‘The air of England is too pure for a slave to breathe; let the black go free!’ These words of Lord Mansfield in the celebrated case of Somerset v Stuart have echoed down the ages as a landmark judgment in the history of the abolition of slavery. But there’s a slight difficulty. He never said it. In fact, it is not easy to discover what he did say, because in 1772 when the judgment was given the law reports had not yet attained the accuracy of later years. There was no court recordings and Mr Pitman’s shorthand had not yet been invented. Reporters took down what the judges said as best they could, as did newspapers who in those days would report in extenso the judgments of topical cases, and Mansfield’s famous words appear to have been taken from a letter to the Evening Post. The most reliable version of
