Slaves in the Viking Age: how prevalent were enslaved people in Viking societies?

“Slavery studies in the Viking Age have been attracting more and more attention over the past 15 years or so. It’s one of those things I think that we've always known about. Every description of raids that comes from that time talks about people being taken away into captivity. It's not like we didn't know. And even if you look at the later sources, like the famous Icelandic sagas, there are lots of enslaved people in those stories.

• Your guide to the Viking raid of Lindisfarne in AD 793

“Part of the distancing of our perception of the Vikings from that reality is, I think, that we talk about thralls instead of slaves. And so we've somehow managed to convert that into something that's not really slavery. It's more like servants or something. It’s not. It is slavery. When we think of Viking raids, we always think in terms of physical loot, taking some church plate or jewellery, but people are one of the main proceeds of all of these attacks.”

• Listen | Neil Price takes us inside the Viking mind to explain how the Norse raiders viewed the world and what drove them to expand across the seas

What did slaves do in Viking society?

According to Price, this renewed academic focus on slavery in Viking Age society has shown that vast resources and people power would have been needed to allow for the increasing size of Viking fleets over the period.

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“By the time you get into the 10th or 11th century, there are fleets of hundreds of ships. And when you start working out how much wool is required to make the sails; how many sheep you need to make those sails; how much timber is required for the planks; how much iron is needed for the rivets; we’re basically talking about a full time occupation for hundreds of people. And we have to ask who those people were.”

Price contends that those people were, of course, slaves. He thinks that we can see evidence for slavery in the settlements of the period as well, “where you get lots of little buildings clustered around big halls. We know who lives in the big halls, but who lives in all the little ones?”

Viking ships: 5 lesser-known facts

Why did the Vikings rely so heavily on their ships, and what made the longboat so terrifyingly effective?

Slavery and the Viking economy

The need for slaves to fulfil the economic functions that Price has described above went on to fuel itself as the Viking period progressed.

“I think it’s a cycle of activity that we've tended to break up into its component parts. We talk about raiding and then we talk about trading and we might talk about slavery as well, but actually it’s part of the same thing, because when you go raiding, you capture people who are then enslaved.

“Then you trade in those slaves and you can use the labour of those enslaved people to build more ships and then you can do even more raiding, and on and on.

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“That's why I say that unfree people are such a central component of the Viking economy. It's not that this is something that appears suddenly with the Vikings. As far as we can tell, slavery is a Scandinavian institution that goes back long before the Viking Age.

“But the engagement of that in a larger economic machine, in the expansion of the Viking Age, is what changes. And that's what also changes the whole market for enslaved human beings because they're one of the main products of the raids.”

Neil Price is Distinguished Professor of Archaeology at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and the author of The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings (Allen Lane, 2020).

He was speaking to HistoryExtra content director David Musgrove on an episode of our podcast about the Viking mindset.

This content was first published on HistoryExtra in November 2020

More content from week one of the HistoryExtra Academy Vikings course:

Viking raiders, with Professor Ryan Lavelle – watch time 18 mins

Fighting the Vikings – read time 13 mins

History explorer: Alfred and the Vikings – read time 13 mins

Your guide to the Viking raid of Lindisfarne – read time 3 mins

The great Viking terror: how Norse warriors conquered the Anglo-Saxons – read time 12 mins

Why did the Vikings' violent raids begin? – read time 12 mins

Viking ships: 5 lesser-known facts – read time 6 mins