Lord Mansfield rode a pony 54 days to school and later reshaped English law
At 13, William Murray set off alone from Perth to London on a pony his father gave him, a journey of some 400 miles that took 54 days. As Lord Mansfield he became the most powerful judge of 18th-century Britain, founding its commercial law and ruling that slavery had no basis in the common law.
Murray was born in 1705 at Scone Palace in Perthshire, a fourth son among eleven children of a Scottish viscount. His family backed the exiled Stuarts, and an elder brother followed the Old Pretender abroad, which left them short of money. Later admirers tidied this up by claiming he had been schooled in Lichfield; in fact he went to Perth Grammar School, where he learned to write good English prose, an edge he felt English-educated classmates lacked. He shone at Westminster School and in 1723 topped the entrance examination for Christ Church, Oxford, where the registrar, baffled by his accent, recorded him as coming from Bath.
Without private income, he relied on a patron who paid him 200 pounds a year to train for the English bar. At Oxford he won a Latin poem contest on the death of George I, an odd show of loyalty to the Hanoverians for a Jacobite family's son; another entrant was William Pitt, his lifelong rival. Called to the bar in 1730, he quickly made his name and in 1742 entered Parliament and became solicitor general, soon the government's chief voice in the Commons thanks to his eloquence.
In 1756 he became Lord Chief Justice, stepping in unexpectedly when his predecessor died a few months after appointment. On the bench he modernised court procedure, cut costs for litigants and built the body of commercial law that helped Britain lead the world in trade and finance; cases such as Carter v Boehm earned him the title founder of English commercial law.
His most famous ruling, in Somerset v Stewart, held that nothing in English law had ever established slavery, so it could not be enforced. The judgement did not abolish slavery in England or the colonies, but it energised the early abolitionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic. He died in 1793.
Source: William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield
