Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  Modern writers have exaggerated the number of African prostitutes in Tudor and Stuart London, reading later trends back into the earlier period, imagining the African prostitutes in the works of Hogarth and Rowlandson were also commonplace in Shakespeare’s London.108 If they were, their names would appear in the copious records of London prostitution produced by the Bridewell court, yet they do not. A heavy evidential burden has been placed on the quasi-mythical character of ‘Lucy Negro’ even though there is no concrete archival proof that she ever existed.109 The only references to her come from literary texts. A ‘Lucy Negro’ appears in the surviving script for the entertainment performed at the Gray’s Inn Revels of 1594.110 The character is a Clerkenwell bawd, who may well have been a topical reference to one of two women who had the nickname ‘Black Luce’ in the period, Latinised in the play as ‘Lucy Negro’. One was Lucy Baynham, ‘the infamous Black Luce of Clerkenwell’, who ran a brothel there in the late 1570s. The other was Lucy Morgan, committed to the Bridewell for keeping a bawdy house in 1600.111 There is no evidence that either of these women was African. Nonetheless, the idea of an African prostitute named Lucy Negro has been embraced by people who like the idea that Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets were written to an African woman.

  There is one African woman, who did exist, that scholars have sought to identify as a prostitute working in London at this time. However, the evidence to support this proposition is ambiguous at best. She is referred to, but not by name, in a letter written in May 1599 by Denis Edwards of Southampton to Thomas Lankford, the Earl of Hertford’s secretary:

  I wrote to you as concerning my negroe where or in what place she was or whether you have taken pains to succour her, or no. If you have not I pray make enquiries for her for she is certainly dwelling in Turnbull Street at the sign of the Swan at one Danes house who selleth beer it is hard by Clerkenwell.112

  Her address in a Dane’s (or Mr Danes) beer shop in the notorious Turnbull Street has been enough for most historians to assume she was a prostitute. Turnbull Street, now Turnmill Street, where Thomasine Greene lay dying of the pox in 1626, was ‘the most disreputable street in London, a haunt of thieves and loose women’.113 In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, Falstaff says of Justice Shallow that he ‘hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street’.114 The street was so notorious that its name was used as a synonym for licentiousness. In 1625, Ellen Tilbury accused her neighbour of being a whore simply by saying ‘Turnbull Street is a more fit place for thee’.115 However, one wonders at the wording of Edwards’s letter. He seems concerned with her wellbeing, and asks his friend to succour her. When he asks ‘what place’ she was in, could he mean to enquire whether she had found a ‘place’, that is, domestic employment? He can’t be asking where she is, because he already knows that she’s dwelling in Turnbull Street. When he asks Lankford to ‘make enquiries for her’, could he not be asking if a job as a domestic servant might be found for her?

  Anne Cobbie is exceptional. She was the only African prostitute active during this period of whose existence we are certain. Her presence in 1626, a decade after Shakespeare’s death, will do little to help those still seeking to identify his ‘Dark Lady’. Nonetheless, her soft skin might have inspired poetry, had the right client appeared at the Bankes’s house at the right time. As it is, we have only the stark words of Mary Hall to record her beauty. If African prostitutes were rare, how did African women who were not married or employed as domestic servants support themselves? Our final story takes us back to the rural Gloucestershire that Edward Swarthye called home, to a village not far from Bristol, where a single woman named Cattelena made a life for herself.

  * When used like this, ‘Black’ is more likely to refer to the colour of the woman’s hair than her skin.

  10

  Cattelena of Almondsbury, Independent Singlewoman

  The cow lazily chewed the grass on the village green, her udders heavy with milk. The tower of St Mary’s Church soared above her, dwarfed in turn by the steep, wooded slope of Almondsbury Hill. Villagers passed by the common, as did the few travellers who used the Aust Ferry to cross the Severn, on their way to Bristol or Wales. No one gave the cow a second glance. The sun grew lower in the sky, and the cow’s mistress came to collect her. She called her fondly by name. The animal was her livelihood and provided her with enough milk, butter and cheese to sustain herself and to sell to others. It was the hour for evening milking. She quietly sat beside the cow and gently began the familiar process of tugging at her teats. It was a meditative, repetitive action. As she sat there, she daydreamed a little. She thought of the twists and turns her life had taken, of the strange series of events that had brought her to Almondsbury. There she was, a single woman with her cow on a village common. A wholly unremarkable sight in rural England. And yet, in this case, it was remarkable. For she was not of Gloucestershire stock like her cow. She was African.

