Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  Take a cock chicken & pull all the feathers of his tail very bare, then hold the bared part of the pullet close upon the sore & the chicken will gape and labour for life & will die; then do so with another pullet till it die, & so with another: till you find the last chicken will not die cannot be killed by the infection being altogether extracted, for when all the venom is drawn out the last chicken will not be hurt by it & the patient will mend speedily: one Mr Whatts hath tried this on a child of his, & 8 chickens one after another died & the ninth lived, & the sore being hard & hot was made soft by the first chicken as papp, the 2nd drew it clean away.78

  This method was used in St Olave’s parish, but Balmford referred to the use of pigeons instead. The poor had to make to do with what they had.79

  The Blackman children finally succumbed to Death’s advances in mid-October 1592, in a week when the plague took one hundred and ninety-eight lives in London.80 Other silk weavers’ children were buried at St Olave’s as the epidemic raged on, and Africans also died in other parts of the city. At St Botolph’s Aldgate, three ‘blackamoors’ in their twenties: Simon Valencia (the needlemaker’s servant), Cassango, and Robert, were buried in the late summer and autumn of 1593, their entries in the register marked with the word ‘plague’.81 The historian John Stow recorded that this outbreak claimed 10,675 Londoners between December 1592 and December 1593.82 When it was over, the capital had lost 8.5% of its population. So many had died that rumour-mongers whispered England would no longer be able successfully to resist a Spanish invasion. Some thought the plague was the result of divine judgement, ‘the will of God rightfully punishing wicked men’. To their way of thinking, taking action to prevent the plague was to rebel against God, and no human efforts could stop people from dying at their appointed time. The Privy Council threatened to imprison anyone who shared ‘such dangerous opinions’.83

  Others blamed immigrants for bringing the plague to London. The ‘filthy keeping’ of foreigners’ houses was identified by the city authorities as ‘one of the greatest occasions of the plague’.84 This might have helped to trigger the anti-immigrant feeling expressed by London apprentices in the spring of 1593. The trouble began in April when they set up ‘a lewd and vile ticket or placard’ on a post in London threatening violence against ‘the strangers’. A series of ‘divers lewd and malicious libels . . . published by some disordered and factious persons’ appeared in the following weeks. One castigated the ‘beastly brutes, the Belgians, or rather drunken drones, and fainthearted Flemings: and you, fraudulent father, Frenchmen’ and threatened that if they did not ‘depart out of the realm’ by 9 July, more than 2,000 apprentices would rise up against them. The verse set upon the wall of the Dutch church at Austin Friars in the City of London in early May did ‘exceed the rest in lewdness’: ‘Strangers that inhabit in this land! . . . Egypt’s plagues, vexed not the Egyptians more / Than you do us; then death shall be your lot’.85 The threatened violence never actually erupted. Some of the culprits were rounded up and ‘put into the stocks, carted and whipped, for a terror to other apprentices and servants’. The Privy Council encouraged the Lord Mayor to use torture if necessary to prevent these ‘lewd persons’ from their ‘wicked purpose to attempt anything against strangers’. For ‘out of such lewd beginnings, further mischief doth ensue’.86 These rumblings of discontent were directed at a wide array of foreigners, prompted by a broad-brush xenophobia. Those named by nationality were European strangers. The Blackman family were not beastly Belgians or fraudulent Frenchmen. Their dark skin would of course make them immediately identifiable as strangers in the street, but Africans were not the primary target of the apprentices’ vitriol.

  The plague that struck the Blackman family so tragically in 1592 may have arrived in a Devon port from Portugal, which had suffered an epidemic in 1589. This outbreak was merely a skirmish in the long campaign Death waged on the capital under the command of this most devastating of his Generals, ever poised to snatch lives away in an instant. Between 1540 and 1666, there were nine serious outbreaks of plague in London. The most famous of these, the so-called ‘Great Plague’ of 1665, killed 12% of the population yet, in percentage terms, the plagues of 1563 and 1603 were almost twice as devastating.87 The Black Death of 1348 had been another matter entirely. It wiped out almost a third of the European population, which had a seismic impact on every aspect of society from the feudal system to religious faith.

