posed 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:

"Some faint traces of the institution of villenage were detected by the
curious as late as the days of the Stuarts; nor has that institution
ever to this hour been abolished by statute."

TEE BEE.

_Villenage_ (Vol. iii., p. 327.).--In reply to the question put by H. C., I
beg to say that in Burton's _Leicestershire_ (published in 1622), a copy of
which is now before me, some curious remarks occur on this subject. Burton
says, under the head of "Houghton-on-the-Hill," that the last case he could
find in print, concerning the claim to a villein, was in Mich. 9 & 10 Eliz.
(_Dyer_, 266. b.), where one Butler, Lord of the Manor of Badminton in
Gloucestershire, did claim one Crouch for his villein regardant to his said
manor, and made an entry upon Crouch's lands in Somersetshire. Upon an
answer made by Crouch, an _ejectione firmae_ was brought in the King's
Bench; and upon the evidence it was moved, that as no seizure of the body
had been made, or claim set up by the lord, for sixty years preceding, none
could then be made. The Court held, in accordanc