Benjamin Lay: Another look at an old Friend by Simon Webb
‘It is tempting to think of Benjamin Lay as an anachronism.’
Some time around the year 1731, a Quaker called Sarah Lay went to visit her neighbour on Barbados. Sarah was shown into her neighbour’s kitchen, and couldn’t help noticing something hanging from a beam in the ceiling. It was not a side of ham or a brace of conies, but a man: an enslaved person, strung up and standing in a pool of his own blood – he had been whipped. Naturally, Sarah asked what the man was doing there. She was told that he had been caught trying to escape.
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