Queens, servants and slaves in the medieval church

People would be surprised to realise to what extent slavery continued in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, but in a different guise, says Lisa Bailey, an associate professor of history and classics and ancient history at the University of Auckland.

“And early medieval ideas about slavery and practices of service are still with us today," says Bailey.

Her latest book Servants of God, Slaves of the Church: Service as Religious Metaphor and Social Reality in Early Medieval Europe (Cornell University Press) looks at the connection between sacred devotion and coerced labour in Western Europe, and how it was often justified as an act of piety with rewards in the afterlife.

The book particularly focuses on women at the bottom of the pecking order, as well as a remarkable noblewoman.

Focusing on the period between 400 and 800 AD in regions now known as France, Germany, northern Italy, and northern Spain, the book looks at how service to the Catholic Church, which ran almost every aspect of life, involved different levels of obligation, from ‘full time slave’ to ‘part-time volunteer’.

“The book is about the coming together of the lived realities of people who were in service to the church in different kinds of ways,” says Bailey, “and the metaphorical idea of being a servant of God, which becomes this really important model of how to be a good Christian.”

She says church leaders urged Christians of every social rank – from peasants to queens and bishops – to model themselves as ‘servants of God’, which might involve doing menial daily labour like washing the church vestments, refilling lamps or cooking for the clergy; meaning a queen could, in theory and sometimes in fact, be found scrubbing a church floor to curry favour in heaven.

Churches also functioned as early social welfare hubs and centres of the community, so there would be not only the church itself, but its many surrounding buildings that might house clergy and enslaved workers as well as the sick and destitute.

However, says Bailey, the vital difference lay in whether one was free to ‘volunteer’ in a casual capacity or forced to donate oneself as a slave for life in exchange for board and keep; some were even donated as slaves by their masters as an act of piety in their will.
 

And not all fates were equal.

“Some people were in quite good situations, they were protected by the church, and it looked after their interests. Others were quite exploited and powerless.”

Women for example, she says, often fared worse overall.

“With slavery in general, and including in the church, there was a tradition of sexual exploitation, particularly of women. It was an accepted thing that masters would sleep with their female slaves.”

The book particularly focuses on women at the bottom of the social order who only feature in the margins of written records, says Bailey, who combed through sources like accounts of saints’ lives, letters, sermons, hagiographies and legal documents kept in various locations in Europe, as well as online.

“I'm particularly interested in the women, because there are very few sources that tell us about lower status women in this society, so these sorts of records are one of the few occasions that we actually start to hear about them.”

However, she also highlights one remarkable woman who went from rags to enormous power and riches, and back to rags again: Saint Balthilde (626-680).

“She was said to be intelligent and beautiful but was a slave at the start of her life,” says Bailey. “She seems to have come from England and into Francia (earlier version of France) to be a slave in the household of one of the high nobles in the court and ends up marrying the king!

“Then when the king dies, she serves as a regent for her young son and rules the whole Frankish kingdom. However, in her later life she was known for her piety and efforts to abolish the Christian slave trade within the kingdom and ends up joining one of the monasteries she founded, living like a slave herself again. She was later celebrated as a saint.”
 

The wealth of many modern Christian institutions was built on the labour of slaves, not just in the modern period, but starting right back in the early centuries of Christianity,” says Bailey.

“When pious people donated lands to the church, they often donated the unfree people who worked on them as well, and those lands and people became the economic engine of wealth.”

Meanwhile, she says, modern racial slavery was also based on and religiously justified by the ideas about slavery developed in the early medieval church.

“We know that slaveowners in 19th century America, for example, found support for their practices in the writings of Augustine of Hippo (354-430) and Gregory the Great (c.540 – 604), which presented slavery as part of a God-approved social structure which was in the ‘best interests’ of the people enslaved.”

Even when we talk about the ideal of the ‘servant leader,’ she says, we are ultimately evoking the metaphor of being a ‘servant of God’.

“This developed from the idea that the best leader was one who served others and deliberately humbled themselves, as modelled in a series of early medieval lives of saints.”

Servants of God, Slaves of the Church: Service as Religous Metaphor and Social Reality in Early Medieval Europe will appeal to scholars of medieval and religious history, as well as anyone interested in how ordinary people, and especially women, lived in early medieval Europe.