On 27 May, the inventory was exhibited: that is Helen Ford took it to show to the Consistory Court in Bristol Cathedral. All was deemed in order. After this, Cattelena’s goods were almost certainly sold. Once the cost of her funeral, the appraisal, the court administration fees and any debts were paid, there may not have been much left. As she had left no will, the remainder of the property went to the Crown.
Cattelena’s small-scale existence, using borrowed furniture in a shared house and working hard to get enough dairy produce from her cow to feed herself and sell to others, does not have the excitement of adventure on the high seas or in the bustling streets of London. Nor can we picture her at the royal court. Yet her very ordinary presence, with her cow, on an English village common, is extraordinary. Imagining her darker face in the pastoral scene forces us to reimagine rural life in this period. The twists and turns that brought an African woman to live in an English village may never be recovered, but a simple list of the goods she owned at her death shows that the authorities recognised that an African could own property and, in its quotidian detail, allows us to sketch the rhythms of her daily life. In the everyday motions of sleeping, preparing food, milking a cow and lighting a candle in the evening, it was a life no different to so many other inhabitants of the English countryside.
* This was an alternative spelling of Magdalene, as in Mary Magdalene, whence we get the word ‘maudlin’ and so might refer either to her penitence or tearfulness, or both.
Conclusion
IN 1584, THE author of Leicester’s Commonwealth, a scurrilous tract attacking the reputation of Elizabeth I’s favourite, made a passing reference to ‘the Black moors. . . that dwell in Guinea (whereof I suppose you have heard and seen also some in this land)’.1 Africans were ‘heard and seen’ across England, from Hull to Truro, throughout the sixteenth century and thereafter. And yet their presence has been forgotten. In 1999, an eminent Liverpool professor, expert in the history of British and Portuguese West Africa, asserted that: ‘Black Africans were hardly at all known in England itself, Anglo-African contacts being almost exclusively within Guinea’.2 He was wrong. The presence of Africans in Tudor England was common knowledge at the time, and it needs to become common knowledge again.
The Black Tudors were not only present, but played an active part in some of the best-known stories of the age. John Blanke blew his trumpet at Henry VIII’s coronation. Jacques Francis came face to face with the skeletons of sailors drowned on the Mary Rose. Diego and Maria joined Francis Drake on the first English voyage to circumnavigate the globe. African sailors like John Anthony crewed early Atlantic trading voyages, while African princes like Dederi Jaquoah visited London merchants’ houses and returned home to facilitate trade. In England’s capital city, people like Reasonable Blackman, Mary Fillis and Anne Cobbie made lives for themselves, while others like Edward Swarthye and Cattelena of Almondsbury found work in the countryside. We have tantalising glimpses of their lives, granted to us only by the peculiar circumstances that brought them into contact with a law court, an unusually verbose parish clerk or a state official who mentioned them in a letter. Fleshing out these biographies from the meagre documentation that remains is not easy, but it is a mission that must be undertaken if we are to reclaim their stories. Those revealed in this book provide so much that challenges the preconceptions we have about the role of Africans in British history.
These ten men and women are but a small fraction of the hundreds of Africans who lived in Renaissance England. Many are recorded by no more than a one-line entry in a parish record or a tax return, their existences many times more enigmatic than the tales told here. Yet, more may still be revealed. No one has yet trawled the entire corpus of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents for these sorts of stories. But as increasing numbers of records become digitised, transcribed and electronically searchable, the task should become more manageable. And if what has already been found is anything to go by, it will prove worthwhile.
Why? Because anyone who assumes that all Africans in British History have been powerless, enslaved victims must be challenged. The Black Tudors actively pursued their own interests and were free to do so. We find them petitioning for the payment of wages or for a pay rise, guarding trade secrets to retain a monopoly, seeking baptism as a path to social acceptance. More often than not, their efforts were rewarded.
