Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  If Cattelena were a servant, this would surely have been recorded in the inventory. The fact that she named the widow Helen Ford her administrator, rather than a family member, suggests she was not living with relatives. Did Cattelena rent a room from Mrs Ford? It was common for single women and widows to live together in this period.32 Unfortunately the parish registers for Almondsbury before 1653 do not survive, so it is difficult to discover more about Helen Ford. A Richard Ford of Almondsbury made a will in 1639, in which he left his son Robert a loom, which suggests he might have been a weaver.33 It is possible that Helen was Richard’s mother.

  The term ‘singlewoman’, used to designate Cattelena’s status in the inventory, was sometimes used to refer to prostitutes. In 1530, the scholar John Palsgrave translated the French ‘putain’, as ‘Syngle woman, a harlot’. John Stow, in his Survey of London (1598), wrote that: ‘single women were forbidden the rites of the church, so long as they continued that sinful life, and were excluded from Christian burial, if they were not reconciled before their death’. London legal records mention two women being dunked in the Thames for being ‘singlewomen’, but these same records use the term for unmarried women whose probity was not in doubt.34 There is no reason to believe Cattelena was a prostitute. In this patriarchal society, the authorities worried that all single women were little better than prostitutes, especially if they lived alone.35 Living with someone else, perhaps Helen Ford, would make Cattelena less suspicious in this respect.

  Cattelena owned a bed or mattress, and bedding: a bolster cushion, a pillow, a pair of blankets, a sheet and a quilt. Mattresses were commonly made of ticking, a canvas or heavy linen material, usually striped. The most basic were no more than a sack: hence the expressions ‘hit the sack’ and ‘in the sack’. The most luxurious were stuffed with feathers and were held in beautifully carved wooden bedsteads. Some people, like Shakespeare, who bequeathed his ‘second best bed’ to his wife Anne Hathaway, had more than one. After the featherbed, the second-best sort was a flock-bed, stuffed with coarse tufts and refuse of wool or cotton. A less valuable mattress was stuffed with straw or chaff from oat or wheat. Whichever sort Cattelena had, she had plenty of other accoutrements to make herself comfortable at night. Her bolster cushion was ‘a long stuffed pillow used to support the sleeper’s head in a bed’.36 In owning a soft cushion like this, Cattelena was benefiting from a general rise in living standards during the latter half of the sixteenth century. In 1577, William Harrison reported that the old men of his village could recall sleeping with ‘a good round log under their heads instead of a pillow’. In their time, if a man ‘had within seven years after his marriage purchased a mattress or flock-bed, and thereto a sack of chaff to rest his head on, he thought himself as well lodged as the lord of the town’. Pillows had also only recently become commonplace. Previously, they were thought only suitable ‘for women in childbed’. Cattelena had only one sheet; it would have been better to have a pair. Given the choice, it may have been preferable for her to sleep above, rather than below the sheet. As William Harrison explained, a sheet under the body would protect ‘from the pricking straws that ran oft through the canvas of the pallet’ and ‘razed’ the hardened hides of the occupant.37 Sleepers often also lay on their quilts rather than under them. Quilts were made of a thin layer of wool, flock, feathers or down, held between two large pieces of material by lines of stitching, often decorative; the ‘Tree of Life’ was a popular pattern.38 So we can imagine Cattelena’s bed as a mattress covered with a single sheet and a quilt, with a bolster cushion and a pillow to support her head, and a pair of blankets to keep her warm.

  She would have kept her kitchen goods in the coffer. She had four little pots, one pewter candlestick, one tin bottle and a dozen spoons. The pots would have been deep, round, metal cooking vessels, usually with three feet, made to stand over a fire.39 Pewter, an alloy of 80% tin with 20% lead, was more valuable than wood as a material for a candlestick, but pretty common nonetheless. Spoons were the principal utensil used for cooking and eating, as forks were not yet commonly employed. When Thomas Coryate saw forks used in Italy in 1611, he thought them so remarkable that he took to using them on his return home, earning himself the nickname ‘Furcifer’ or fork-bearer. In Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass (1616), one of the characters hatches a business plan to introduce forks into the English market, bringing them ‘into custom here as they are in Italy to the sparing of napkins’.40 It would have been hard to manage without a knife, however. Presumably there was one she could share.

