After the Mansfield judgement there was not a large-scale dash for freedom among enslaved black Britons. The economic considerations that convinced black people to stay with their masters, whether as slaves or as servants, were unchanged by rulings from the King’s Bench. Life among the black poor on the streets of London and elsewhere remained as precarious and harsh as ever and black slaves lacking family networks or marketable skills were barred by poverty from seizing the freedoms that the law appeared to have conceded.
