Tag Archives: was slavery legal in England?

Mary Prince & the ambiguity of slavery in England

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In 1831, a couple of years before the British Empire abolished slavery, a former slave named Mary Prince published The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. It’s credited with giving a good strong push to the abolitionist chariot and it’s one of Britain’s pivotal slave narratives, the first written by a woman, remembered with Ottobah Cugoano’s from 1787 and Olaudah Equiano’s from 1789, although Cugoano and Olaudah are, I think, better known.

Why am I weaseling around saying “I think” there? Because I’m not originally British. I’ve lived here for–hang on, I’ll need access to my toes to count this high–18 years, give or take a toe, but when you come to a country as an adult there’s some ground you just don’t make up. You bring other gifts. Immigrants are handy to have around, although you wouldn’t know that if your only contact with us comes from following the news. But some of the stuff that happens in your brain when you’re young doesn’t happen when you’re not. And I’m very much not. So I have the impression that Prince is less well known, but y’know, most of British history is new to me, so I’m not the best judge. 

To be fair, a lot of British history would be new to most of the British if they were to stumble over it, just as most of American history would be new to most Americans, and a lot of people are working overtime to make sure it stays that way.

Irrelevant photo: daffodils growing in a hedge. I’d love to run a picture of Mary Prince but there are none.

 

But back to Mary Prince

Prince was born into slavery in the Caribbean, sold away from her family when she was twelve, and shuffled between islands and slaveholders until well into her adulthood. She escaped once briefly, as a child, and as an adult married a free Black man Daniel James, who offered to buy her freedom but was refused. 

In 1828, about a year and a half after her marriage, the last in that collection of slaveholders, John Adams Wood, took Prince to England as a servant, and–

You remember that first paragraph where I said she was a former slave? That’s both true and not true. Her status in England was ambiguous. 

 

The bit about whether slavery was legal

To make sense of this, we have to go back to a 1772 court ruling involving  James Somerset, a slave who escaped in England just as he was about to be shipped overseas and sold. The court freed him and that ruling was generally taken as putting an end to slavery within England’s borders, although not in its empire. 

In fact, it didn’t end slavery. A year after the Somerset ruling, a newspaper reported that an escaped slave had been recaptured and committed suicide. Other newspapers ran ads for the sale of slaves. In 1788, two anti-slavery campaigners bought a slave in England to prove that slavery continued within the country’s borders. 

In fact, the judge in the Somerset case, was aware enough of slavery’s ambiguous status that his 1782 will freed his grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle, who’d been born into slavery but who he’d raised and educated and who lived in England with his family. What he had in fact ruled illegal in the Somerset case was taking a slave out of the country without his or her consent. That left England in a thoroughly weird position: none of its laws gave slavery any standing, but none of them made it illegal either. 

 

And back to Mary Prince again

Not long after Prince arrived in London, she walked out on the slaveholders who’d brought her, and I’d love to tell you how long “not long” was but nothing I’ve found makes it clear. The sources I’ve found do say her health was getting worse–she had arthritis–and a couple of the sources make it sound like she struggled to do the work that the Wood family demanded. One source says they threatened to throw her out on the street.

Whatever happened, she walked out and turned to the Moravian Mission, a Protestant church that she’d joined in Antigua, and at some point she found her way to the Anti-Slavery Society and met Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the London branch. She also found work and, the ambiguities of the law be damned, lived as a free woman.

What Prince wanted was to return to Antigua as a free woman, though, and she and Pringle tried, first through a lawyer and later through a minister, to negotiate with Wood for her freedom. Wood refused to free her on any terms. 

In 1829 she petitioned Parliament, asking them to free the enslaved people of the Caribbean, making her the first woman to petition Britain’s Parliament. And in what seems to be a separate petition, the Anti-Slavery Society petitioned for her manumission. 

Sorry for the murkiness. I’m working from multiple articles here and frankly some of them are better on rhetoric than on detail. Anyway, if there were two petitions, both failed. If there was one– 

Yeah. You get it.

At some point she became unemployed and the Pringles hired her as a domestic servant, and it was while she lived with them that she suggested testifying, in book form, to the brutality and violence of slavery. 

“I have felt what a slave feels,” she wrote, “and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free.”  

Prince could read and write, but she dictated the book to an English abolitionist, Susanna Strickland, who compiled it, and an abolitionist who’d lived in Antigua “helped on the Antigua section,” whatever that means. An additional slave narrative, by Louis Asa-Asa, was added to the book. He testified to his experience of being captured in Africa and brought ashore in St. Ives, Cornwall, when storms took the ship off course. 

Scholars argue about the extent to which Strickland and Pringle shaped the manuscript. By extension, I’d guess they’re arguing about how much the voice is Prince’s. No one these days seems to question the reality of her evidence, which is graphic and raw. 

 

The book and the lawsuits

At the time, though, the book was questioned, and it wasn’t long after the book was published that the lawsuits started. First Pringle, as the publisher, sued someone who claimed in print that the story was a fraud. Pringle won and was awarded £5 (more or less £485 in 2025 money, and from here on I’ll leave you to do the calculations) plus costs–a total of £160. 

Then Wood–the last in that line of slaveholders, remember–sued Pringle for defamation and Pringle countersued. The court decided that story was exaggerated and Wood was awarded £25 but not costs. All of which added to the book’s popularity. It went through three editions in its first year. 

 

And after that . . . 

. . . Prince drops out of the public record and we don’t get the end of the story. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the British empire, except for, ahem, the parts controlled by the British East India Company, and that first ahem is followed by a second ahem, because for a period of years slavery was replaced with an apprenticeship system that was slavery under a different name.

Still, it’s possible that Prince returned to Antigua and her husband. It’s also possible that she didn’t. 

Bermuda counts her as a national hero and observes a holiday in her honor.

English slavery: the legal history

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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.

Irrelevant photo: Fields showing the medieval divisions–long strips, because those plows were hard to turn.

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.