4.2.1 The Historiography of Black Slavery in England
Popular history has it that the first black settlers in England were taken there in 1555 by John Lok, who brought five Africans to Britain that were to serve as translators.1 In their wake came the first Africans who were victims of the Atlantic slave trade, their numbers increasing due to the Elizabethan wars against Spain.
It is often claimed that Queen Elizabeth I was the first to point at a “black problem” in England. She proclaimed several “Edicts of Expulsion” (two Acts of the Privy Council and one Tudor Royal Proclamation) in this period to remove the so-called blackamoores from England.2 But whether Elizabeth deliberately tried to remove Africans or not, which is subject to debate, the venture was unsuccessful.The African presence in England increased after the takeover of Jamaica in 1655, and more so after the Asiento contract was given to England at the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.3 It probably reached its apex in the years after 1763, as the number of absentee West Indian planters that preferred to live in England increased.4 Most blacks came to Britain in two ways. First, it was customary for captains of slaving vessels to be allowed the transporting of a few slaves in each cargo for their personal profit, whom they would bring with them to Britain. Second, West India planters often took some of their slaves with them when they came to the metropolis. For both categories, blacks could serve as cheap labour and as a means to promote their social status in England.5
A great many historians have tried to measure the black presence in England in the period of the British involvement in the African slave trade. One genealogist recently made a database on Africans in Britain. She believes that there were between 10.000 and 20.000 blacks in England during this period, but pointed out that many of them were not necessarily enslaved.6 All in all, Drescher estimates that blacks represented between 0.09 and 0.2 percent of the population of Great Britain in 1771, right before Somerset’s case.7 Although this does not seem much, black persons were concentrated in the trading ports, and one assessment even claims that they represented 2 to 3 percent of the population of London by 1771.8
Primarily, it is the condition of these black persons which is to our interest.
Some of them, just like in the New World, were obviously personally free, and in that sense not much different from regular Englishmen in that period. But as Lord Mansfield himself stated in Somerset’s case, many black people were unfree. There is quite some evidence which suggests that there was a limited public traffic of black people in England. In particular, there are some reports on the existence of small slave markets in cities such as Liverpool, Bristol and London at times. Likewise, newspapers included advertisements to sell or recover a runaway slave every now and then.9 But, as Van Cleve has asserted, it is a good practice to talk about “near slavery” in many of these cases, as there is little evidence to suggest that black people in England were treated in the same way as in the Atlantic colonies, areas which were economically much more dependent on slave labour. In that sense, whereas there is proof of sales, imprisonment, wageless compelled service and forcible shipment abroad of English blacks, the harshest practices of the Atlantic (e.g. dismembering or scourging a slave) were probably not practiced in England. What is more, it is unclear whether slave status was seen as heritable for black slaves in England.10This immediately brings us to the thorny questions: what was the status of those black people that served as slaves in England’s Atlantic colonies, when they arrived with their masters in Bristol, London or Liverpool? Did they remain slaves de jure? Could villeinage be used to define their status? Would the opposition to slavery in the wake of the Vagrancy Act 1547 be repeated, and slavery be deemed to be “too extreme” to gain recognition by the English legal order?
For the answer to those questions, we will have to look to Westminster and the common law and equity judges. Parliament’s proceedings, however, will not help us much in our enquiry. Although there was apparently an attempt to insert a clause regulating the use of slaves in England into a master and servant bill in the House of Lords, Parliament eventually never made legislation on the issue. However, this proposal does suggest that parts of Parliament, at the least, considered slavery to be legal in England, though we cannot infer much more from these documents.11 Thus, the recognition of slavery in England has to be traced by looking at what the common law and equity courts said of the subject, before, during and after the cause cĂ©lèbre of Somerset v. Stewart.12