  When Beatrice comments on Benedick’s hearty appetite in Much Ado About Nothing, she calls him a ‘valiant trencherman’. Trenchers were flat plates of wood, on which meat or other food was cut up and served. They were either square or circular; some of the former had a small depression in one corner for salt.41 Cattelena had twenty-four trenchers, which seems rather a large number for a single woman, unless she was using them to present butter and cheese. She also had a tablecloth, which – not being essential – suggests a certain level of wealth, as well as some finesse in her daily dining habits.

  All Cattelena’s ‘wearing apparel’, or clothing, came to a value of £2. We can get some idea of what might constitute a typical woman’s wardrobe from the clothes the Virginia Company purchased for a group of women they sent to Jamestown in 1621 to be wives for the settlers. Each woman received a petticoat, a waistcoat, two pairs of stockings, a pair of garters, two smocks, a pair of gloves, a hat and bands, one round band, an apron, two pairs of shoes, a towel, two coifs and one cross cloth (worn across the forehead), as well as worsted and yarn for stockings. One set cost £2.42 These women were ‘young, handsome and honestly educated maids’, the daughters of artisans or gentry, and so their wardrobe rather more extensive than Cattelena’s, but the basic constituents were probably the same.

  The most valuable item that Cattelena owned was her cow, which was valued at £3 10s. A cow was an extremely useful possession. Alcon, a rustic character in a play from 1590 exclaims, ‘My cow is a commonwealth to me!’ Not only, he explains to a usurer who is threatening to take his cow away, does she allow him, his wife, and son, ‘to banquet ourselves withal, butter, cheese, whey, curds, cream, sod milk, raw milk, sour milk, sweet milk and butter milk’, she has also saved him ‘every year a penny in almanacs’. The cow’s ‘very tail was a calendar’. If she ‘set up her tail and have galloped about the mead[ow], my little boy was able to say “Oh Father, there will be a storm!”’43 Three-quarters of labourers leaving inventories between 1560 and 1600 owned a cow, calf or heifer. Sir Kenelm Digby wrote in 1658: ‘There’s not the meanest cottager but hath a cow to furnish His family with milk: ’tis the principal sustenance of the poorest Sort of people . . . which makes them very careful of the good keeping and health of their cows’.44

  Cows were given names. Some reflected their function, as well as the owner’s sense of humour. Eleanor Cumpayne of Halesowen, Worcestershire, inherited a cow named Fillpayle from her father George in 1559. It is lost to history whether the name was spoken as an order ‘Fill pail!’ or as a compliment on satisfactory service.45 Other recorded names reflect the affection with which these useful creatures were regarded: Gentle, Brown Snout, Lovely, Motherlike, Winsome and Welcome Home.46 What Cattelena called her cow is not recorded, but this doesn’t mean she didn’t give it a name; it just wasn’t commonplace to record cows’ names in inventories or wills. Only seven of the four hundred and ninety-one cows (1.43%) bequeathed in 3,720 wills Essex dating from 1620 to 1635 had their names recorded.47

  In 1615, Gervase Markham included a chapter on ‘Dairies, Butter, cheese and the necessary things belonging to that office’ in his guide for English housewives, which gave advice and recipes for every aspect of keeping a cow. The ideal cow should, he said, be ‘of big bone, fair shape, right red, and deep of milk, gentle and kindly’. By ‘kindly’ he meant not of a sympathetic nature, but ‘apt to conceive, and bring forth, fruitful to nourish, and loving to that w
hich springs from her’. The best hours for milking were between 5 and 6am in the morning and 6 and 7pm in the evening.48 From Whitsun to Michaelmas, a cow could produce a gallon of milk a day, which could be used to make a range of ‘white meats’, as Alcon called them.49 Markham includes recipes for all sorts of cheese, from ‘morning milk cheese’ and ‘a very dainty nettle cheese’ to ‘eddish, or winter cheese’. ‘May butter’ could even be used for medicinal purposes:

  if during the month of May before you salt your butter you save a lump thereof, and put it into a vessel, and so set it in the sun the space of that month, you shall find it exceeding sovereign and medicinable for wounds, strains, aches and such like grievances.

