Although many books on the Anglo-Saxons do not say much about it, more than ten per cent of England's population were slaves. Slavery was a widespread institution in early medieval Europe, and the sale and export of slaves was one of the main motors of the economy. Since the ninth century the trade's most outstanding exponents had been the Vikings, whose warfare was predicated for the most part on seizing young men and women as merchandise, to be sold either at home in Scandinavia or - very commonly - to Arab merchants in the Middle East. England was one of their principle hunting grounds, so individuals abducted from the coasts of Devon, Wales or Northumbria might eventually find themselves labouring under a desert sun to construct a caliph's palace, or members of a sultan's harem.
Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest, (2018) p.25
