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for slaves. In 884, Kildare was plundered, and more than 300 sent away for slaves. In 892, Armagh was again captured, and 800 captives sent to the ships. But, in quick succession, Carrol, with Leinster forces, and Aloal Finia, with the men of Bregh, defeated the Danes and retook Dublin, while in other parts of the island the Northmen suffered great reverses; but in 914 we find them again returned and in possession of Dublin and Waterford, but quickly put to the sword by the Irish. Another division succeeded to plunder Cork, Lismore, and Aghadoe; and, in 916, were again in Dublin, ravaged Leinster, and killed Olioll, the king. In 919, they were attacked near Dublin by Niell Glunndubh, king of Ireland. Their resistance was desperate, under the command of the chiefs Ivor and Sitric: here fell the Irish monarch, the choice nobility, and the flower of the army. Donough revenged the death of the king, his father, and the barbarians were again signally defeated; but we find them, in 921, under the command of Godfrey, their king, in possession of Dublin, marching to and plundering Armagh, and, for the first time, sparing the churches and the officiating clergy. A predatory war, without decisive encounters, was continued for more than twenty years, when they suffered two severe defeats from Cougall II., in which their king, Blacar, and the most of his army were slain. In but the mind sickens, tires at these recitals; a whole army is swept away, and, as if the ocean poured twice its numbers on shore, whole centuries gave no relief. In short, we have a continuation of these scenes of piratical war, until the power and spirit of this restless race of the Northmen were broken at Clontarf, near Dublin, on the 23d of April, 1014, where they suffered an irrecoverable defeat from the Irish, under the command of Brian Boroimhe.

Ireland did well to rejoice in the perfect overthrow of these ruthless invaders; but here fell Brian, whom ninety winters had only nerved for the conflict. Here fell his son Morogh, and his grandson Turlogh, personifications of the rage of battle; here fell a numerous, almost the entire, nobility; here fell Ireland's valiant warriors in unnumbered heaps. The voice of Ireland is yet sometimes heard, but it is the voice of a broken heart; of complaint, of weakness, of weeping, and sadness. In a review of these times and those that followed, the providence of God may be traced by its final development. Where no mercy was, it is infused by hope of gain; and the savage and the captured slave are led to an equal elevation in the service of the altar of the God Jehovah.

The sacrifice of the Lamb is substituted for the victim of war in the woods of Woden; while the proud flashes of the crescent of Islam became dim before the continued ray of the Star of Bethlehem.

LESSON XXI.

THE condition of the slave, throughout the whole of Europe, was attended with some circumstances of great similarity.

The slaves were generally of the same nation, tribe, and people, who formed a constituent portion of the free population of the country where they were, and always of the same colour and race. Even the Sclavonians, on the continent, formed no exception in the more northern parts of Europe. In short, slavery, as it existed in Europe, was only in a very few instances in the south marked by any radical distinction of race: consequently, the condition of the slave could never be as permanent and fixed as it ever must be where strong distinctions of race mark the boundaries between bondage and freedom-although often far more cruel.

The disgrace of the free, from an amalgamation with the slaves, did not proceed from any consideration as to race, but merely from the condition of the slave-more pointed, but somewhat analogous to the disgrace among the more elevated and wealthy, arising from an intermarriage with the ignorant, degraded, or poor. Influenced by such a state of facts, the particulars of his condition were liable to constant change, as affected by accident, the good or ill conduct of the individual slave, the sense of justice, partiality, fancy, or the wants and condition of the master; nor needed it the talent of deep prophecy to have foretold that such a state of slavery must ultimately eventuate in freedom from bondage.

A description of the slaves of Britain will give a general view of those of the continent, for which we refer to Dr. Lingard.

The classes whose manners have been heretofore described constituted the Anglo-Saxon nation. They alone were possessed of liberty, or power, or property. But they formed but a small part of the population, of which not less than two-thirds existed in a state of slavery.

All the first adventurers were freemen; but in the course of

their conquests, made a great number of slaves. The posterity of these men inherited the lot of their fathers, and their number was continually increased by freeborn Saxons, who had been reduced to the same condition by debt, or made captives in war, or deprived of liberty in punishment of their crimes, or had voluntarily surrendered it to escape the horrors of want.

The ceremony of the degradation and enslavement of a freeman was performed before a competent number of witnesses. "The unhappy man laid on the ground his sword and his lance, the symbols of the free, took up the bill and the goad, the implements of slavery, and falling on his knees, placed his head, in token of submission, under the hands of his master."

All slaves were not, however, numbered in the same class. In the more ancient laws we find the esne distinguished from the theow; and read of female slaves of the first, the second, and third rank. In later enactments we meet with borders, cocksets, parddings, and other barbarous denominations, of which, were it easy, it would be useless to investigate the meaning. The most numerous class consisted of those who lived on the land of their lord, near to his mansion, called in Saxon his tune-in Latin, his villa. From the latter word they were by the Normans denominated villeins, while the collection of cottages in which they dwelt acquired the name of village. Their respective services were originally allotted to them according to the pleasure of their proprietor. Some tilled his lands, others exercised for him the trades to which they had been educated. In return, they received certain portions of land, with other perquisites, for the support of themselves and their families.

