3 - Slave or Free: The Aehtemann in Anglo-Saxon Rural Society

Summary

It is over some thirty years since David Pelteret published ‘Two Old English Lists of Serfs’, in which he provided the first thoroughly documented and scholarly discussion of the aehtemann. The aehtemann was a type of estate worker in Anglo-Saxon England. Given the paucity of the term, most scholars of Anglo-Saxon rural society had given the aehtemann little attention, preferring to throw him into the more ubiquitous groups of slaves or serfs, and largely undistinguished from them. Pelteret's article and his later work Slavery in Early Mediaeval England provided the first attempt to study the aehtemann as a distinctive type of manorial worker. He concluded that the aehtemann was closely connected to work on the lord's inland and inheord, the lord's own demesne as well as his personal flocks and herds. Pelteret also regarded his status as heavily servile, if not fully incorporated into the ranks of slaves.

This article re-evaluates the evidence regarding the status and function of the aehtemann, focusing largely on the primary source that most fully describes him, the Rectitudines singularum personarum (hereafter Rect). From such an analysis and from a close reading of the Rect, this article proposes that the word aehtemann was a purely functional term, designating someone who was paid to work on the lord's land or with the lord's herds. As such, the word aehtemann is neutral as to the legal status of the individual. Though the term is neutral as to whether one was ‘slave’ or ‘free’, he was not regarded as among the ranks of the þeowas (traditionally translated as ‘slave’), but was actually drawn from the ranks of small tenant holders of an estate, such as the cotsetla. I also propose that the list of estate workers described in Rect 10–20, such as the sower, the plowman, the oxherd, etc., actually represents various types of aehtemenn, each of whom was compensated for his labors by perquisites appropriate to his task. When one draws these above conclusions into a singular scenario, one finds that the aehtemann played a role on Anglo-Saxon estates similar to that of the famuli of later centuries, particularly the lundinarii of the twelfth century.