Early Medieval Slavery and the Weapons of the Weak

(James C. Scott, 1936–2024. Photo credit: Yale.)

By James Burns

Even if one accepts that the serf, the slave, and the untouchable will have trouble imagining social arrangements other than feudalism, slavery, or caste, they will certainly not find it difficult to imagine reversing the distribution of status and rewards within that social order.

This quote is from page 331 of Weapons of the Weak, a 1985 book by the renowned anthropologist James C. Scott, who passed away earlier in July. My colleague at Leicester, Andy Merrills, suggested to me that I should look at Scott’s work, and I am grateful that he did so. Scott’s arguments are clearly relevant for the study of slavery in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, when there was no abolition movement to allow slaves to envision a new social order, but when slaves nonetheless resisted their owners and sought to improve their status. Yet slavery is less prominent in Scott’s two major studies of resistance by members of the lower social orders, Weapons of the Weak and Hidden Transcripts (1990), than might be expected. Enslaved people were by no means absent from his analysis, but the peasantry received more attention, reflecting Scott’s interests in modern Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, in Weapons of the Weak, Scott drew upon studies of slavery in the Americas to bring slaves into his thesis that everyday actions by disadvantaged peoples are more historically significant than extreme forms of rebellion. For Scott, performative laziness, small-scale theft, and petty non-compliance might be unorganised, self-interested, and unlikely to bring about radical change—but that does not diminish their status, or indeed their importance, as forms of resistance.

Scott’s generalisations are inevitably open to question. Yet they remain useful to think with—perhaps even more so for domestic slavery than agricultural slavery, despite Scott’s own focus on the rural poor. While never an easy option for any group of enslaved people, slave rebellion seems to have been more viable for agricultural slaves than for household slaves, who were fewer in number and closely supervised in the home. Indeed, Janel Fontaine has suggested that the absence of Roman-style villas where concentrated populations of slaves worked the fields explains the absence of slave revolts in early medieval England.

Scott’s ideas help us to understand the logic of everyday resistance in the slaveholding household. Its very discreteness and lack of coordination made it achievable—in contrast to open revolt, which was more likely to end in death for the slave.

I also particularly like Scott’s point that to dismiss low-level theft and other acts aimed primarily at obtaining food and possessions as inconsequential, because they are not necessarily grounded in some broader selfless class solidarity, is ‘a slander on the moral status of material needs’ (p. 296; all page numbers refer to Weapons of the Weak).

Of particular importance for the early Middle Ages, where our sources were written by a narrow elite constituency, is Scott’s observation that:

For many forms of peasant resistance, we have every reason to expect that actors will remain mute about their intentions. Their safety may depend on silence and anonymity; the kind of resistance itself may depend for its effectiveness on the appearance of conformity; their intentions may be so embedded in the peasant subculture and in the routine, taken-for-granted struggle to provide for the subsistence and survival of the household as to remain inarticulate. (p. 301)

It may be difficult to access the precise resistance strategies of early medieval domestic slaves, and the political content of the strategies that are visible, not just because of source biases, but because slaves themselves were tactically taciturn. To go looking for early medieval slave resistance we must find ‘hidden transcripts’.

Yet though Scott suggested that patterns of everyday resistance could add up to ‘long-run campaigns of attrition’ (p. 298), he was clear-sighted about their failure to bring about immediate or radical social change. Indeed, unlike the Haitian Revolution, slave resistance in the early Middle Ages cannot easily form part of a narrative about the defeat and eventual abolition of slavery. But it is still unfortunate that early medieval slaves are so often left out of histories of resistance: the 2007 Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance has no entries relating to the early Middle Ages in the West, and its timeline skips from the bacaudae in the fifth century to the Zanj revolts in the ninth. By not paying enough attention to everyday forms of resistance in the early medieval household, we leave room for old stereotypes of slave docility. Therefore, as Scott wrote regarding the weapons of the weak generally, we need to ensure that we ‘respect, if not celebrate’ (p. 350) domestic slaves who resisted their owners in the early Middle Ages.