  Plague burials took place at dusk, when there were fewer people about, to minimise the chance of the disease spreading. Not all took heed, however, and Balmford grieved to see how ‘the poorer sort, yea women with young children, will flocke to burials, and (which is worse) stand (of purpose) over open graves, where sundry are buried together, that (forsooth) all the world may see that they feare not the Plague’.88

  At the peaks of these plague epidemics, the usual burial rituals had to be set aside as parishes struggled to cope with the numbers of corpses. Two centuries earlier, a Florentine chronicler recorded that his city’s plague pits were:

  as wide and deep as the parish was populous; and therein, whosoever was not very rich, having died during the night, would be shouldered by those whose duty it was, and would either be thrown into this pit, or they would pay big money for somebody else to do it for them. The next morning there would be very many in the pit. Earth would be taken and thrown down on them; and then others would come on top of them, and then earth on top again, in layers, with very little earth, like garnishing lasagne with cheese.89

  However, such pits were only resorted to in extremity. At St Bride’s, Fleet Street, the parish officials dug a plague pit in August 1665 when they often had more than thirty bodies to bury each day.90 The week Jane and Edmund died, St Olave’s parish had about forty bodies to dispose of but mass graves would not have been needed. Six other people were buried alongside Jane on 13 October and four others beside Edmund, who died on 16 October.

  The Blackman children received proper burials, with due ritual. Although there are no baptism records for Jane and Edmund, the fact that they were buried in the parish churchyard indicates that the church authorities knew them to be Christians. Some Africans were baptised shortly before their burial, suggesting they were already ill and preparing for the worst. ‘John the Blackamoor’ was baptised thirteen days before his burial at St Mary the Virgin, Aldermanbury, London in 1565.91 When Mark Antony was buried in January 1617 at St Olave, Hart Street, the record stated he was ‘a negro Christian’: he had been baptised just two days earlier.92 Those not known to be Christian were buried elsewhere: an anonymous ‘neger’ was laid to rest ‘on Catt downe’ an area to the east of Plymouth, close to the sea and the Plym estuary, in 1593–4.93

  The unusually detailed accounts of St Botolph’s Aldgate reveal more about the funerals of the Africans buried there. When Domingo, Sir William Wynter’s servant, died of consumption in August 1587, the parish provided ‘the best cloth’ to cover his coffin. In 1552, St Botolph’s had a hearse cloth of tawny velvet, the borders ‘embroidered with Jesus’, but this was confiscated as a piece of Popish frippery by Edward VI’s government in 1553, and so by the 1580s, the ‘best’ cloth was probably rather less grand.94 In October 1593, one of the black men who died of the plague in the parish, Cassango, had one bearer and was given the best cloth – for which his employer, Mr Barber, was charged 9d – though it wasn’t used because he already had a black cloth. That November, another African plague victim, ‘Robert a negar being servant to William Mathew a Gentleman’ had the second cloth and four bearers. Three years later, ‘a negar, supposed to be named Francis’, servant to a beer brewer, Peter Miller, had four bearers and the finest cloth when he died of scurvy aged twenty-six.95 Some of these funerals were grander than those recorded for non-African parishioners.

  Nothing more is known of Blackman’s life after the death of his children, but there is a tantalising record that suggests his son Edward carried on his father’s trade. On 6 March 1614, when Edward Bla
ckman would have been twenty-seven, a certain ‘Edward Blackmore of Mile End, silk weaver’ married ‘Jeane Colle of Stepney’ at St Dunstan’s and All Saints Church, Stepney.96 A mere three miles from Southwark, Mile End was on the eastern edge of Spitalfields, which became the centre of London’s silk-weaving industry later in the seventeenth century. It is possible that Edward and Jeane knew each other as children, for a Jane Colle, daughter of the porter William Colle, was baptised at St Olave’s, Tooley Street, in August 1590, three years after Edward.97 The couple had three children – Jane, Mary, and William – born in 1614, 1617 and 1619. Only Mary achieved adulthood; William died at the age of two and Jane when she was three.98

  The majority of documents recording the lives of black people at this time do not state their occupations and where one is recorded, it is usually domestic service. But if Reasonable Blackman was a Black Tudor who made his own way, with his son Edward possibly taking up his father’s trade, then it is plausible that some of the many Africans whose occupations are not recorded could also have been financially independent. Just as Blackman doubtless learnt his trade in a master silk weaver’s household, other Africans began as servants, and later set out on their own.

