together with a Pursuivant [he] did travel at his great Charges into divers parts of your highness Realm for the said Blackamoores. But the masters of them, perceiving by the said warrant that your orator could not take the Blackamoores without the Master’s good will, would not suffer your Orator to have any one of them.47
Had Edward Wynter been approached in this manner, he would probably have given Van Senden short shrift. Wynter had once been sold himself, to the Spanish ambassador as a prisoner in France, and highly valued Swarthye’s services. Swarthye’s continued presence in his household, and treatment by the court in 1597, contradicts the notion that Africans were expelled from England by this Privy Council letter.48
In 1619, Sir Edward Wynter died. He was succeeded by his son John. If Edward Swarthye had come to England in 1586, he must have then been at least twenty, which would make him thirty at the time of the whipping and in his fifties when Wynter passed away. He may have lived on to serve Sir Edward’s son, who was thought by Samuel Pepys to be a worthy man. John Wynter was knighted in 1624 and became secretary to Queen Henrietta Maria in 1638. If Swarthye were still alive he would have been an old man of over seventy. We cannot know whether he lived to see his master choose the losing side in the Civil War, or resort to burning White Cross Manor to the ground in April 1645.49 Or, indeed, if he remained in service all his life. Not all Africans working in gentry households remained in them forever. Henry Jetto, for one, left his position as Sir Henry Bromley’s gardener at Holt Castle in Worcestershire in around 1608 and made a home for himself in the village of Holt with his wife and family. When he died in 1627 he was the first known African wealthy enough to leave a will bequeathing legacies to his children and grandchildren.50
John Guye distanced himself so successfully from the ignominious events at White Cross that they are not recorded in later accounts of his life. After being dismissed from Edward Wynter’s service he returned to Bristol, where he had been born. On 20 February 1597, he was admitted into the liberties, or given the freedom of the city, entitling him to trade and hold property. His career progressed rapidly: he became Sheriff of Bristol in September 1605, and a member of the Spanish Company (merchants trading to Spain) the same year. In 1608 he set sail on a reconnaissance mission to Newfoundland. James I granted the Newfoundland Company its patent on 2 May 1610 and John Guye led the first group of English colonists to Canada that summer.51
It is no surprise that iron working was on Guye’s Newfoundland agenda. On 6 October 1610 he wrote from Cupers Cove to Sir Percival Willoughby about iron ore samples from Belle Island, the ‘island of iron’. Willoughby was an investor in the Newfoundland Company, and the two men hoped to profit from iron working together. This great hope was never realised. As Francis Bacon remarked, ‘the hope of mines is very uncertain’ and serves only ‘to make the planters lazy in other things’.52
Guye’s meeting with a group of Beothuk in Newfoundland.
On his third trip to Newfoundland in 1612 Guye encountered the native people, the Beothuk, for the first time. One wonders what effect, if any, his years living and working alongside Edward Swarthye had on his impression of them. In his journal he wrote that they greeted the English party with a dance, ‘laughing and making signes of joy, and gladness, sometimes striking the breasts of our company and sometimes their own’. The Beothuk and the Englishmen proceeded to eat and drink together; the Beothuk preferred the English aqua vitae to their beer.53 This was the first – and last – friendly encounter between the English and the native people of Newfoundland.
Guye returned to Bristol in April 1613, where he became mayor in 1618 and an alderman the year after. The biographer John Aubrey described him very briefly in his Brief Lives (1669–1696) as ‘the wisest man of his time in that city. He was as their oracle and they chose him for one of their representatives to sit in Parliament’. Guye sat in the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624, where he brought in a bill for lowering of interest rates from 10 to 8. He died in 1629 and was buried at the church of St Stephen’s in Bristol. He left half of his considerable estate, which included his Bristol house, estates at Doynton and Gaunt’s Earthcott, near Almondsbury in Gloucestershire and Kingston Seymour in Somerset, and his share in the prisage (customs duties) on wines imported into Bristol to his son John, the eldest of ten children, and half to his ‘loving wife’ Anne; the same Anne he had first met in Lydney.54
Had Anne Guye not been quite so loving, John Guye not so ambitious or Sir Edward Wynter so violent, we might never have known of the existence of Edward Swarthye, alias Negro. Instead, the knowledge that Swarthye whipped Guye forces us to reassess our preconceptions about the status of Africans in Tudor society. That said, Edward Swarthye was still a servant, which in the modern mind is easily elided into something little better than slavery, even though many English people were in service then. But not all Africans who came to England followed this path. Some, like Reasonable Blackman, a silk weaver in Southwark, were able to use their skills to make an independent living.