The presence and experience of the Black Tudors and Stuarts demonstrates that Elizabeth I’s so-called ‘expulsion of the blackamoors’ is a myth born of modern assumptions, not reality. As debate about immigration becomes ever more vituperative and divisive, it is vital to understand that the British Isles have always been peopled with immigrants. The Black Tudors are just one of a series of different peoples who arrived on these shores in centuries past.3
Knowing about the Black Tudors brings a richer understanding of a fascinating period of history. Traditional narratives tell of the ‘Age of Discovery’, but the physical presence of Africans in England literally brings home the reality of the country’s growing contact with the wider world. Tracing the journeys of individuals such as Diego, who came to Plymouth via Panama and ended his days in the Moluccas, makes the global story personal. Broadening our horizons to consider the political and military potential of Morocco, or the Cimarrons in the story of the English struggle against Spain, gives us a more accurate picture of international affairs at the time.
Few people know that the Tudors, or even the early Stuarts, traded with Africa at all. When they do think about it, they think of John Hawkins and imagine that any trade with that continent must have been a trade in human flesh. Through Dederi Jaquoah and the other Africans who went on to become interpreters and facilitators of trade after short stays in London, we discover most English merchants were far more interested in acquiring gold, ivory and grains of paradise from their sophisticated African counterparts.
Historians have often argued that the racialised chattel slavery that developed in Colonial America was based on a mind-set imported from England.4 But the experiences of Africans in Tudor and early Stuart England described here show that slavery was not an inevitable result of the Anglo-African encounter. Coupled with evidence of free Africans in early Virginia, this book adds weight to the conclusion that American slavery was instead something that emerged in the very specific economic and social circumstances of the early colonies.
The intense physical requirements of harvesting lucrative colonial crops, especially sugar, created the demand for imported slave labour, following the decimation of the indigenous populations by Old World diseases; this led English merchants to begin transporting enslaved Africans across the Atlantic in earnest from the 1640s onwards. It is not that the Tudors were morally superior to those who came later. It is merely that, until the mid-seventeenth century, there was no market, and so no profit, to be made from slavery.
And yet, even once slavery was adopted by the English colonies, and the English overtook the Portuguese and the Spanish as the world’s most successful slave traders, no statutes codifying slavery were ever passed in England. This caused confusion when Englishmen brought home Africans they had legally purchased in the colonies. This was the very confusion that men like James Somerset were able to exploit when the question of their freedom came before English judges in the eighteenth century.
In the Tudor period, before the English colonies were established, there was a similar confusion when Africans came to England from southern European countries such as Spain, Portugal and Italy, where they might have been legally enslaved. As the Italian merchants in Southampton who contested Jacques Francis’s reliability as a witness, and Hector Nunes, who found that the ‘Ethiopian Negar’ he’d illegally acquired refused to ‘tarry and serve’ him, discovered to their cost, Tudor England really had ‘too pure an Air for Slaves to breathe in’.
The history of the Black Tudors is an aspect of British history that deserves a wider audience. It shows that when we ask new questions of th
e past we get new, and often surprising, answers. We thought we knew Tudor England, but this book reveals a different country, where an African could earn a living, marry and have a family, testify in a court of law, or even whip an Englishman with impunity.
Author’s Note
When I began research for my Oxford D.Phil. thesis, ‘Africans in Britain 1500–1640’, in 2004, study of the subject was still in its infancy. Pioneering works of Black British History such as Edward Scobie’s Black Britannia (1972), James Walvin’s Black and White: the Negro and English Society, 1555–1945 (1973) and Folarin Shyllon’s Black People in Britain, 1555–1833 (1977) only dedicated a few pages to the early modern period, citing a handful of examples. By the time Peter Fryer published Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain in 1984 he was able to enumerate around 30 individuals living in England and Scotland, thanks in part to research carried out by Paul Edwards.
My own investigation owes a huge debt to Marika Sherwood, a founding member of the Black and Asian Studies Association (BASA), who was kind enough to provide me with a list of close to 100 references to Africans that she had recently published in a 2003 History Today article entitled ‘Blacks in Tudor England’, and the BASA newsletter. Kathy Chater, who was working on her book Untold Histories: Black people in England and Wales during the period of the British slave trade, c. 1660–1807 (2009), also sent me references she had found from the earlier period. Using these as a starting point, I was able to compile a database of more than 400 references to more than 360 African individuals living in England and Scotland which became the Appendix to my thesis, ‘Evidence of Africans in Britain, 1500–1640’. My criteria for inclusion were strict: although it would be tempting to assume that everyone with the surname ‘Black’ was of African origin, there are enough certain examples of people described as ‘a’ or ‘the’ ‘blackamoor’, ‘negar’ or ‘Ethiop’ that we can disregard more ambiguous possibilities.
