The Full Story
In 1772, a man named James Somerset escaped his owner in London. He was recaptured and chained on a ship bound for Jamaica. Three ordinary people decided to do something about it. Not politicians. Not lawyers. Not people of wealth or power. Thomas Walkin, Elizabeth Cade, and John Marlow, Somerset's godparents, applied for a writ of habeas corpus, a law the English had written in 1679 to stop anyone being imprisoned without reason.
The case landed on the desk of Lord Mansfield, the most senior judge in England. He did not want it. He tried to settle it privately. He delayed. He adjourned. He understood what was at stake: fourteen thousand enslaved people lived in England, and the merchant class had fortunes riding on the answer. But three ordinary people with a ninety-three-year-old law would not go away. Granville Sharp organised the case behind them.
On 22 June 1772 Mansfield delivered his ruling. "The state of slavery is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law." England had written no law allowing slavery. So slavery had no legal basis on English soil. James Somerset walked free. The principle the English had been building toward for five hundred years was locked into law, not through an army, not through a revolution, but through three ordinary people who used it.
Why This Matters
The Somerset ruling did not end slavery in the British Empire. It did not free a single person outside England. But it drew a line: slavery could not exist where English law ran, unless Parliament explicitly created it. No Parliament ever did. That line became the foundation of every argument that followed. When abolitionists pushed to end the slave trade in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833, they were building on what three godparents and a long-dead law had put in place.