“the debate, however skewed it sometimes became, did seem to me to be about important structural issues. 3 This model, which drew on nineteenth-century scholarship while enriching it with textured social analysis, was to become the common view among medievalists for many years. For Bloch, as the Latin word ‘servus’ evolved into French ‘serf’, native slaves saw their status gradually transformed into a condition which could no longer be recognised as slavery. 2 But what happened after the Germanic kingdoms of the fifth to eighth centuries? Marc Bloch, one of the greatest historians of medieval unfree labour, proposed a gradual disappearance of productive slavery which would have been completed during the ‘ Premier Âge Féodal ’ (eighth-eleventh centuries), when serfdom prevailed. 3 See specially the long article he published in the Anuario de Historia del Derecho Español (1933) a (.)Ģ A closer look at Visigothic legislation shows however a far less charitable scene: with nearly half of its laws referring to slaves, the Lex Visigothorum bears witness to a society whose rulers were particularly worried about preserving slavery as a key social institution.In it, he made a distinction between Asturian society in the first and eleventh centuries, which is representative of the traditional point of view on medieval slavery:
We can find such a point of view for example in the words of Ramón Prieto Bances, who in the late 1930s wrote a remarkable study of the rural dominion of one of the chief monasteries in medieval Asturias (San Vicente of Oviedo) in which he followed the trend of French histoire des classes rurales. This weakening of slavery during the Middle Ages was seen as a sign of historical progress, an achievement that was only made possible by the moral influence of Christianity. Only domestic slavery would have survived thereafter, as war and trade furnished the households of the powerful with foreign, non-Christian slaves.
1 According to a strong scholarly tradition dating back to the great liberal historians of the nineteenth century, productive slavery mostly disappeared in Europe during the first centuries of the early Middle Ages, being substituted by serfdom.
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