Slaves, often rivals captured in wartime, were pretty numerous—one estate listed in the Domesday Book (the land survey commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086) had more than seventy of them. However, slavery from the ninth to eleventh centuries in England was not quite the kind of dehumanizing bondage we think of from more modern times, as in the American South, for instance. Although slaves were property and could be sold—and for quite a lot: a healthy male slave was worth eight oxen—slaves were able to own property, marry, and move about freely within the community. The Old English
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