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A footnote in history

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21 October 2016 / LW Blake
Issue: 7719 / Categories: Features
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After Lord Mansfield’s judgment: whatever happened to James Somerset, asks LW Blake​

James Somerset (or Somersett, or Sommersett,or Summersett) is the most famous freed slave in English legal history. He and his erstwhile slave-owner Charles Stewart were the two litigants who stood before Lord Mansfield CJ in July 1772, in the case of Somerset v Stewart (1772) Lofft 1, 20 State Tr 1. The mystery is: what happened to James Somerset after Lord Mansfield’s judgment in his favour? It is also a mystery about how an unhelpful footnote (which purports to explain the future fate of James Somerset) ever found its way into a standard textbook on constitutional law.

This is a mystery worthy of an MR James ghost story. A Warning to the Curious would have been a good title for this investigation, if he (James) had not already used that title and made it the underlying theme of all his short stories.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

According to Ruth Paley, in her valuable biographical entry for James Somerset in the Oxford Dictionary

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