  As we learnt in Chapter Five, butter was thought to be a preventative against the plague. None of Cattelena’s kitchen utensils seem to be specifically for making butter or cheese – no churn is listed – but she may have shared these items. Her three earthen dishes were, as Markham notes, the best vessels for ‘long-keeping’ of milk.50

  Milking cows and making cheese and butter was thought of as women’s work. In one 1629 ballad, a man and his wife swap roles. She goes out into the fields and he stays at home. When the man tries to milk the cow things do not go well:

  He went to Milk one evening tide,

  A skittish Cow on the wrong side,

  His pail was full of Milk, God wot,

  She kickt and spilt it every jot,

  Besides she hit him a blow o’ the face,

  Which was scant whole in six weeks space

  He is no better when it comes to churning butter:

  As he to Churn his Butter went,

  One morning with a good intent,

  The Cot-quean fool did surely dream,

  For he had quite forgot the Cream,

  He churn’d all day, with all his might.

  And yet he could get no Butter at night.51

  The poor man had forgotten to put the cream into the churn and so spent all day pumping an empty vessel in vain. Cattelena would have been far more proficient, and her neighbours would have attributed this in most part to her sex.

  Single women like Cattelena pastured their cows on the common land and made a living by selling milk and butter to their non-farming neighbours. A cow was considered a starting point towards self-sufficiency. In the eighteenth century, parish authorities sometimes helped poor women to buy a cow so they could support themselves without further help from the parish.52 There were various patches of common land in Almondsbury, and Cattelena was fortunate enough to live there when Sunday’s Hill common was still open to all; it was enclosed in 1631.53 The pace of enclosure set in the sixteenth century, by men such as Sir Edward Wynter, only accelerated in the seventeenth. This sparked agrarian riots, such as the Midland Revolt of 1607, which began in Northamptonshire, a county that had lost 27,000 acres to enclosure since 1578.54

  Cattelena was not a wealthy woman, yet neither was she a pauper. Her goods were valuable enough in total to be listed and reckoned by the authorities. At a time when Africans elsewhere in the world were themselves property, it is significant that she was the legal owner of anything at all. Her relative independence as a woman is also significant. Not only was she free, as in not enslaved, but she seems to have been free from service or any family obligation. Thanks to her cow, she was able to support herself.

  The only other African woman we know who possessed property in early seventeenth-century England was Helenor Myou. She was in London when Laurence Mereene stole ‘certain bandes, a pillober and other goods’ from her and made his escape across the River Thames with the help of Thomas Collingwood, a yeoman of the Strand by the Savoy, in 1612. She successfully pursued the culprits at the Middlesex Sessions, where another waterman, John Smith of Stepney, was exonerated after he was also accused of carrying away the ‘felon who had robbed a blackamore woman’.55 Myou owned ‘bandes’ (collars or ruffs), a ‘pillober’ (or pillowcase), and some ‘other goods’. These mysterious items were also described as ‘divers goods’, suggesting they were numerous enough to have been for sale.56 So Myou not only owned property in these goods, a fact accepted without comment by the court, but may have been in business. Her possessions suggest she might have been a seamstress, or that she worked for one, like Mary Fillis. Between 1571 and 1640, more than fifty African women were recorded without mention of masters or mistresses. One scholar has suggested they were all ‘unattached (abandoned, destitute)’, but there is no reason why many of them cannot have lived as Cattelena and Helena Myou did.57

  One route to financial independence for Cattelena would be to have received a legacy of money or goods in the will of a dying employer that allowed her to leave the household and set up on her own. There are a few examples of Africans being left money in their employers’ wills.58 In August 1570, Nicholas Witchals of Barnstaple left five marks to ‘Anthony my negarre’. This was a sizeable sum: £3 6s 8d. Mary Groce, widow of Lawrence Groce, a Southampton merchant, left ‘three pounds in money’ to her ‘servant Joane the blackemore’ in October 1612. In December 1600, the London merchant William Offley’s will gave £10 to Frances, his African maid. With such a legacy Cattelena could have bought her cow, some other necessaries, and still been able to afford rent while she established herself as a dairy provider.