  THE MAJORITY OF the Africans in Tudor and early Stuart England were not recorded as having a master or mistress. Without a job in someone’s household or aboard a ship, were they abandoned or destitute?1 Anne Cobbie, Reasonable Blackman and the anonymous needlemaker of Cheapside made a living in the city, but what of the Africans who lived in the countryside, in particular the women? The only record that survives of Cattelena of Almondsbury is an inventory of her goods made after her death.2 Like large swathes of the English population, her life was committed only to the ‘short and simple Annals of the Poor’.3 About one million probate inventories survive for the period from around 1580–1720.4 These lists of objects, from livestock to armour, chamber-pots to musical instruments, provide an intimate insight into the daily lives and material culture of ordinary people. The more detailed ones allow us to imagine the rooms the objects furnished, the daily rituals of their owner, and estimate their social standing. What can Cattelena’s possessions tell us about her daily life and how she supported herself? And how did she come to be living in a small village in Gloucestershire?

  In the inventory of her goods, Cattelena was described as ‘a negra deceased of Almondsbury in the county of Gloucester single woman’.5 Her status as an unmarried woman was not very unusual. An estimated 30% of the English adult female population were single women, and very few of the African women we know about were married in this period.6 Use of the word ‘negra’ was quite rare, especially in the Bristol area. It is simply the female form of the Latin (also Spanish, Portuguese and Italian) ‘negro’, meaning black. The word ‘negro’ was new to England in the sixteenth century. Its first recorded use in an English text was in 1555, in Richard Eden’s translation of Peter Martyr’s Decades of the New World, where he used it to describe the inhabitants of ‘the coast of Guinea and the mid parts of Africa’.7 I have only found the female form ‘negra’ employed to describe seven other individual Africans between 1598 and 1640. The word ‘negro’ was also used to describe women: there are eighteen known examples between 1586 and 1627. In one case in Bristol in 1612, a woman was described as a ‘blacke negra’, which seems to demonstrate some uneasiness with the foreign word ‘negra’. None of the other Africans in Bristol were described as ‘negroes’ or ‘negras’, so the term was still unfamiliar there.8 We don’t know where Cattelena was from, but her Hispanic-sounding name suggests that she, like many others, had arrived in England via the Spanish or Portuguese-speaking worlds.

  This late-eighteenth century view of Almondsbury Church by Samuel Lysons shows the broach spire and cows, like the one owned by Cattelena, grazing on the common.

  Cattelena’s village, Almondsbury, lies seven miles north of Bristol. It was originally a ‘bury’ or camp, and possibly the burial-place, of the Saxon prince Alomund, or Ealhmund (active around 784), father of King Egbert, the first sole monarch of England. Almondsbury was listed in the Domesday Book of 1086, when it had two hundred and sixty-two inhabitants and covered two hides, or 240 acres.9 Set on a steep, wooded hill,
the village looks down across the Severn estuary to the hills of South Wales, and over the Royal Forest of Dean. At the foot of the hill is St Mary’s Church, with its tall lead-clad broach, or octagonal, spire, the village green before it. Adjoining the churchyard is the Bowl Inn, named after the shape of the surrounding land. The lead for the church spire was locally mined. In 1639, the Berkeley estate steward and local historian John Smyth wrote that it had ‘in good plenty been digged’ in the hilly part of the parish, and that the roof of nearby Berkeley Castle (the site of Edward II’s murder in 1327) was covered with lead from the same source.10

  Moments of drama occasionally interrupted this pastoral scene. In 1621 the vicar, Hieronimus Brown, noted a matter:

  which should never be forgotten as long as the Sun & moon endureth; that is, a very fearful example of God’s just judgement against that detestable sin of drunkenness, manifested upon William Crosseman, son of John Crosseman, who, amidst his excessive drinking in ye Church house, on 10 April, in the year of our Lord 1621, was suddenly killed by Timothy Wright, a lewd serving-man, sometimes dwelling with Mr Thomas Chester.11

