2007 marked the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the United Kingdom and much media and museum attention was given to this important issue. We in the Local Collections thought that it would be interesting to see whether our historic collections held any relevant material. Sadly, a search of our online catalogue threw up nothing from 1807 itself but, taking a broader view, we found material not only relating to slavery as it is normally understood, but earlier manifestations dating from the thirteenth century.

Until the economic and demographic devastation wrought by the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, many peasants living on rural estates were legally classed as ‘nativi’, (variously translated as serf or villein). They, with family members and all their possessions ‘belonged’ to the lord of the manor, and their rights and freedoms were severely circumscribed: they could be married only at the lord’s discretion, and to a partner of whom he approved; they could be evicted from their holdings arbitrarily and taxed at the lord’s whim. In practice they were scarcely ever ejected; instead they could amass large holdings which passed by inheritance, they could profit from the sale of their produce, and they could manipulate the system to evade fines. Several deeds in our collections show that they were nevertheless regarded as assets to be traded. In the 1280s, Philippa, widow of Robert Begworth, made over to Roger Leye and his wife Matilda, all her rights in her villein Robert King of Kingston (in Chesterton), together with his chattels, household, house and one virgate (30 acres) of land. Roger and Matilda subsequently granted Robert King and his possessions to a nephew. King was clearly not a poor man, farming thirty acres, but his personal rights were limited. In 1339, just before the Black Death, Alan, serf of Geoffrey Dobyn was granted, together with other property in Chadshunt, to John Clerk of Gaydon. As late as 1383, when serfdom had become a dead letter in practice, Katherine Trussell, of Flore, in Northamptonshire, seized the crops growing on land leased to John Palmer, a former serf who had been given his freedom by her father-in-law, claiming that Palmer was her ‘villein by right’.

In later centuries slavery became an external issue for Warwickshire people: in 1655 Alice Leigh, Duchess Dudley established various charities, most of which related to the poor of various local parishes. One provision, however, was for money to be spent on the redemption of Christian slaves, referring to those (usually seamen) who had been captured by the Turks or Moors around the Mediterranean. One hundred and twenty years later this charity was still being used: in 1778, for example, the Leigh family agent received a request for £400 for the redemption of Christian slaves in Barbary, and in 1811 the trustees are considering the redemption of a ship’s crew.

Of slavery itself, there are only a few notices among our holdings. The Stratford Borough Records contain the draft of a petition, from the town to the House of Commons, urging the abolition of ‘the Traffic in the Human Species practised by this Nation upon the Inhabitants of Africa … founded in Avarice and [which] can only be supported by fraud and violence’, but it is endorsed ‘not sent 1788’; and the Council Minutes for 1807 contain no mention of the passing of the Abolition Act. Slavery in the United States continued to be an issue until after the Civil War, and the attitude of some English businessmen is reflected in a letter of 1838 from Thomas Cooper of South Carolina to Sir George Philips of Weston: ‘Every slave in a southern state is an operative in Great Britain.













We cannot work rich southern soil by white free labour, and if you will have Cotton Manufacturers, you must have them based upon slave labour’. We also came across a marriage settlement of 1811 between an Irish officer in the Bengal Volunteers and Mary Louisa Antonia L'Enfernat, daughter of a French West Indian planter, which includes, as part of the dowry, a ‘Mozambique Negress Laundress worth 200 dollars’; whilst the 1775 will of Thomas Trinder, born in Cirencester but living in what is now The Gambia ‘in the service of the Company of Merchants trading to Africa’, includes a grant of freedom to his Ashanti slave woman Abinnabat, who is also given four small slave girls as a legacy! Interestingly he goes on to assign another female slave and her two children, to the Company ‘not so much to continue them Slaves, as to prevent them from being pillaged and plundered by the free Natives, which would be the case had they no Master’. A further nine slaves, of whom three are named, are given as legacies.

It would be easy to assume that an archive based in the middle of England, and with the word ‘Shakespeare’ in its name, would have nothing relevant to the subject of slavery; but this one search has revealed the rich variety of our holdings which, now increasingly accessible via our online catalogue, are truly ‘not of an age, but for all time.