Simon Millson retweetledi
🏴🇬🇧 Chapter One. The Beginning of the End.
This is the story of how ordinary British people ended slavery.
It starts here. In 1086.
William the Conqueror had just seized England by force. His first act was to count everyone in it. What the 'Domesday Book' revealed was extraordinary.
More than seventy percent of the people on this island belonged to someone else.
Not slaves. But not free. Serfs. Bound to the land from birth. Unable to leave. Unable to own property. Their children inherited their chains automatically.
Then in 1348, the Black Death arrived.
Within two years it had killed nearly half the population of England. Villages emptied overnight. And the survivors realised something the lords had hoped they never would.
They had power.
They demanded wages. They walked off the land. They refused to return on the old terms. Parliament passed a law in 1351 to force them back.
The people ignored it.
In 1381, sixty thousand ordinary people marched on London. They burned the records that proved their bondage. They demanded to be treated as human beings. The king rode out, made promises, then broke every one of them. The leaders were hunted down and executed.
But serfdom never recovered.
Without a single law. Without a king declaring it so. Over the next hundred years it quietly collapsed. The English simply stopped accepting it.
By 1500 it was dead.
Three hundred years before France.
Nearly four hundred before Russia.
This was the character being forged. On this soil. By ordinary people who refused to stay down.
And they were just getting started. 🇬🇧
Their individual stories are on our page. Our book is coming soon.
Help us make this possible. proudofus.co.uk/support
Be Part Of Us.
Be Proud Of Us. 🇬🇧
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