"I have no master, I myself am the m--" "Silence, for God's sake!" I got the words out in time to stop the king.

We were in trouble enough already; it could not help us any to give these people the notion that we were lunatics.
There is no use in stringing out the details.

The earl put us up and sold us at auction.

This same infernal law had existed in our own South in my own time, more than thirteen hundred years later, and under it hundreds of freemen who could not prove that they were freemen had been sold into lifelong slavery without the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the minute law and the auction block came into my personal experience, a thing which had been merely improper before became suddenly hellish.

Well, that's the way we are made.
Yes, we were sold at auction, like swine.