5
Reasonable Blackman, the Silk Weaver
Death had taken little Jane first. His son Edmund died three days later. That left Reasonable, his wife, and five-year-old Edward shut up in their house as the plague continued to ravage the city. The red cross on their door was beginning to fade, but they were still locked away, in grave danger of infection. Those who could afford to, the sort who liked to wear the fine silk Blackman wove, had left for their country estates long ago. The silk weaver and his family, like so many others, had no such luxury. Blackman thought of Jane and Edmund, and thanked God he’d been able to bury them in coffins. There was a churchyard across the river that had run out of space and forbidden coffins altogether.1 But they had been so tiny, those boxes of wood. He shuddered to think of their small bodies, cold, stiff and lifeless, inside.
REASONABLE BLACKMAN MADE a living as a silk weaver in Elizabethan Southwark. Given his profession was not long established in the English capital, where did he learn it? And what of his name; was it a reference to his ‘reasonable’ prices? Whatever his rates, they allowed him to support a family. He had at least three children, though two of them died young in the plague of 1592. His wife was probably an Englishwoman, considering the relatively small numbers of Africans in Elizabethan London. How accepted would this family have been in the Southwark community? He was a skilled craftsman, which shows us that not all Black Tudors worked for a master. It also causes us to wonder how many of the other Africans in Tudor England whose occupations are unrecorded were financially independent.
A surname alone cannot confirm a person’s ethnicity.2 Although Reasonable’s surname would seem to indicate the colour of his skin, it is in fact an old English surname, derived from the Old English Blaec mann, as are ‘Black’, ‘Blackmore’, ‘Moor/More’ and ‘Morris’. It could also be spelt Blakeman, Blakman, Blackmon or Blackmun. A John Blakman was living in England in 1206 and the name was fairly common until the thirteenth century. By the Tudor period, the name was found in Eynsham, Oxfordshire, Fowey, Cornwall, and Berkhampstead, Hertfordshire.3 Henry VI had a chaplain named John Blacman, a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. A different John Blackeman was buried at Grey Friars Church, London, in July 1511. A third man of the same name was a benefactor of St John’s Hospital, Coventry.4 None of these men was African.
‘Blackman’ may have originated in reference to a dark complexion, but by the sixteenth century it cannot be assumed to signify African ethnicity. As William Camden noted in 1586, ‘surnames began to be taken up ... in England about the time of the Conquest, or else a very little before’.5 Theoretically, a man called More in 1566 could have had a Moorish ancestor from five hundred years before, but it is a rather remote possibility. We cannot even assume that ‘Blackman’, or names like ‘Moor’ or ‘Niger’, were originally assigned to men of African origin. Wilfred Niger was nicknamed Niger or ‘the Black’ in around 1080, after he painted his face with charcoal to go unrecognised amongst his enemies at night.6 Th
e names could also refer to dark hair (Black), or to someone who came from a place called Moore (in Cheshire), More (in Shropshire), Blackmore (Essex), Blackmoor (Hampshire, Somerset) or Blakemere (Herefordshire), or even to someone who lived on or near a moor.7 In Scotland, the surnames ‘Muir, Mure, Moor, Moore, More’ referred to ancient ‘residence beside a moor or heath’.8
It is only because Reasonable Blackman was also described as ‘blackmor’ and ‘a blackmore’ that we know he was African.9 ‘Blackamoor’ or its variants was the most popular term Englishmen used to describe Africans, appearing in some 40% of references to individuals in the archives, and in literature from at least 1525.10
To the modern ear, his first name, Reasonable, sounds as if it could have been a trading name, advertising the reasonable prices of his silk weaving business. Might Blackman have invented this name for himself, much as people with foreign names that are difficult for the English to pronounce still do today? It may have been a Christian name received at baptism, along the lines of ‘Praisegod’ or ‘Charity’, or a nickname bestowed on him by his neighbours and friends. Nicknames were widely used in Tudor England: Queen Elizabeth liked to invent them for courtiers (Robert Dudley was her ‘eyes’, Burghley her ‘spirit’) and even foreign princes; her suitor the Duc de Anjou was her ‘frog’.11 Notably, both Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Walsingham were known by nicknames meaning African. More was referred to by Erasmus in punning mode as ‘Niger’, while Walsingham was ‘the Moor’ to his Queen because of his constant nature.12 But any distinctive characteristic could give rise to a nickname, or byname, which could be pejorative, humorous, or both. Sometimes nicknames were used to distinguish people with similar names. A merchant named Thomas Palmer became known as ‘Whiskers’ Palmer, after the beard he had adopted in Turkey, where he lived for many years before returning to London. Robert Taylor (alias Rutt) called John Ledge, the apparently unctuous constable of his Essex village, ‘Smooth Boots’.13
In 1579, Reasonable Blackman was living south of the River Thames on the ‘West Side’ of St Saviour’s parish in Southwark. ‘Resonablackmore’ purchased two tokens to reserve his place to take communion at St Saviour’s on Easter Sunday 1579.14 St Saviour’s parish began at London Bridge and stretched west, through the site of today’s Borough Market, to what is now the Tate Modern. The ‘West Side’ where Blackman lived was actually at the eastern end of the parish, near the church (now Southwark Cathedral). The area lay between ‘The Close’ (now Montague Close) and ‘Chain Gate’ (one of the gates to the churchyard).
