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A history of ireland in 100 objects, a selection
5th & 6th class lesson Plan
Viking slave chain late-ninth or early-tenth century
The clink of this iron chain is a dark note that Christian slaves; a progressive move that took several
sounds through much of Irish history, from St Patrick hundred years to disseminate across the rest of the
to twentieth-century institutions of incarceration. It is European continent.)
the sound of slavery. It was found, along with a human Most slaves are anonymous, but we have the
skull, iron spearhead and bronze pin, near Ardakillen names of a few Irish people enslaved by Vikings.
crannóg, Co. Roscommon. Its function was brutally The ‘Life’ of St Findan (or Fintan), a Leinster monk
plain: to turn people into moveable property. It is a who died in Switzerland in 878, records the capture
remnant of a trade that sold Irish slaves to places as of his sister by Vikings. When Findan seeks to ransom
far apart as Iceland and the Arab world. her, he himself is captured. He is sold in succession
The Old Norse word for a slave, ‘thræll’, is still to four different masters before he escapes. There is
part of our language, as thrall; but slavery had a long specific mention of the enslaved Findan being bound in
and disreputable history in Ireland before the Vikings. chains. The Icelandic Laxdæla saga contains the story
St Patrick was captured as a slave, and one of the of Melkorka (probably Máel Curcaig), the daughter
first written documents in Irish history is his Letter of an Irish king, who is captured in a raid when she
to Coroticus, denouncing a British chieftain who is just fifteen and sold in a slave market in Norway
had enslaved some members of his Christian flock. to ‘Gilli the Russian’. She is then bought by a Viking
Bondage remained a feature of later Irish society: called Höskuldr for ‘three silver pieces’. He takes her
there are records in the annals of families selling to Iceland, where she bears him a son, Oláfr, whom she
children in times of need. teaches to speak Irish. She somehow retains a defiant
In the ninth century, Viking Dublin had emerged personality: when Höskuldr’s wife contemptuously
as a major slaving centre, from which captives, not flings stockings at her head, Melkorka responds by
merely from the rest of Ireland but also from Britain, giving her a bloody nose. Few Irish slaves were the
were traded. The slave trade retained a significant children of kings, and few would have survived such
role in the city’s commerce until the twelfth century. defiance. In the saga, Melkorka pretends for years to
(In a foretaste of nineteenth-century imperial rhetoric, be deaf and dumb. Slaves, indeed, seldom get to speak
the suppression of the slave trade was one excuse or to leave the records of their own voices. The only
for the imposition of English overlordship in Ireland. sound they leave behind is the dull clank of a chain.
The Anglo-Normans did in fact ban the use of
This is a project of
