Like other scholars, Blackstone viewed slavery as both radically distinguished from and ambiguously associated with other types of service/servitude. Apprentices, with whom Blackstone associated the ‘perpetual service’ of (former?) slaves, were one of the four ‘sorts of servants’ which he distinguished after stressing that ‘pure and proper slavery’ could not exist in England. According to his classification, ‘the first sort of servants (…) acknowledged by the laws of England’ were ‘menial servants; so called from being
intra moenia, or domestics’, generally hired for a year. ‘Another species of servants’ – he wrote – ‘are called apprentices (from
apprendre, to learn) and are usually bound for a term of years, by deed indented or indentures, to serve their masters, and be maintained and instructed by them.’ ‘This is usually done’, he continued, ‘to persons of trade, in order to learn their art and mystery; and sometimes very large sums are given with them, as a premium for such their instruction.’ ‘A third species of servants are labourers, who are only hired by the day or the week, and do not live
intra moenia, as part of the family.’ Finally, he mentioned ‘a fourth species of servants, if they may be so called being rather in a superior, a ministerial, capacity; such as stewards, factors, and bailiffs: whom however the law considers as servants
pro tempore, with regard to such of their acts, as affect their master’s or employer’s property’.
1 Blackstone, Commentaries, pp. 413–15.That there were no longer slaves in England and that foreign slaves became free as soon as they landed on its shores had also been written, a century before Blackstone, by Edward Chamberlayne (1616–1703) in his
Angliae Notitia, or The Present State of England (first published anonymously in 1669 and then republished several times). ‘Foreign Slaves in
England are none, since Christianity prevailed. A Forreign Slave brought into
England, is, upon Landing,
ipso facto free from Slavery, but not from ordinary Service’, Chamberlayne wrote, without giving more details about what he meant by ordinary service (perhaps perpetual service, as in Blackstone’s view).
2 Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia, or The Present State of England (London, 1676), p. 299. When Chamberlayne wrote his work, slaves who entered England were probably less numerous than in Blackstone’s times, since England’s involvement in the slave trade grew significantly from the late seventeenth century.
3 See http://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates; William A. Pettigrew, Freedom’s Debt: The Royal African Company and the Politics of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1672–1752 (Chapel Hill, 2013), pp. 11–12. Like Blackstone, Chamberlayne dealt with slavery while speaking of different kinds of servant: after noting that servants’ conditions had improved since the time when England was considered to be ‘the Purgatory of Servants’, he explained that ‘ordinary Servants are hired commonly for one year, at the end whereof they may be free (giving warning three months before)’. It was considered ‘indiscreet to take a Servant without Certificate of his diligence and of his faithfulness’ by his former master. Servants were to be corrected by their masters and mistresses and resistance was ‘punished with severe penalty’; killing one’s master was ‘accounted as a Crime next to High Treason’.
4 Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia, p. 299.In the same chapter, entitled ‘On Servants’, he also discussed villeinage: ‘some lands in England are holden in Villanage, to do some particulars Services, to the Lord of the Mannor, and such Tenants may be called the Lords Servants’. He then explained that
there is a two-fold Tenure called Villanage, one where the Tenure onely is Servile, as to plough the Lords Ground, sow, reap, and bring home his Corn, dung his Land, &tc. The other, whereby both the Person and Tenure is servile, and bound in all respects, at the disposition of the Lord; such persons are called in Law, Pure Villains, and are to do all Villanous Services.
He concluded that ‘of such there are now but few left in England’,
5 Ibid., pp. 299–300. and then described what he presented as the ‘the nearest to this condition’, which were apprentices. These were ‘a sort of pure Villains or Bond-slaves’, but differed in that ‘Apprentices are Slaves, onely for a time, and by Covenant; the other are so, at the will of their Master.’
6 Ibid., p. 300. While Blackstone no longer mentioned villains among servants, listing labourers instead, both he and Chamberlayne associated apprentices and slaves, which might appear surprising to a contemporary sensibility. The harsh conditions of apprentices, in fact, surprised some travellers even in early modern times. Europeans from different countries had peculiar perceptions of the differences in the freedom enjoyed by (different kinds of) servants in different European nations.