  On the other side of the Thames, another African worked in the cloth trade. Mary Fillis was a servant to Millicent Porter, a seamstress, and thanks to the unusual enthusiasm of the parish clerk of St Botolph’s Aldgate we know more about her than most.

  * The plague died down over the winter and spring but came back to the parish with a vengeance the following summer: 146 died in July 1593, 269 in August, 300 in September, 163 in October.

  6

  Mary Fillis, the Moroccan Convert

  ‘Our Father, which art in heaven . . .’ The strange words echoed around the church. ‘Hallowed be thy name . . .’ Mistress Porter had helped her learn this verse, and what it meant, in preparation for the day. When she’d reached the end of the Lord’s Prayer, Reverend Threlkeld asked her to rehearse the articles of her belief and she did so, carefully and fluently. Then he asked, did she desire to be baptised? ‘Aye,’ she replied. And so they went to the font. The whole congregation called on God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ to receive her into Christ’s Holy Church. She had been in London thirteen or fourteen years now, since she was six or seven. She had seen the church spires every day, towering over the city streets. She had heard these people speak of their God, of his great Providence, of his Heaven. And of his wrath. Finally, Reverend Threlkeld said ‘I baptise thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Ghost. Amen.’ And it was over. She was a Christian, and she could go forth and ‘daily proceed in all virtue and godliness of living’.

  MARY FILLIS WAS one of many Africans baptised in Tudor England. Like her, most were either adults or teenagers at their christening, and as there was no specific ritual outlined in the Book of Common Prayer for such cases before 1662, they are really better classed as conversions.1 Did these ceremonies signal true integration and acceptance into the Tudors’ theocratic society? Mary Fillis had lived in London for thirteen or fourteen years before becoming a Christian; why did she wait so long to convert? The exceptionally detailed account of her baptism given by Thomas Harridance, the parish clerk of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, gives us some clues.2 He not only names Fillis’s current mistress, the seamstress Millicent Porter, but also a widow, Mrs Barker of Mark Lane, her previous employer. Who was Mrs Barker? What brought the young Mary Fillis into her household and why did she leave? Mary Fillis lived through a period in which England’s trading and diplomatic relationship with her country of birth, Morocco, was rapidly evolving. How did this affect her life and the way she was treated?

  Mary Fillis was born in Morocco in 1577. She was the daughter of Fillis of Morisco, a basket-weaver and shovel-maker. In contrast to the way ‘morisco’ was used as an adjective to describe Jacques Francis the diver, Harridance employed the word ‘Morisco’ as a noun, meaning Morocco. The name Fillis might be linked to the profession of basket-weaving, as ‘fillis’ is ‘a kind of loosely twisted string, made of hemp (hemp fillis) or jute (jute fillis), used by horticulturists as a tying material’, which could have also been used to weave baskets.3 There may be a connection between her father’s profession and the area of London Fillis found herself in, as in Edward IV’s time, ‘Basket-makers, wire-drawers, and other foreigners’ were only allowed to have shops in the manor of Blanch Appleton, which lay at the north end of Mark Lane, where Mary Fillis worked for Mrs Barker.4 There is, however, no indication that Mary’s father ever came to London.

  When Mary Fillis was born, her country was about to enter a twenty-five-year period of peace and prosperity under the rule of Sultan Ahmad Al-Mansur. But before this could begin, three kings had to die. In the earlier part of the sixteenth century, Morocco was divided between a northern kingdom, ruled from Fez by the Wattasid dynasty, and a southern kingdom, ruled from Marrakesh by the Sa’adian family. Fez was founded by Idris I, Morocco’s first Muslim ruler, in 789. Known as the ‘Mecca of the West’, the city was home to some 100,000 people and the world’s oldest university or madrasa, Al Karaouine, which boasted international alumni including Leo Africanus, the Dutch scholar Nicholas Cleynaerts and the tenth-century Pope Sylvester II.5 Marrakesh was the second-largest city in Morocco, with a population of 20,000. Leo Africanus described it as ‘one of the greatest cities in the whole world’; its buildings were ‘cunningly and artificially contrived’ with ‘most stately and wonderful workmanship’. A thriving trading centre, it was well placed to benefit from the trans-Saharan caravan trade which brought gold, ivory, spices and slaves from the south.6