But all were alike deprived of the privileges of freemen. They were forbidden to carry arms. Their persons, families, and goods of every description were the property of their lord. He could dispose of them as he pleased, either by gift or sale: he could annex them to the soil, or remove them from it: he could transfer them with it to a new proprietor, or leave them by will to his heirs.

Out of the hundreds of instances preserved by our ancient writers, one may be sufficient. In the charter by which Harold of Buckenhole gives his manor of Spaulding to the abbey of Croyland, he enumerates among its appendages Colgrin, his bailiff, Harding, his smith, Lefstan, his carpenter, Elstan, his fisherman, Osmund, his miller, and nine others, who probably were his husbandmen; and these with their wives and children. Wherever

slaves have been numerous, and of the same race as the master, this variety in their condition has always followed. See the statement of Muratori concerning the Roman slaves; also the laws of Charlemagne concerning those of the Lombards and Goths. These records are proof that slavery, accompanied with such facts, is always in the act of wearing out.

LESSON XXII.

ALL historians agree that the Sclavonians, who at an early age made their appearance on the north-eastern borders of Europe, came, a countless multitude, pouring down upon those countries. from the middle regions of Asia.

The precise place from which they originated, the causes of such emigration, and the successive impulses that pushed them westward, have now, for centuries, been buried beneath the rubbish of the emigrants themselves and the general ignorance that overspread the events of that age.

But there are some facts that assign to them a place among the Hindoo tribes. Brezowski, speaking the Sclavonic of his day, in his travels eastward, was enabled to understand the language of the country as far east as Cochin-China; and scholars of the present day find numerous Indian roots in this language. A similarity of religious rites is to be noticed between the ancient Sclavonians and the Hindoos. They burned their dead, and wives ascended the funeral piles of their husbands. Their principal gods were Bog, and Seva, his wife. They worshipped good spirits called Belbog, and bad spirits called Czarnebog.

These hordes overspread the countries from the Black Sea to the Icy Ocean; and, in their turn, were forced westward by similar hordes of Wends, Veneti, Antes, Goths, and Huns. Thus attacked and pushed in the rear, they poured themselves upon the inhabitants of the more western regions, who, more warlike, and with superior arms, put them to death by thousands, until the earth was covered with the slain. Thus fleeing from death, they met it in front, until the nations then occupying the north and east of Europe, satiated and sickened by their slaughter, seized upon their persons as slaves, and converted them into beasts of burden.

Their numbers exceeding every possible use, the captors exported them to adjoining countries as an article of traffic; and the Venetians, being then a commercial people, enriched themselves by this traffic for many years. All continental Europe was thus filled by this race, from the Adriatic to the Northern Ocean. Thus their national appellation became through Europe the significant term for a man in bondage; and although in their own language their name signified fame and distinction, yet in all the world besides, it has superseded the Hebrew, the Greek, and Roman terms, to signify the condition of man in servitude. Thus the Dutch and Belgians say slaaf; Germans, sclave; Danes, slave and sclave; Swedes, slaf; French, esclave; the Celtic French, &c., sclaff; Italians, schiavo; Spanish, esclavo; Portuguese, escravo; Gaelic, slabhadh; and the English, slave.

Nor was this signification inappropriate to their native condition. For these countless hordes were the absolute property of their leaders or kings, who were hereditary among them,—as was, also, their condition of bondage.

The Romans called their language Servian, from the Roman word servus, a bond-man; and from the same cause, also, a district of country low down on the Danube, Servia, which name it retains to this day. This country belongs to Turkey, from whence they took the name serf. This term has been borrowed from thence, by the Sclavonic Russians, to signify a man in bondage. The whole number of their descendants is now estimated at 100,000,000; and notwithstanding their amalgamation has identified them with the nations with whom they were thus intermingled, yet a thousand years have not ended their condition of bondage in Russia, and 40,000,000 are accounted only as an approximation to the number that still remain in servitude in the north of Europe and Asia.

"The unquestionable evidence of language," says the author of the Decline and Fall, "attests the descent of the Bulgarians from the original stock of the Sclavonian, or more properly Slavonian, race; and the kindred bands of Servians, Bosnians, Rascians, Croatians, Walachians, followed either the standard or example of the leading tribes, from the Euxine to the Adriatic, in the state of captives, or subjects, or allies, or enemies; in the Greek empire, they overspread the land: and the national appellation of the SLAVES has been degraded by chance or malice from the signification of glory to that of servitude. Chalcocondyles, a competent judge, affirms the identity of the language of the Dalmatians,

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