This post comes to you from the Department of Contradictions. It’s a big department, so don’t wander off on your own, please. We may never see you again.

The most familiar parts of England’s relationship with slavery–at least to me, so I’ll quietly assume it’s true for you too, since I’m clearly the pattern for all humanity–are the slave-based economy of its colonies and its involvement in the slave trade. And right behind that comes the work of its abolitionists. But if we stick to those, we’ll miss a couple of messy and interesting parts of the story. So let’s look at whether slavery was legal under English law. It’ll be heavy on top-down history, but in a later post I hope I’ll be able to get into what English slaves did to free themselves. It’ll be useful to know the legal stuff when we get to that.

Ready? Good. Stick together please. I did warn you.

Early history

I’m American originally and make a lot of standardized (not to mention silly) American assumptions, so first let me remind you (we’re identical, remember, so your mind will be as silly as mine) that slavery hasn’t always been based on color differences, or even on national or ethnic differences.

You already knew that? So did I, but the image in my mind appears in black and white anyway, so it’s worth repeating. 

When William the Conqueror seized England’s throne and everything that went with it, he sent his minions to count up what he’d conquered, and in 1068 they reported that, among other things, 10% of the population was enslaved. At least some of these would’ve been Anglo-Saxon slaves held by Anglo-Saxon slaveholders. 

A bit later, in 1102, England abolished slavery. Take a minute to notice that, please: slavery was outlawed. 

The country kept serfdom, though, and although serfdom wasn’t slavery, it was a close and unpleasant relative, the kind who drinks too much, doesn’t wash often, and starts fights at family parties. It wasn’t until the 17th century that the last form of serfdom, villeinage, was abolished.

But even in the middle ages, some people (for which you can read some people who were powerful enough to have left a record of their opinions) found it abhorrent. Henry II (1154 to 1189; you’re welcome) freed some of his villeins “because in the beginning nature made all men free, and afterwards the law of nations reduced some under the yoke of servitude.”

Just after you think, Wow, you ask yourself, Why didn’t he free them all, right? It’s a fair question. The answer is that I haven’t a clue, but if you’re constructing an argument that England’s law, culture, and history don’t accept slavery and its various cousins, make a note of that quote. It’ll be useful. 

Be careful to ignore all the evidence that runs counter to your argument. You’ll find plenty of it and it’ll only confuse the picture.

Now let’s zip forward to 1569, when someone named Cartwright was seen whipping a man and the courts got involved, because it looked like assault–or technically, battery.

Wait, though, Cartwright said. He’s my slave, so I have the right.

The court disagreed and ordered the man freed, saying that  “England was too pure an air for slaves to breath in.” 

No, the spelling isn’t mine. The letter E was rationed back then. They weren’t going to waste one just to mark the difference between breath and breathe. They knew we’d figure it out.

As far as is known, the slave was  from Russia. He was white and Christian.

Important as the ruling was, exactly what it meant in terms slavery’s legality remained hazy, but it would’ve been clear enough for the Russian. He was free. 

History’s an ironic s.o.b., though, because at about this same time England first got involved in the international slave trade, and from here on the picture is black and white, not white and white, because the slaves they were transporting came from Africa. 

Slave trading was small-scale stuff at first, but by 1660 the Royal African Company was incorporated and it went into the trade on an industrial scale, transporting 212,000 slaves, almost all of them branded on their chests with either the name of the company or DY, for Duke of York. Out of those, 44,000 died on the slave ships. I trust I don’t need to tell you about the conditions on the slave ships. If I do, ask Lord Google about the Middle Passage. The conditions were brutal, degrading, and–look at the numbers–often lethal. 

That 212,000 isn’t the total number of slaves transported by English ships, only by that one company. The total would be something along the lines of 3.1 million, and only 2.7 million of those survived the trip.

If you want a historical landmark for the start of industrial-scale slave trade, we’re talking about Charles II’s reign, and yes, I had to look that up, so don’t feel bad. 

And with that, we’re ready to introduce a new subhead, because this one’s wearing out.

 

Contradictory rulings

In 1677, an English court heard a case involving a group of slaves who were “wrongfully detained.” (The quote’s from Peter Fryer’s book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, so no link. If you want to go deeper into the topic, the book’s a good place to start.) The case involved a squabble between two white men, a plantation owner in Barbados and a naval officer who argued that “as there could be no possession of people as property, therefore his action in detaining the enslaved persons was more akin to the feudal practice of villeinage, which tied people to land, thereby making them immovable as simple property.”

