This chapter explores the effect of the Norman Conquest as well as looking at the developments during the Norman period as a whole during the reigns of William I (1066–87), William II (1087–1100), Henry I (1100–35) and Stephen (1135–54). It falls into three sections. The first provides an overview of the main effects of 1066 in terms of law and order. The second and main section then discusses in detail what is often considered to be the most significant development under the Normans, the feudal system, and how this impacted upon law and order. Feudalism actually undermined the development of a common law by feudal lords presiding over their own feudal courts for their tenants. The king’s law and protection was only afforded to his own personal tenants. The third section then focuses upon two aspects that are often overlooked in accounts of the effect of the Conquest: the effect of the Norman era upon the position of slaves and women. The importance of the later Norman kings will be the focus of the conclusion.

In contrast to Plato, Aristotle allowed and argued for the possibility that all human lives have some non-instrumental value. This valuation of life is premised on his teleological conception of nature: insofar as all human lives are natural ends of some sort, they are thus a good. However, this non-instrumental value of mere living is in itself not sufficient to make a life worth living. As in Plato, whether a life is lived well or badly is the decisive factor, and again the state of virtue or vice is the most important consideration. Vice makes a life worse than death, regardless of the other good things in it, but fully fledged virtue is not necessary for a life worth living. In contrast to those who are fully virtuous, other non-vicious humans may need other goods, or at least freedom from other bads, such as serious illness or grave misfortunes, to pass the threshold of a life worth living. In contrast to Plato, Aristotle is less optimistic about the chances of the non-educated elite having a life worth living, though he does not flatly deny that possibility.

The natural philosopher Robert Boyle, mentor of John Locke, took the view that the aim of science was ‘the Empire over the Creatures’. The task of Chapter 6 is to show how Robert Boyle’s new political system for an economics of natural science, primarily involving the utilitarian exploitation of nature and of trade, connected with his contribution to the development of a form of natural law and natural philosophy shorn of moral natural law. That idea drew on classical theological teachings on dominion over creatures (as set out in Genesis 1:26) together with the economic goal of making natural sciences productive – also considering the significant expansion that the British Empire was undergoing at that point in time. Theological principles about an omnipotent and bountiful God were crucial to Boyle’s plans for the achievement of broader management of nature, but as a rule he avoided consideration of anthropological theology and moral natural law in his scientific writings. A close reading of Of the Usefulness of Experimentall Natural Philosophy and of the Aretology helps in articulating these ideas.

The secession crisis of 1860-61 in the lower Mississippi valley represents the crisis in the South as a whole. Secession is more contentious, and southern Unionism more prevalent, in Arkansas and Tennessee than in Louisiana and Mississippi. Support for secession initially corresponds to areas of plantation agriculture and large slaveholdings, but the Confederacy receives overwhelming white support after secession. Events outside the region shape the Union’s initial approach to the rebellion and to the problem of fugitive slaves, though the region also experiences internal disruptions in mobilizing for war. The lower Mississippi valley initially experiences little direct effect from the war, but control of the Mississippi River soon becomes central to Union strategy. By early 1862, preparations were underway for Federal incursions into the region. Although the issue of slavery becomes unavoidable, notions of “Reconstruction” remain limited, and few Northerners envision a reunion predicated on the abolition of slavery.

The formulas describe unfree men and women with terms that are fluid and overlapping, and that encompass everything from what we would call chattel slavery to loose patronage. The unfree most often appear as the passive objects of the power and interests of their betters. They are not a closed group, however. Free people submitted themselves to servitude either voluntarily or by force of circumstance, in exchange for money or to make amends for some wrong. Unfree were freed or bought their own freedom. The unfree also display a significant amount of agency. They ran away. They sought help against their own lords from other powerful people. Sometimes they stole things, including marriage partners. They contested their status, often with success. Some even owned other unfree. In short, the formulas tell us that status at the interface between free and unfree was fluid, and that while they spent much of their lives as the passive objects of power, the unfree in this world had the capacity to act in their own interests, were fully aware of how power flowed, and could work the social and political system to their own advantage.

