| Summary: | This article examines the slave trade through the lens of cultural interactions between different population groups in Britain and Ireland; it investigates how the resultant tensions impacted on their viewpoints of each other and, in particular, how their writers reported the taking and trading of slaves. This study will confine itself to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when these tensions were heightened by conquests and the process of Europeanisation. The influence of these medieval tensions and perceptions on the way our available written sources discuss slavery must be considered. Viewpoints on the slave trade, and those involved in it, are especially foregrounded in source references to the trade being brought to an end. This article will critique the ‘Viking’ and ‘Celtic’ stereotypes of our sources, which have sometimes seeped into scholarship on the matter too. It will challenge the notion of Scandinavian-imported slavery, foisted upon Britain and Ireland, and analyse the biases of Anglo-Norman writers in their portrayals of ‘Celtic’ barbarians, particularly of Scottish forces at the Battle of the Standard in 1138.
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