Tooley Street (then Barms Street) in the 1560s.
By 1587, Blackman lived in the neighbouring parish of St Olave’s, Tooley Street. St Olave’s ran east from London Bridge along both sides of Tooley Street to Tower Bridge, incorporating the sites of today’s Shard and City Hall. The church of St Olave’s, situated on the main thoroughfare of Tooley Street, was dedicated to Olaf II Haraldsson (995–1030), a Norwegian king, celebrated in England for helping Ethelred expel the heathen Danes from several English cities, towns and fortresses.15
Southwark, south of the river, and so outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, was a notoriously dissolute area. It was crowded, with almost 20,000 inhabitants in 1600, making up 10% of London’s population. Many were immigrants; by 1603, there were 2,004 ‘alien’ households in St Olave’s alone.16 It was also known for being home to the poor, unemployed, criminals and vagrants. In 1596, the Court of Aldermen, with the encouragement of the Privy Council, ordered that ‘all manner of rogues, beggars, idle and vagrant persons’ in the area be apprehended. Southwark had a notably high concentration of alehouses, brothels, theatres and bear-baiting gardens. The playwright and pamphleteer, Thomas Dekker, commented in 1608 that ‘every fourth house is an alehouse’. And, as Christopher Hudson complained in 1631, ‘Alehouses are nests of Satan where the owls of impiety lurk and where all evil is hatched, and the bellows of intemperance and incontinence blow up’. The sleeping inhabitants of Southwark might well have thought Satan’s owls of impiety were on the loose one night in October 1582, when ‘certain lewd persons . . . did very disorderly disguise themselves and went up & down the street . . . almost stark naked, with their swords drawn in their hands, making great noises, shoutings and cryings’.
Although various monarchs, most recently Henry VIII, had attempted to shut down Southwark’s brothels, they continued to flourish illicitly. Theatres such as The Rose, built on Bankside in 1587, were said to be frequented by ‘light and lewd disposed persons, as harlots, cutpurses, cozeners, pilferers &c., who under colour of hearing plays, devised divers evil and ungodly conspiracies’. The area boasted five prisons: the Clink (which inspired the slang term for a gaol, possibly from the sound the gates made when they shut on a prisoner), the Compter, the King’s Bench, the Marshalsea and the White Lion.17 Yet, cheek-by-jowl with all this was an established community of craftsmen and artisans. Some worked south of the river because they could not afford City rents, others because their alien status (which in Tudor London included anyone born outside England) made them ineligible to work there. Foreigners were officially barred from completing apprenticeships and so rendered ineligible to obtain the freedom of the City.18
It was a good time to be a silk weaver. As wealthy aristocrats, ladies, gentlemen and merchants spent more time in the capital, attending court, Parliament or the law courts, there was a growing demand for silk clothing and accessories, and other luxury goods. Clothing was used to proclaim status, with Queen Elizabeth leading the way. In 1561, she received her first pair of silk stockings from Mrs Alice Montague, one of a dying breed of gentlewomen, known as ‘silk women’, who made various silk accessories or ‘narrow wares’, but did not manufacture cloth on an industrial scale. The Queen asked for more: ‘I like silk stockings well; they are pleasant, fine and delicate. Henceforth I will wear no more cloth stockings.’19 Elizabeth’s courtiers aped her expensive tastes. They decked themselves out in all sorts of silk: velvet, satin, damask and taffeta.20 Sir Walter Ralegh for one was keen on silk stockings.21 By the 1590s many courtiers were spending up to £1,000 a year on clothes.22 Their efforts were satirised by Thomas Dekker who wrote of: ‘those changeable Silk gallants, who . . . read no books but a looking glass’.23 The desire for silk was echoed on stage. In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio promises Kate ‘silken coats and caps, and golden rings’. The fatal handkerchief Othello gives Desdemona is made of silk, spun by ‘hallow’d worms’.24