  The two kingdoms were united under the rule of the Sa’adian Mohammed ash-Sheikh in 1549. To succeed, he had not only to eliminate the Wattasids but also to resist the Spanish and Portuguese who had established various trading posts along the Moroccan coast over the preceding century.7 Mohammed ash-Sheikh took many of these key cities, most significantly Safi and Agadir, back under Moroccan control in 1541.8 Soon only Ceuta, Tangier and Magazan remained in Portuguese hands.9

  The Ottoman Turks watched ash-Sheikh’s mounting successes with growing displeasure. For the past hundred years, they had enjoyed a period of prodigious military expansion. Pushing west, they took Constantinople in 1453, much of Hungary in 1526 and threatened Vienna more than once. Their naval presence in the Mediterranean caused serious vexation to the European powers throughout the century, despite the much-celebrated 1571 victory at Lepanto, when a coalition of Catholic powers known as the Holy League defeated the Turks in an epic battle. They also expanded east, encroaching into Persia and taking Baghdad in 1534. To the south, they invaded Syria and from there made their way into Egypt, Tripoli, Tunisia and Algiers. By the mid-sixteenth century the Ottoman Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, ruled over some 15 million people on three continents.10

  And still the Ottomans were not satisfied. Looking to expand further into North Africa, they assassinated ash-Sheikh in 1557. His head was mounted on a spike above the walls of Constantinople.11 The crown passed to his son, Abdallah Al-Ghalib, but when he died of natural causes in 1574, civil war broke out. His son, Abu Abdallah Mohamed, attempted to secure the throne by executing one of his brothers and imprisoning the other. This did not deter his uncle, Abd al Malik, who had been living in exile in Algiers, from claiming the crown himself. He invaded Morocco and captured Fez in 1576, driving his nephew to seek refuge in the Spanish-held fortress of Penon de Velez.12

  In 1578, King Sebastian of Portugal made a suicidal intervention in this dynastic dispute. He aligned himself with the ousted Abu Abdallah Mohamed and invaded Morocco. Juan da Silva, Philip II’s ambassador in Lisbon, despaired to watch the King depart ‘without a single man knowing what we are undertaking, and whereas victory seems impossible, defeat seems certain because we are depending totally on a miracle; may God grant it.’ On landing at Tangier, Sebastian insisted on marching inland, separating his troops, who had ‘no
knowledge of the military arts’, from their naval support. Juan da Silva reported that ‘all are sure he leads them to a certain death’.13

  On 4 August 1578, all three rulers died in the Battle of Alcazar, also known as the Battle of the Three Kings, or The Battle of Makhazen River. Abd al Malik was fatally ill before the fighting started, and died in his tent as the battle raged around him. The contemporary rumour was that he had been poisoned, but a modern medical assessment of his symptoms suggests he suffered a perforation of the oesophagus that led to sepsis and multi-organ failure. His councillors made every effort to conceal his death from his troops, propping the corpse up with cushions and continuing to issue commands in his name for some hours, until the news could no longer affect the battle’s outcome. His nephew, Abu Abdallah Mohamed, who could not swim, was thrown from his horse and drowned in the River Makhazen while trying to flee from the onslaught. The young Portuguese King was so intent on slaughter that he battled on even as three horses were shot from under him. He became isolated from his guard and was cut down on the field. The bodies of the three kings were displayed in a tent that evening by Ahmad Al-Mansur, Abd Al-Malik’s brother. Al-Malik’s body was buried with due ceremony in Fez, but his nephew’s corpse was flayed, stuffed with straw, and mounted on an ass to be paraded through the streets of Fez and other cities and towns. He was henceforth known as Mohammed Al-Mutawakkil (the Flayed). Sebastian’s body was handed over to the governor of Ceuta in December, before being transported to Faro. He was eventually buried at the Jerónimos Monastery of Belém in Lisbon.14