Slave chain, late ninth or early 10th century

The clink of this iron chain is a dark note that sounds through much of Irish history, from St Patrick to the Magdalen laundries. It is the sound of slavery. Found in the River Dee, beside the big Viking settlement at Linn Duachaill, near Annagassan in Co Louth, the chain, made of iron links that were originally gilded with tin, would have looked incongruously pretty. But its function was brutally plain: to turn people into moveable property. It is a remnant of a trade that sold Irish slaves to places as far apart as Iceland and the Arab world.

The Old Norse word for a slave, ‘thræll’, is still part of our language, as thrall. But slavery had a long and disreputable history in Ireland before the Vikings.

St Patrick was captured as a slave, and the first written document in Irish history is his Letter to Coroticus, denouncing a British chieftain who had enslaved some members of his Christian flock. The spread of Christianity does seem to have greatly diminished the use of slavery, but it returned with the Vikings.

In the ninth century, Dublin emerged as a major slaving centre, from which captives, not merely from the rest of Ireland but also from Britain, were traded. The normal price for a male slave was 12oz of silver; a female fetched eight. The slave trade retained a significant role in the city’s commerce until the 12th century. (In a foretaste of 19th-century imperial rhetoric, the suppression of the slave trade was one of the excuses for the imposition of English overlordship in Ireland.) Most are anonymous, but we have the names of a few Irish people enslaved by Vikings. The Life of St Findan (or Fintan), a Leinster monk who died in Switzerland in 878, records the capture of his sister by Vikings. When Findan seeks to ransom her, he himself is captured. He is later sold in succession to four different masters before he escapes. There is specific mention of the enslaved Findan being bound in chains.

The Icelandic Laxdæla saga contains the story of Melkorka (probably Máel Curcaig), the daughter of an Irish king, who is captured in a raid when she is just 15, and sold in a slave market in Norway to “Gilli the Russian”.

She is then bought by a Viking called Höskuldr for “three silver pieces”. He takes her to Iceland, where she bears Höskuldr a son, Olafr, whom she teaches to speak Irish. She somehow retains a defiant personality: when Höskuldr’s wife contemptuously flings stockings at her head, Melkorka responds by giving her a bloody nose. But few Irish slaves were the children of kings, and few would have survived such defiance.

In the saga, Melkorka pretends for years to be deaf and dumb. Slaves, indeed, seldom get to speak or to leave the records of their own voices. The only sound they leave behind is the dull clank of a chain.

Thanks to Anita Barrett and Brian Walsh

Where to see itAt the exhibition Raiders, Traders Innovators: The Vikings and County Louth, at the County Museum in Dundalk, Co Louth, dundalkmuseum.ie, 042-9327056