It was not just the elite who wore silk. Although there were strict laws in place dictating who could wear what, as befitted their social station, they were largely ignored. ‘It is very hard to know,’ Philip Stubbs complained in 1583, ‘who is noble, who is worshipful, who is a gentleman, who is not: for you shall have those, which are neither of the nobility, gentility, not yeomanry, go daily in silks, velvets, satins, damasks, taffetas and such like, notwithstanding that they be both base by birth, mean by estate and servile by calling’.25 The specifics of the often-flouted sumptuary laws reflect just how fashionable it was to wear silk. Even those who could not afford to deck themselves in silk from head to toe still sought to flaunt a flash of silk somewhere about their person. The 1533 edict forbade the wearing of taffeta, satin, damask, outer garments containing silk and velvet garments (except jackets and doublets) unless you had an income of £100 a year. The 1554 law prohibited the wearing of silk accessories unless you were the eldest son of a knight or had an income of £20 a year. Those who continued to illegally wear silk ‘hats, bonnets, nightcaps, girdles, hose, shoes, scabbards or spur leather’ would face three months’ imprisonment, and a fine of £10 for every day they had worn the offending item.26
Silk was also used in theatrical costumes. The diary that Philip Henslowe, owner of the Rose Theatre, kept between 1591 and 1609 lists two hundred and seventy-four silk and lace items (the production of lace involved the use of silk).27 The actors’ dress was in stark contrast to the rags of London’s poor. One observer wrot
e to Walsingham in 1580 that it was ‘a woeful sight to see two hundred proud players jet in their silks where five hundred poor people starve in the streets’.28
Silk weaving was a relatively new industry in London and underwent a dramatic expansion during Blackman’s time; imports of raw silk increased five-fold between 1560 and 1593.29 Silk had been produced in China for thousands of years and latterly made its way into Europe along the trading route known as the Silk Road. As demand increased in the West, the skills required to produce it slowly made their way there. By the fourth century, there were silk-weaving workshops in Constantinople, Syria and Egypt. Production spread across North Africa, to centres such as Tunis and Fez; Othello’s silk handkerchief was made in Africa.30 The Moors introduced the craft to Spain in 712, where the profession took root in Andalusia. It reached Italy in the thirteenth century and three centuries later their silks dominated the European market. The art then made its way into France and the Netherlands, reaching Antwerp, a key centre for cloth production, in the 1530s.31 By 1584, the Antwerp silk industry employed some 4,000 people, producing satins, damasks, thin bourats, coarse grogram taffeta, velvets and the heavy, usually black, armoisin.32
Antwerp’s days as a centre of trade and industry were numbered, for the Netherlands were shortly to be wracked by eighty years of war that began when the people of the Low Countries revolted against Spanish rule in 1568. The Netherlands had been ruled by the Spanish since 1506 when Charles V inherited his father’s Dukedom of Burgundy and became Lord of the Netherlands. In 1516, he inherited the Spanish crown from his mother and three years later was elected Holy Roman Emperor, a title previously held by his paternal grandfather, Maximilian I. Charles was born in Ghent and as monarch he returned to the land of his birth regularly, maintaining a fairly harmonious relationship with his Dutch subjects. Things changed when his son Philip II succeeded him in 1555. Unlike his father, Philip was not born in the Netherlands, and after 1559 he never visited it; not that this prevented him from continuing to impose taxes on its people. This, combined with his insistence that he would not rule over heretics, led to a series of uprisings known as the Revolt of the Netherlands, which in 1618 segued into the Thirty Years’ War.33
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