Another action was brought before him under these circumstances:--Butler, Lord of the Manor of Badminton, in the county of Gloucester, contending that Crouch was his villein regardant, entered into certain lands, which Crouch had purchased in Somersetshire, and leased them to Fleyer. Crouch thereupon disseised Fleyer, who brought his action against Crouch, pleading that Butler and his ancestors were seised of Crouch and his ancestors as of villeins regardant, from time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. The jury found that Butler and his ancestors were seised of Crouch and his ancestors until the first year of the reign of Henry VII.; but, confessing themselves ignorant whether in point of law such seisin be an actual seisin of the defendant, prayed the opinion of the Court thereon. Dyer, _C.J._, and the other judges agreed upon this to a verdict for the defendant, for "the lord having let an hundred years pass without redeeming the villein or his issue, cannot, after that, claim them." (_Dyer_, 266. pl. 11.) When Holt was chief justice of the King's Bench, an action was tried before him to recover the price of a slave who had been sold in Virginia. The verdict went for the plaintiff. In deciding upon a motion made in arrest of judgment, Holt, _C.J._, said,--"As soon as a negro comes into England he is free: one may be a villein in England, but not a slave." (_Cases temp. Holt_, 405.) As to the period at which villenage in England became extinct, we find in _Litt_. (sec. 185.):-- "Villenage is supposed to have finally disappeared in the reign of James I., but there is great difficulty in saying when it ceased to be lawful, for there has been no statute to abolish it; and by the old law, if any freeman acknowledged himself in a court of record to be a villein, he and all his after-born issue and their descendants were villeins." Even so late as the middle of the eighteenth century, when the great Lord Mansfield adorned {411} the bench, it was pleaded "that villenage, or slavery, had been permitted in England by the common law; that no statute had ever passed to abolish this _status_;" and that "although _de facto_ villenage by birth had ceased, a man might still make himself a villein by acknowledgment in a court of record." This was in the celebrated case of the negro Somersett, in which Lord Mansfield first established that "the air of England had long been too pure for a slave." In his judgment he says,-- "... Then what ground is there for saying that the _status_ of slavery is now recognised by the law of England?... At any rate, villenage has ceased in England, and it cannot be revived."--_St. Tr._, vol. xx. pp. 1-82. And Macaulay, in his admirable _History of England_, speaking of the gradual and silent extinction of villenage, then, towards the close of the Tudor period, fast approaching completion, says: