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'In a Country of Liberty?': Slavery, Villeinage and the Making of Whiteness in the Somerset Case (1772)

The case of James Somerset drew attention to the question of the legality of slavery in eighteenth-century England and brought into prominent view two distinguishing and contradictory features of British life in the eighteenth century: liberty and property. In Rex v. Knowles, ex parte Somersett (1772) arguments about the nature and history of villeinage – the tenure by which a feudal villein held or occupied his land in exchange for bond-service rendered to the lord – played a crucial role. While abolitionists, led by Granville Sharp (1735–1813), maintained that English villeinage became obsolete because English law favoured freedom, defenders of slavery mobilized the category of villeinage as slavery’s logical precedent and analogue. The lawyers for James Somerset made part of their case against state support for domestic slavery by arguing that villeinage did not set a precedent because it was ‘a slavery in blood and family, one uninterruptedly transmitted through a long line of ancestors’. 1 This definition delineated villeinage as a specifically English status proven ‘by other villeins of the same blood such as were descended from the same common male stock’. 2 William Davy (d. 1780), serjeant-at-law and one of the lawyers representing Somerset, argued for Somerset’s release on the grounds that as an institution villeinage was ‘confined to Complexion and ... confined to a particular Quarter of the World’. 3 In other words, villeins were English people with ties of family, whiteness, and place. Abducted Africans, without the requisite lineage or historical claim, could never inhabit this legal category. Mingling on the periphery and in the metropole had confusing implications for economic, political, and legal institutions as well as for individual physical bodies. 4 The association of villeinage with whiteness that took place through the arguments presented in Somerset’s case was necessary in order to distinguish between free and enslaved people, colonizers and colonized, English and African. The case provided an opportunity to clarify boundaries by creating and fixing legal categories. James Somerset was born in West Africa around 1741. When he was eight years old, he was bought by European slave traders and sold in Virginia to