In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Act ii, scene v, chambermaid Maria plays an epistolary trick on her fellow servant. She forges a text to make the pompous steward Malvolio believe that his fantasy of rising above his station and marrying their mistress Olivia has become reality.1 The dupe is imagining just this as he comes into the garden where the deceptive document, which will literally spell out his daydream, has been planted. Maria and her accomplices, Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Fabian, watch from a hiding place and comment as the spectacle unfolds. It all begins the moment Malvolio picks up the text and reads the address written on its exterior (ii.v.69–80)

Six Plautine prologues1 and six Terentian prologues are our earliest unequivocal proof of original titulature in ancient drama.2 The twelve titles these provide are also the only securely author-sanctioned titles we have for the entire republican period until Cicero.3 While any authorial title is revelatory, the titles of Roman comedies are especially so; we have just seen that the title of a translation can convey information about its relationship to the source text. Juxtaposed with “Thesauros”, “Trinummus” gave us a key to understanding not only how the playwright conceptualizes his own play but also how he has reconceptualized a Greek play.4 Plautus’ titular changes, then, are meaningful and we should be paying more attention – not least because the poet does not always give his translation a new name: of ten comedies in the corpus whose originals we know for sure,5 only six have new titles.6 What is the difference between plays with changed names and those whose Greek names have just been translated into Latin? Are the former more Plautine than the latter? Is Mercator closer to Emporos than Stichus is to Adelphoi?

This chapter addresses those social ties beyond the kin-group which seem – to judge from commemorative practices – to have been of most importance for the inhabitants of Roman Hieradoumia. Fellow members of small-scale local cult-associations (phratrai, symbiōseis, speirai, doumoi) are very prominent in funerary commemoration, as are religious officials, neighbours, friends, and (for unfree persons) groups of fellow slaves. At Saittai, men are often commemorated by trade guilds and professional associations, probably reflecting the existence of guild-based burial-clubs; there is some reason to think that these trade guilds were unusually prominent in the civic organization of the polis of Saittai. Finally, civic communities fairly often participate in the commemoration of deceased members of the civic elite; such men and women’s tombstones can include lengthy extracts from post mortem honorific decrees which systematically conflate the deceased’s public and private virtues.

Using the rich funerary epigraphy from Rome and environs, this chapter reconstructs the organization of court domestic service, establishes a taxonomy of the various service roles attested at court, and explores the significance of the structural differentiation that can be observed among the (mostly servile) domestic servants. It then considers the impact of the emperor’s domestic servants on court politics, exploring the relationships that developed between the court and the outside world. Literary texts suggest that some domestic staff controlled access to the emperor, that others acted as brokers in distributing imperial patronage, and that a few became favourites of the emperor. The latter could rise to great heights of influence, but could also become lightning-rods of discontent with the regime. As a result, a reconfiguration of power within the court or a change of regime could see the expulsion of favourites from the inner circle – or worse.

This chapter examines the place within the court of the imperial secretaries and the workers in their bureaux. It first considers social connections between the servile workers in the bureaux and court domestic staff. Following this, the major imperial secretaryships are examined: the offices of ab epistulis, a libellis, a cognitionibus, a commentariis, a memoria, a studiis, a censibus, and a rationibus, as well as their late third-century equivalents. Some individuals holding these offices demonstrably had close relationships with the emperor or courtiers. But we lack the evidence to conclude that the secretaries and their bureaux formed an ‘outer court’ with a clear spatial relationship with the emperor’s domestic realm, or that they had an institutionalized pattern of social or professional contacts with that realm. The chapter also examines the structural relationship between the court and the imperial treasuries (the aerarium and fiscus), highlighting the reciprocal flow of funds.

The selection of literary, epigraphic, and papyrological sources presented in this chapter illustrates the key categories of courtier at the Roman imperial court, and the relationships of courtiers with each other and with the emperor. Categories of courtier include: the emperor’s friends (amici principis); his advisors; poets, writers, and other cultural figures; members of the imperial family; domestic workers; astrologers; the emperor’s sexual partners; and foreign royals. Various themes relating to the emperor’s relationships run through the sources, including: the tensions between ideals and realities; the competing claims of independence and subservience; the instability of court hierarchy; the operation of influence, brokerage, and patronage; the existence of power groups and factions at court; and the consequences of relationship breakdowns between emperors and courtiers.

This chapter focuses on the interactions that took place in the homes of the leading families of the late Republic, with particular emphasis on those that continued, albeit in changed form, at the imperial court. In exploring this theme, priority is given to written and archaeological evidence from the late Republic and early Augustan era, rather than later evidence, which may be suspected of anachronism. Topics covered include the personnel of the aristocratic household, the social rituals that took place there, the role of the household as a node of patronage, and the development of Republican houses as physical spaces. The chapter also argues that the rise of the great dynasts of the late Republic provoked anxieties similar to those that existed in the court culture of the Principate regarding the asymmetrical relationship between emperor and courtiers, and the outsized power of particular freedmen.