  The village was also the scene of the Princess Caraboo hoax in 1817, in which the impostor Mary Willcocks persuaded the locals that she was a royal personage, kidnapped by pirates from her home on the island of Javasu in the Indian Ocean.12

  Many of the lives in this book have been lived in the bustling streets of London or ports such as Southampton, Plymouth and Dover, where you’d expect to find foreigners. By contrast, Cattelena is one of several Africans who were living in the Tudor and early Stuart English countryside. Parish registers record the baptisms and burials of Africans, or the children of Africans, in villages in Cornwall, Cambridgeshire, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Kent, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Suffolk and Wiltshire. The earliest is the burial of ‘Thomas Bull, niger’ in Eydon, Northamptonshire, in December 1545.13 The entries from southern coastal counties are explained in part by their proximity to the ports, where ships returning from Africa and Atlantic privateering voyages might arrive. But it is nonetheless startling to find more Africans in the small village of Hatherleigh, Devon, than in the county town of Exeter. Some of the more obscure locations where Africans were living include Bluntisham-cum-Earith in Cambridgeshire, where ‘Dido And a more’ was buried in 1594, Stowell in Somerset, where ‘Galatia the black negra’ was buried in 1605 and Sibton in Suffolk, where ‘Christianna Niger Anglice a blackamore’ was baptised on Christmas Day 1634.14

  There may have been more Africans living in rural locations: not all the parish registers have been systematically searched for such entries and some do not survive. In such cases, these individuals were probably the only dark-skinned person in their village. Indeed, some are referred to as ‘the’ rather than ‘a’ blackamoor. Beyond the fact that they were accepted into the parish community through baptism and Christian burial, there is little evidence to tell us how these Africans were regarded and treated. Some clearly had relationships with local people, as their children were also baptised. Gylman Ivie, a ‘negro’ or ‘Ethiop’, had two children with Anna Spencer of Dyrham, Gloucestershire; their daughter Elizabeth was baptised in October 1578, and their son Richard in February 1581, only to be buried two years later in June 1583.15 In St Keverne, Cornwall, ‘Constance the base child of a blackmore ye reputed father John the servant of John Langford’ was baptised in January 1605.16

  What brought Cattelena to Almondsbury? The village lies close to Bristol, home to at least sixteen Africans between 1560 and 1640. As far as we know, the first African to live in the city was a man Sir John Young ‘did appoint to keep possession of his garden’ in around 1560.17 Four Africans were baptised in the city’s churches in the period 1600–1636, and nine were buried from 1595–1632.18 Almost half were women. Joan Maria married the weapons-maker Thomas Smyth and died of the plague in 1603, three years after her son Richard was baptised. Katherine, a ‘blacke negra, servant at the horshead’ – that is, the Horsehead Tavern on Christmas Street – was buried at Christ Church in January 1612. In September 1632, Grace Claun and Mary, servant to William Edmonds, were both buried at St Augustine the Less. And in August 1636, an unnamed woman gave birth to a daughter called ‘Maudlinge’* in Bristol’s Bridewell prison.19 As we saw in Chapter Six, in the 1640s a woman named Frances, who worked for ‘a man who lived on the Back of Bristol’ was part of the Baptist congregation led by Nathaniel Ingelo. Was Cattelena another African woman of Bristol?

  Like the Ethiopian ‘negar’ who ‘refused to tarry and serve’ Hector Nunes, Cattelena might have run away from her employer. Servants who abandoned their work broke the terms of their service and were regarded as idle or vagrant in the eyes of the law.20 Augustina Patra, a ‘blackamoor servant’, was punished by the London Bridewell in January 1601 ‘for running away diverse times’.21 Her mistress was Lady Elizabeth Berkeley (1576–1635), the daughter of George Carey, Baron Hunsdon. Elizabeth, who married Sir Thomas Berkeley in 1596, was a godchild and a cousin of Elizabeth I; her grandfather was the son of Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister. The family seat of Berkeley Castle was not far from Almondsbury, only about fourteen miles to the north-east. Another African woman, Mary, absconded from the Weymouth household of the French privateer Captain Peter Sallenueve in 1633 and got as far as Dorchester before the authorities caught up with her. The Dorchester Offenders’ Book records that:

