The Law and Policy Blog

13th August 2021

This blog recently looked at the end of the Atlantic slave trade, with the last (known) surviving transatlantic slaves and what their lives told us about law.

The last (known) victim died as recently as 1940, that is within the lifetime of four sitting United States senators.

This blog now moves to the beginnings of how English law dealt with slavey, with the Butts v Penny case of 1677.

(This is the first of an intended series of posts, dealing with cases on slavery and the slave trade.)

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Before we look at the case, there are three points of context.

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First, and by way of background: there was (supposedly) by the 1600s no (formal) slavery in England.

There had been been something known as ‘villeinage’ – where villeins, like human garden gnomes, were in effect held to be property fixed to the land.

Villeins however had (limited) legal protections, and could not be bought and sold like mere chattels.

By the 1600s, however, villeinage had in substance ended.

But it was the nearest English law had, at that point, to the notion of slavery.

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Second: by the 1670s English merchants had been happily and deeply involved in the slave trade for over a hundred years.

The slave trader John Hawkins was trading in slaves as early as the 1560s.

So impressed were those at the time with this trade in slaves that when Hawkins was granted a coat of arms, on its crest there was ‘a demi Moor in his proper colour, bound and captive’.

The role of English merchants in the trade in slaves was thereby not something that those at the time were somehow ashamed of – it was something openly celebrated.

At the time, a coat of arms was among the most public statement about a thing a person could make.

‘a demi Moor in his proper colour, bound and captive’

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Third: by the 1670s the trade in slaves even had the official recognition of the English state.

As early as 1618, James I had supported the establishment of a ‘Company of Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa’ and in 1663 a royal charter was granted to the Royal African Company.

So although the English courts had not yet grappled with the slave trade in its case law, and although it was a concept not (directly) known in English law, slavery and the slave trade was certainly something that was legally recognised and sanctioned.

For a court in 1677 to decide that there could not be a trade in slaves would go against both over a hundred years of actual mercantile practice and over fifty years of official support.

The odd thing, perhaps, was that it took so long for a dispute to reach the English courts to be reported.

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For completeness, mention should now be made of a 1569 case: Cartwright.

This is the case where (supposedly) it was held that ‘England was too pure an air for a slave to breathe in’.

The problem is that this celebrated – and later much-quoted – case was that it was not reported (that is, recorded) at the time, and we only know about if from later mentions in the 1700s.

Like a lost Shakespeare poem that we know about only from quotation, we do not have the original.

And it not being reported at the time, it had no contemporary impact or wider significance – if a judge said those rousing words at all.

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So we come to the 1677 case of Butts v Penny.

Here we have two law reports.

The first is from a collection of cases reported by the judge Sir Creswell Levinz.

Unfortunately, the Dictionary of National Biography tells us, that is ‘some division of opinion among English judges as to Levinz’s merits as a reporter’.

His report is here – and it is one brief report among many others he reported:

The other report is not from a judge nor even from a practising lawyer, but from an endearingly obsessive non-practising barrister called Joseph Keble, who just turned up to court every day to report cases that ended up filling twenty volumes.

His report differs from that of Levinz – and is even shorter:

Again, for Keble this was just one report among many, many others.

Neither Levinz nor Keble emphasise their reports of this case, and if you scroll (or leaf) through their reports, the report is just reported like any other.

The fact that the case was about slaves did not strike either reporter as being especially noteworthy, and presumably it did not strike their contemporaries as being that noteworthy either.

The reports are not consistent – for example, one says 100 slaves and one says 10 (and a half?).

As Levinz may have been a/the judge in the case, and is anyway the more senior lawyer of the two, his report would normally be preferred – regardless of his mixed reputation.

What does this case tell us?

First: Butts (the plaintiff) had bought slaves, and that Penny (the defendant) had taken them.

Second: Butts was suing Penny on the basis of ‘trover‘ – which means that Butts was not demanding the physical return of the slaves but was suing for their cash equivalent.

This was thereby a commercial case – and trover cases were a commonplace of the time – but unlike most commercial cases (then as now) this had not settled and so had to be determined by a court.

Third: the value or other importance of the case was such that Penny instructed a lawyer, Thompson, to put the defence – on the law, rather than on the facts.

Fourth: the lawyer Thompson put the defence that there could not be property in people – Keble says the lawyer compared the situation with the then extinguished state of villeinage.

Had the court sided with Thompson’s submission on this then perhaps the history of the law of slavery would have taken a different direction.

But after a century of English slave trading and given the royal sanction for the slave trade, it would have been a robust court that would have made such a decision.

Fifth: the court deferred to mercantile practice – the custom of merchants.

In essence: because as a commercial fact slaves were bought and sold, then the court must accept that slaves could be bought and sold.

Slaves had fewer protections than villeins – indeed no legal protections at all.

Slaves – human beings – were ‘merchandise’.

And as merchandise, they could thereby be the subject of an action for trover.

Like any other property.

And sixth: the court made reference to the slaves being ‘infidels’ as if that somehow reinforced the decision made.

And so the plaintiff won.

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The striking thing about this case is, well, just how un-striking it was at the time.

A commercial case among hundreds of others, with the briefest (and inconsistent) law reports.

The court just nodded along with the custom of merchants.

And that was that.

No outcry, no obvious public attention.

The same matter-of-fact, bureaucratic mentality that was to be a feature of how the English courts generally dealt with the issue of slavery for the next hundred or so years.

The court did not even seem to regard itself as making new law or establishing any precedent – it was instead just applying existing commercial law to yet another form of property.

As if it was completely normal.

One can presume that before 1677, similar cases would have settled on the assumption that slaves were ‘of course’ merchandise and so could be subject to an action in trover.

Only this otherwise unknown Mr Penny went to the length of litigating the case to court, employing the lawyer Thompson to raise a legal (rather than evidential) defence, and then Mr Penny lost.

Butts v Penny is an unexceptional exceptional case.

Exceptional to us, as we see human beings casually reduced to ‘merchandise’.

Unexceptional to those at the time, other than Mr Penny getting his lawyer to make a spirited but futile defence.

And this was the first mark on the legal record of how English courts would practically deal with the slave trade.

As Hannah Arendt said in a different context, this is how banal an evil can be.

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