Manumission

From the Latin words manus (hand) and missio (release), manumission was the act of freeing a slave. It could occur in many ways (Gaius 3.56). For example, a slave might be released from the owner’s power by a claim before the magistrate and in the presence of the master, in which a free man (called adsertor libertatis) would affirm that the slave was a free man (manumissio vindicta); by presentation of the slave to the censor for registration as a Roman citizen (manumissio censu); and by testamentary disposition of the slave’s master (manumissio testamento).

The last form of manumission was the most common. Testamentary manumissions were conditional on the slave’s paying a sum of money to the heir. During the period between the opening of the will and the fulfillment of the condition, the slave remained enslaved (statuliber). The child of a female slave born during that period was also considered a slave.

More informally, however, manumission could occur by a letter from the master to the slave (manumissio per epistulam), by a declaration of the master before witnesses (manumissio inter amicos) or simply by an invitation to the slave to join the master’s table (manumissio per mensam). A slave manumitted by informal procedures lacked many rights, including those of full citizenship. Such a slave was protected by praetorian law but not civil law. Slaves freed by praetorian law were called Junian Latins, because they had the same legal status as the existing Latins (lex Iunia [Norbana], c. 19 ce). Emperor Constantine added another procedure for manumission: the master’s giving consent in a church before a Christian congregation (manumissio in ecclesia).

Emperor Augustus transformed the law of slavery by the lex Fufia Caninia (2 bce) and especially the lex Aelia Sentia (4 ce). The lex Fufia Caninia

Family law 135 imposed a limit on manumissions by will: an owner of no more than two slaves could use this procedure to free the one or two slaves that he had; an owner of three to ten could use it to free half of his slaves.

Owners of eleven to thirty slaves could manumit up to one-third of their slaves by will; owners of thirty-one to 100, one-fourth; of 101 to 500, one-fifth; and no one could so manumit more than 100 slaves (Gaius 1.42-43). The lex Aelia Sentia (D. 40.9) also stipulated three provisions. First, the owner had to be twenty years old for the manumission to be valid. Second, to become a citizen, the freed slave had to be thirty years old, unless the manumission was made before a praetor (vindicta). Freed slaves under age thirty were protected only by praetorian law (and were considered Latins after the promulgation of the aforementioned lex Iunia). Third, some freed slaves punished by their masters or condemned to fight with beasts, or tortured and convicted of crime, could never become citizens. They would remain as dediticii. Finally, manumission that defrauded creditors was void.

Justinian significantly changed the law of manumission. The new law abolished the status of luniani latini and dediticii, and it established that all manumissions whether formal or informal, should confer citizenship. The new law also required a document attested by five witnesses to validate informal manumissions (per epistolam and inter amicos). Restrictions on numbers of testamentary manumission were also abolished.

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Source: Domingo Rafael. Roman Law: An Introduction. Routledge,2018. — 252 p.. 2018

Manumission

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