  Mary a Black moore servant to Captain Sallanova of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis ... is taken within this Borough this day being Run away from her master & she confesseth having no leave of either her master or mistress & is ordered to be sent home again this day in the Afternoon.22

  Alternatively, Cattelena may have first arrived in the area as part of one of the local gentry households. The nearest was the Chester household at Knole Park, which lay half a mile to the south of the village. Another local manor house was Over Court, built around 1580 for the Bristolian John Dowell, son of a wealthy merchant.23 In the eighteenth century, Sir James Laroche employed two African servants there: James Long (died 1773) and Charles Morson (died 1776).24 The third manor in the vicinity was Gaunt’s Earthcott, which had been purchased by the Bristol Corporation from the Crown after the Dissolution of the Monasteries. By the early seventeenth century, the bulk of this estate was leased to none other than John Guye, who we met in Chapter Four, and his brother-in-law Matthew Bucke. All three houses had connections to Bristol merchants, but the strongest case can be made for Knole Park, which also had a link to Southampton.

  At the time of Cattelena’s death Knole Park was occupied by Thomas Chester (1587–1653) and his wife Elizabeth. His grandfather, Thomas Chester (c.1518–1583), a wealthy MP, merchant, and mayor of Bristol, had purchased the manor of Almondsbury in 1569. The elder Thomas Chester had various business interests that might explain the arrival of a young Cattelena into his household. In 1556, he and Giles White were summoned to appear before the Privy Council concerning the ‘sending forth of two ships into the coasts of Guinea’, an association that connects him to the earliest known African in Bristol.25 For it was Giles White’s widow Anne who testified in 1560 that Sir John Young ‘did . . . appoint a blacke moore to keep the possession of his garden’.26 Chester later sold Young the site of today’s Colston Hall concert hall, where Young built his ‘Great House’.27 In 1577, at the age of fifty-nine, Chester became a founding member of the Spanish Company. So it is possible that Cattelena came to Knole Park from Bristol.

  Her other possible route to Knole Park was through the elder Thomas Chester’s daughter Anne. She married John Caplin, MP for Winchester, merchant and comptroller of the custom house of Southampton, in 1574. As we saw in Chapter Two, there were as many as ten Africans resident in the households of wealthy Southampton merchants between 1594 and 1611. John Caplin paid the poll tax for an African in his household in the parish of Holy Rood in 1598 and 1599, and a relative, Francis Caplin, paid the same tax in 1611. Anne Caplin died some time before 1623.28 The tax returns don�
��t record the gender, or any other details, of the Africans in the Caplin household so we don’t know if these records all refer to the same individual or not. Could Cattelena have served in the Caplin household before coming to Almondsbury?

  The inventory of May 1625 listed Cattelena’s possessions as:

  One cow

  One bed, one bolster, one pillow, one pair of blankets, one sheet, one quilt

  Four little pots, one pewter candlestick, one tin bottle, one dozen of spoons

  Three earthen dishes, two dozen of trenchers

  One table cloth

  All her wearing apparel

  One coffer & two little boxes

  Noticeable by its absence is any sort of furniture. There are no tables or chairs; even the ‘bed’ may actually refer to a mattress rather than a wooden frame.29 The fact that she didn’t own any other furniture suggests that she shared a house, or lived in someone else’s house. It was rare for single women to live in their own home. Only about 5% of single women below the age of 45 headed their own households. About half lived with at least one parent, a third lived as servants, 5–11% lived as lodgers and 3–7% lived with some other relative.30 Some African women in London are described as lodgers, ‘borders’ or tenants: Suzanna Pearis ‘a blackamoore tenant’ to John de Spinosa near the sign of the Fleur de Lys in East Smithfield in 1593, ‘Mary a negro’ who said she ‘dwelte with Mr Conradus’ in 1606 and ‘Isabell Peeters a Black-more lodging in Blew Anchor Alley’ in 1616.31