David Lisle

David Lisle beat a boy nearly to death in 1765, and the case that followed put the first crack in slavery's legal standing in England. He was a lawyer who had brought Jonathan Strong from Barbados to London as his property. In 1765 he pistol-whipped him about the head until Strong was blind in one eye, unable to walk and close to dying, and then put him out on the street as useless. Strong was found there by William Sharp, a surgeon who treated the poor without charge, and by his brother Granville, a clerk in the Ordnance Office with no legal training and no particular views about slavery. They got him into hospital, kept him for four months and found him work. Two years later Lisle saw him in the street, recognised his recovered property, and had him seized and sold to a Jamaica planter for thirty pounds. That second act is what made the case. Granville Sharp went to the Lord Mayor, who ruled that Strong had been taken without a warrant and was free to go; Lisle challenged Sharp to a duel and then sued him, and Sharp spent two years teaching himself law in order to answer it. The suit collapsed. What came out of it was a self-taught expert who went on to bring the Somerset case in 1772, in which Lord Mansfield held that no master could remove a person from England by force - the judgment the English abolition movement is usually dated from. Nothing else is recorded about Lisle, including when he was born or died. He is remembered because of who picked his victim up.

• Nationality: English
• Roles: other