At the risk of shameless self publicity, on the aftermath of the Somersett decision and what it actually meant, you might like to look at my essay 'After Somerset' in Norma Landau (ed), Law Crime and English Society, 1660-1830 (Cambridge, 2002). There's more about Somerset in the Oxford DNB - but that's also by me, so it is naturally congruent with the legal positin outlined in the essay.
But briefly, yes, you are right the decision was about whether a master could compell his servant out of the country. A subsequent decision by Mansfield (Thames Ditton) suggests that he did think that an individual could owe unpaid service - this correlates to the well known Blackstone gloss, suggesting that a master could own the right to labour but not the actual human being.
Regards
Ruth
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