So we won’t find heroes on either side of this case. It was two charmers fighting over human property. One wanted them as slaves and the other as serfs. The court ruled that “since black people were bought and sold and as they were infidels, they ranked as merchandise and therefore could be treated as property for the purposes of the claim.” (We’ve gone back to Josh Hitchens for that quote. See the first link if you want to go deeper.)

Two things stand out in this ruling: one, people could be considered property; and two, this could be justified by checking their religion against England’s own. If they didn’t match, the people could become property. 

The people involved were not set free.

A second ruling at the end of the century repeated the role of religion in deciding whether a person could be property: “heathens” could be; Christians couldn’t.

Logically enough, this led to a widespread belief that becoming a Christian would free a person, and English slaveholders went to some lengths to make sure their slaves got no chance to convert, and ditto the communities where they–the slavers–kidnapped people to enslave them.

On the other hand, not long after that ruling we find one that says, “The common law took no notice of blacks being different from other people,” and another saying “That as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free. . . . One may be a Villein in England, but not a Slave.”

Neither ruling touched on the slave trade or slavery in English colonies. They applied only to within the borders of England.

 

Except…

Except that they didn’t exactly apply within the borders of England, because slavery did exist within its borders, unchallenged. They were about slaves coming into England. 

Why should the law consider them different from the slaves already there? Beats me, but it did. 

Still, slaveholders continued to bring their slaves into England, and they were worried enough about the risk that they asked the attorney general for an opinion on the subject, which he dutifully issued in 1729. A slave, he said, remained a slave while in England, baptism didn’t free a slave, and a slave could be compelled to leave England and return to the colonies. He didn’t cite case law or precedent–the altars English law worships at–but the opinion was taken seriously and used in court by lawyers who managed to keep a straight face while doing so.

 

A bit more case law

Legal rulings wobbled backwards and forwards on the issue for a good–or not so good–long time. In a 1749 ruling, slaves remained slaves. In a 1763 ruling, they not only became free, they could charge their former masters with ill treatment. 

Then we get to the case of Jonathan Strong, who was brought to England as a slave, beaten so badly that the slaveholder threw him out on the street when Strong was no more use to him, and later tried to reclaim him when he saw that he’d recovered. Strong was held in jail before he could be put on a ship, and he managed to contact the men who’d help him recover from his beating. 

It all ended up in court and Strong was set free, after which one of the men who’d helped him, Granville Sharp, was sued for £200–a shitload of money at the time–for interfering with the slaveholder’s property. The slaveholder also challenged him to a duel, an invitation Sharp was sharp enough to decline.

He was also sharp enough to defend himself in courts, since he couldn’t find a lawyer who thought he had any defense, and he did a good enough job that the plaintiff’s lawyers dropped the case and the plaintiff had to pay the costs.

Actually, three times the costs. So we get to do a victory dance, but we’ll have to cut it short because the ruling avoided setting a precedent. What’s more, five years after he was beaten and thrown out on the street, Jonathan Strong died as a result of his injuries. He was 25.

By now, Sharp had become a campaigner, and he was involved in a few more cases that rescued individuals but didn’t yield a decisive ruling on slavery’s legality. 

That sets the scene for the 1772 Somersett case. James Somersett had been enslaved in Massachusetts, was brought to England as a slave, and after two years escaped. He was recaptured and held on a ship bound for Jamaica but rescued by legal intervention.

When the case went to court–we’ll skip over the legal arguments–at last a judge came back with a decisive ruling: slavery was so “odious” that it could only exist if authorized by law–and no English law had ever authorized it.

But, despite appearances, the Somersett ruling didn’t abolish slavery in England, it only prevented slaves from being forced to leave the country against their will. This was no small thing, because the slaves in England tended to be servants. (I’ve read of one group who worked in a quarry, but they seem to be the exception.) Without minimizing the horrors of slavery, the threat of being deported to, say, a sugar plantation in Jamaica if they tried to run away was a powerful one. 

So slavery itself continued on English soil, and English newspapers continued to advertise the sale of slaves and searches for runaways. 

 

The abolition of slavery

England’s involvement in the slave trade became illegal in 1807, but slavery within England wasn’t abolished until 1838, when it was abolished in the colonies as well. Except, ahem, for the parts of the world ruled by the British East India Company, which were ruled by the company, not its government.   

The slaveholders were paid compensation. The slaves not only weren’t compensated, in the colonies they were pushed into what were a thinly disguised form of slavery called apprenticeships. By then, though, slavery had already died out within England, not because of new laws or court rulings but because, Fryer argues, the slaves themselves had become a powerful anti-slavery force and freed themselves.

But that’s another post–or it will be if I can find enough detail to make it work.