manorial villeinage, a white man might still become a _villein in gross_, by the laws of England.[50] The court declared farther, that the slave property of a debtor was undoubtedly liable to action in the English courts, to recover the sums due a creditor. But after all these admissions, which clearly amount to a recognition of the fact that England itself was then by law a slaveholding country, Lord Mansfield proceeds to settle the principle (the only one, as he carefully declares, to which his decision extends) that the power of the writ of _habeas corpus_, not being limited to free persons by express statute, should, as he thinks, in England be extended to slaves, when they invoke it, and should be held to override the rights of the master under the laws; because those rights were now regarded as odious and excessive by current publick opinion. Such, and no more, is the extent of this much be praised, and much misunderstood decision! It is plain to common sense, that if it is not an instance of the judicial abuse of making, instead of expounding, law, it only establishes the fact that the laws of slaveholding England were then in a ridiculously inconsistent state. [Footnote 49: See, on all the following statements from Lord Mansfield, Lofft's Reports, 12th Geo. 3d, pp. 1, 8, 17, 18, etc.] [Footnote 50: What the _villein in gross_ was, may be learned from the following, of Bracton, Lib. iv., 208: "Purum villenagium est, a quo præstatur servilium incertum et indeterminatum; ubi scire non potest vespere, quale servitium fieri debet mane, viz., ubi quis facere tenetur quicquid ei præceptum fuit." See also Blackstone, Lib. ii., 93.] In fact, not only were there then fifteen thousand negro slaves in England, but they were publickly bought and sold in the markets of London. The prevalence of slavery is attested by another species of historical evidence, very different from that of learned judges, but at least as authentick. The pictures by which Hogarth has fixed the follies and peculiarities of fashionable life on his immortal canvass, frequently contain the African valet; showing that the possession of this species of servants was demanded by high life. From the Normans, those noted slaveholders, to 1775, no statute had been passed upon the subject of personal slavery.[51] There then existed, in the northern part of the kingdom of Great Britain, from thirty thousand to forty thousand persons, of whom the Parliament said, "Many colliers, coal-heavers, and salters, are in a state of slavery, or bondage, bound to the collieries or salt-works where they work, for life, transferable with the collieries and salt-works, when their original masters have no use for them."[52] Again in 1799, they declare that "many colliers and coal-heavers still continue in a state of bondage." [Footnote 51: Justice Campbell, on Dred Scott case, 19th Howard, 109.] [Footnote 52: Parliament, 15th Geo. 3d.]