be absorbed by the demand established in Chapter 1. The resulting picture is one in which warfare altered in style and frequency to support increased slave taking throughout the tenth century. From the middle of the eleventh century captive taking clearly experienced a decline, in line with decreased external demand and major political shifts within the slaving zones.
The first book of Hariulf’s history describes the life and work of Richer (French: Riquier), patron of the abbey of St Riquier. It is set in the context of Frankish history with considerable detail about the Merovingian kings of the Franks. Hariulf’s main source is Alcuin’s life of Richer, written at the request of Angilbert, but he makes significant changes in tone and emphasis. Richer is presented as the pre-eminent noble of the Ponthieu region, who welcomes and is then converted to Christianity by two Irish missionaries. His miracles are described, together with his missionary activities in Britain and the ransoming of captives. Having selected his successor to lead the community he founded at Saint-Riquier, Richer retired to a poor dwelling in the forest to live the ascetic life, where he died. His body is moved back to the community and four successor abbots are described.