Thus begins one of the most unusual and intriguing documents of late antiquity, the Confession of St Patrick, describing the circumstances in which a Romano-British teenager was taken from his home and sold into slavery in barbarian Ireland. The Confessio is Patrick’s defence against criticisms by certain members of the British church hierarchy who were attacking his past and his missionary efforts in Ireland. It was written sometime in the second half of the fifth century, but is plagued by chronological vagueness, references to unknown places, and a Latin that has suggested to some it was not his native tongue. Nevertheless, the Confessio is still the closest thing we have to a slave narrative from antiquity. It is one of only two authentic writings of St Patrick, the other being the earlier Epistola ad milites Corotici (Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus), addressed to the soldiers of a British warlord who had attacked and enslaved newly baptized Irish converts.

This chapter looks at the enslavement of children (below 16 years of age) from the 5th to the 15th centuries, focusing on the Mediterranean and the British Isles. It uses contemporary documents, such as personal narratives, laws, contracts, letters and ecclesiastical sources, to construct case studies illustrating the major ways that children could become slaves. These include capture in war or kidnapping and sale by pirates and unscrupulous slavers; abandonment as a newborn, rescue, and rearing as a slave; pledging into servitude by parents to pay a debt; and birth to an enslaved mother. Domestic slavery was the most usual fate for children, though a few boys were made into eunuchs destined for elite households in the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate, and girls might become concubines or sex slaves. There was little official effort to prevent child enslavement, although the Byzantine emperor Justinian attempted to abolish the use of children as debt-pledges and the enslavement of abandoned newborns, and banned castration within the bounds of his Empire. In general, the enslavement of even very young children and their transport across long distances was common and uncontroversial.

“Marriage is the joining of male and female and a partnership [consortium] for all of life, a sharing of divine and human law,” wrote the jurist Modestinus early in the third century. The lawyer thus expresses the Roman idea of marriage as a joint enterprise, in which each partner has both emotional and financial interests (consortium can also connote a business relationship), a view found also in literary sources. A similar but more sentimental depiction of marriage appears in funerary inscriptions for a deceased spouse, with whom the dedicator is said to have lived for years “without any complaint” (sine ulla querela), and on sarcophagi depicting the couple clasping hands in a gesture of marital solidarity. Whatever the realities of married life for individuals, Roman public and private ideology clearly espoused the idea of marriage as a mutual and balanced partnership.

It is fitting to begin with a quotation from one of the great legal minds of the imperial period, for any study of Roman marriage will of necessity draw heavily on legal evidence. The sources available to scholars of marriage in the medieval and early modern periods – cartularies, parish records, local and episcopal archives, private diaries, letter exchanges, and so on – do not exist here (apart from the epistles of famous political or religious figures, which are literary or theological works rather than intimate correspondence).