  Cattelena could also have inherited the cow, bedding, kitchen utensils and some of her clothes. It has been said that in this period ‘the most important component of wealth was not wages, but inheritance, whether that inheritance consisted of a landed estate, or of a single cottage and garden, or even of a cow, a kettle, a brass pan and a bed’.59 Other Africans were bequeathed such items, so why not Cattelena? As well as money, William Offley left Frances ‘a gowne of twelve shillings the yard’, while Mary Groce left Joane a flockbed, two blankets, a coverlet and two pairs of sheets.

  These employers understood that their servants might not continue in their households, and provided them with enough money to leave. Nicholas Witchals specified in his will that Anthony be given five shillings ‘so that he remain with my wife’ or ‘if she mind to not keep him’ they should give him five marks ‘and let him depart’. The fact that Anthony’s baptism was recorded at St Peter’s Barnstaple in 1565, but there is no record of his burial there, suggests that he left the town.60 Five marks was equivalent to around half a year’s wages for the average labourer, so quite a generous severance package.61 While there are no records of Africans in service in the tax returns from Southampton after 1611, the parish registers do not survive, so Joane’s fate remains uncertain. Nonetheless, with £3 to her name, she had the opportunity to become independent. William Offley’s will specified ‘to Frances my black a moore I give for her relief the sum of ten pounds’, meaning she had the choice to remain in his household or to move on. In March 1625, ‘a Christian negro servant unto . . . Lady Bromley’, later described as ‘a negro maid servant’, left a legacy of £10 to the poor of St Mary’s parish, Putney, ‘to be employed as a stock for the relief and comfort of the said poor in bread, or otherwise at the discretion of ... the vestry men’.62 Lady Anne Bromley had been the wife of William Offley and by 1625 was also the widow of Sir Henry Bromley, the former employer of Henry Jetto at Holt Castle, who died in 1615.63 She seems to have inherited Frances’s service from her first husband. Yet in Offley’s will Frances was given financial freedom; £10 was a huge sum of money, especially compared to the 50 shillings awarded to Offley’s other maids. In the end, she seems to have kept the money for the next twenty-five years, allowing her to become a benefactor to the poor of Putney at her death.

  After Cattelena died, she was presumably buried at St Mary’s Church in Almondsbury. The parish registers only survive from 1653, so we cannot be sure. She died intestate, without making a will, which isn’t particularly surprising. Most people did not make wills and very few single women did. The purpose of a will is to make sure your property is inherited by the people of your choice, particularly to provide for widows and y
ounger children, whom the common law and local custom might overlook in favour of the heir. When an individual had many relatives, a will, as one Lincolnshire yeoman remarked in 1596, could prevent ‘such troubles, unkindness and controversies as do most commonly grow where no such order is taken’. The single women who did make wills tended to leave their estate to a relative, though more often than not they made other women, such as sisters or nieces, their beneficiaries.64 If, like Cattelena, you did not own a great estate or have any close family, the likelihood of controversy was much diminished and there was no great motivation to write a will.

  Helen Ford would have had to apply to the Consistory Court of Bristol, the ecclesiastical court presided over by the Bishop of Bristol in Bristol Cathedral, for letters of administration. These gave her the authority to deal with Cattelena’s estate. It was common for women’s estates to be administered by other women. Administrators were normally close family members, such as wives, sons or brothers of the deceased. In the absence of a relative, the administrator was sometimes a creditor, someone the deceased owed money to, or a neighbour or other friend.65

  The next step was for Cattelena’s estate to be valued. On 24 May 1625 her goods were appraised by Thomas Cottwell, Maurice Perry and Thomas Haines. Thomas Haines was possibly a member of a local gentry family, the Haynes of Westbury-on-Trym, Wick and Abson.66 At least two local men had to act as appraisers, and were given breakfast or supper for their services, although in the case of impoverished estates this might dwindle to just a drink, as the provisions had to be paid for from the deceased’s estate.67

  Cattelena’s goods were worth a total of £6 9s 6d. Inventories were only required for estates worth more than £5, so this places the value of her possessions at the lower end of the scale. That said, she might have owned things not mentioned; probate inventories did not list land, only moveable goods. While cows, pigs and sheep were itemised, chickens, ducks and geese usually weren’t. The inventory also often omitted debts owing.68