Unlike many other monarchical courts in history, the Roman imperial court had no distinctive form of dress for courtiers. But dress, jewellery, and the presentation of the body were still important in the world of the court. The clothed, adorned, and groomed body was a crucial instrument of communication within court society. In the case of the emperor and his family especially, the clothed body and its presentation also communicated with the rest of society; the considerable inscriptional evidence for staff in the imperial household with tasks involving clothing, jewellery, or grooming hints at the message of magnificence often being conveyed. Magnificence was, however, a two-edged sword. The ancient literary sources display clear traces of moralizing discourses that sought to pressure the emperor into what were considered to be appropriate sartorial decisions.

As long as people could be used as economic pawns, freedom was an ambiguous status. While legal recognition of property rights over land and goods expanded in the nineteenth century, the morality regarding ownership of human beings was challenged in courts, parliaments, and newspapers for centuries. Chapter 5 explores the experiences of freed people in a context of change related to property recognition and rights along with freed people’s access to property in the second half of the nineteenth century. Although semantics suggest otherwise, there was very little distinction between the experiences of enslaved or freed people in Angola. Accumulation of free and enslaved bodied, known as wealth in people, has been a fundamental framework for understanding West Central African societies’ understandings about wealth and accumulation. But ownership rights over people were contested within a context of juridical changes in all kinds of property rights in Angola. Coerced, unfree labor persisted, even as Portugal introduced gradual means to emancipate slaves in its possessions. Any efforts to regulate and end ownership rights over individuals had a public and a private sphere of debates, where slavers resisted the end of commodification while enslaved individuals rejected amelioration and gradual abolition projects.

The Prologue introduces the fundamental concepts of the book (antislavery, abolition, judicial forum), and Colombia’s ambiguous manumission law of 1821. Colombian leaders embraced a politics of antislavery by criticizing the Atlantic slave system and Spanish colonialism as a form of political slavery, but their efforts to speed the coming of a world with no slavery were lukewarm. They took the gradual emancipation approach, leaving most slaves in captivity, upholding the property rights of masters, and offering no citizenship to slaves and most former slaves. By contrast, some slaves and a few magistrates developed radical antislavery positions, calling for the unconditional end of slavery. However, antislavery and anti-Spanish politics had overlapping legal origins and tensions that emerged in the political exchanges and debates that transpired during litigation. In this judicial forum – a space of antislavery and abolition in a society with no freedom of the press or association – many slaves articulated their vision of a peaceful and complete end of slavery. They hoped to become law-abiding, God-fearing vassals of the king and, later on, citizens of the early republics.

In the opening of Plautus’ Casina the prologue warns the audience: ‘in case you’re waiting for [Euthynicus], he isn’t returning to the city in this comedy today. Plautus didn’t want him to. (64–6)’. The adulescens Euthynicus never becomes present onstage, and yet he is not completely absent either: his mother ‘knowingly supports him in his absence’, by supporting him against her lascivious husband. Euthynicus is not alone: Roman comedy is populated by a crowd of absent characters who are represented on stage by (guileful) proxies. Thanks to the poet’s imagination all these absent characters become present, and through their proxies they ‘benefit us in their absence as if they were present’, as the same prologue of Casina proclaims (20), with reference to the most important proxied absence of all, Plautus himself. There is something inherently theatrical about ‘proxiness’ and (Roman) comedy, a genre performed by actors proxying absent playwrights, featuring slaves proxying absent masters, and written by playwrights proxying both the Roman elite and the (lost) Greek models. The aim of the chapter is to delve into the world of proxied absentees in Roman comedy, investigating their meta-theatrical potential and the comic force of ‘proxiness’ in general.

In Chapter Three, I move beyond plantation America’s shores to trace how the legal logic of chattel slavery projected out into the Atlantic Ocean. The idea that human beings could be treated as things at law was not landlocked. Rather, it was a legal concept that also infused the worldview of those who labored at sea. This becomes clear when we sift through the claims of the countless sailors, captains, and merchants who brought their disputes to colonial Vice Admiralty Courts, which governed life on British naval and merchant vessels. Litigants quibbled over many things in colonial Vice Admiralty Courts, but what united their disparate claims was an overarching assumption that people of African descent were valuable commodities. Vice Admiralty procedure helped to make this possible. Although English admiralty law had developed over centuries to allow European sailors and merchants to seize cargo and ships, Vice Admiralty litigants and judges extended the Courts’ in rem jurisdiction to include slaves found on captured vessels. This process of adaptation was silent and uncontested. Litigants, lawyers, and judges assumed arguendo that Vice Admiralty Courts could treat slaves as they would any other type of marine property. Without comment, they slotted enslaved people into ready-made forms and procedures, and brought black bodies before the Courts as objects that could be condemned, appraised, and sold.