Since I began my research, two other scholars have published their own findings: Imtiaz Habib included a detailed ‘Chronological Index of Records of Black People 1500–1677’ in his book Black Lives in the English Archives (Ashgate, 2008) while Onyeka’s Blackamoores: Africans in Tudor England, Their Presence, Status and Origins (Narrative Eye, 2013) also listed and referenced many examples of Africans living in Tudor England.
This documentation means that statements such as that made as late as 1999 by Liverpool Professor Paul Hair, an expert on Portuguese and British West Africa, in his article ‘Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650’ that ‘Black Africans were hardly at all known in England itself, Anglo-African contacts being almost exclusively within Guinea’ are no longer tenable.
The evidence for the Black Tudor presence comes from a range of archival sources: parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials; other church and municipal records; tax returns; household accounts; legal records; voyage accounts; wills and inventories; diaries and letters.
It is this archival record that must be consulted first when trying to understand the position of Africans in Tudor society. Until now, much of the discussion of this subject has relied upon literary texts such as Shakespeare’s Othello and the various other contemporary plays that featured African characters and geographical texts, such as Leo Africanus’s Description of Africa and the travel narratives gathered together by Richard Hakluyt and his friends. Few Tudors knew how to read, or regularly attended the theatre. Far fewer had ever travelled abroad. Printed texts only reflect the ideas of a small, literate or play-going elite. Such works are written to entertain or convey a polemical point, and cannot be quoted verbatim as evidence of attitudes without first analysing the context in which they were written, and why.
The archival material naturally comes with its own set of drawbacks and historical problems. The authors of England’s parish registers, tax returns, household accounts, court records, and other administrative documents did not set out to entertain the reader. They simply recorded what actually happened to Africans in Tudor England; not what people thought of them in the abstract, but how they were treated on a day-to-day basis. These quotidian actions speak louder than words.
The Black Tudors are often only known to us from a line in a register recording their birth or death, or their presence in a household. The ten people featured in this book are better documented than most, often because they appeared in court, or in other cases, where petitions and the occasional more detailed baptism record give us the clues we need to piece together a biography. This approach was pioneered by Rosalyn Knutson in her inspired 1991 essay ‘A Caliban in St Mildred, Poultry’, which took the baptism of Dederi Jaquoah as its starting point, but went on to deploy a wide range of archival sources to place Jaquoah in a wider context, in particular examining the life of the merchant John Davies, who brought him to London. Gustav Ungerer also demonstrated what could be done with legal records when he used the High Court of Admiralty case of Erizzo v. Corsi to tell the story of Jacques Francis in his 2005 article ‘Recovering a Black African’s Voice in an English lawsuit: Jacques Francis and the Salvage Operations of the Mary Rose and the Sancta Maria and Sanctus Edwardus, 1545–c.1550’.
While my research into the African presence in Britain has been extensive, it has not been exhaustive. In particular, the legal sources that have proven so revealing warrant further investigation. The High Court of Admiralty papers for this period are not well catalogued and so are not easy to search systematically, but might well furnish further fascinating examples of Black Tudor lives. I hope this book will show what is possible, and inspire others to conduct further research into the subject, both in England and in other European countries. This in turn will hopefully feed into a wider debate about the status and experience of Africans in early modern European societies and why and how this was to change over the course of the seventeenth century.
Acknowledgements
There are so many people who have gone out of their way to help me with their time, enthusiasm and expertise since I made my first forays into this subject in 2004, that some of them are bound to remain unacknowledged. So my apologies and thanks to them in equal measure.
In the writing of Black Tudors I have been particularly fortunate that other scholars have been kind enough to answer odd questions, read chapters, or in some heroic cases, the whole manuscript, and provide me with invaluable feedback, discussion, suggestions and encouragement. A huge thank you to Richard Blakemore, James Davey, Kevin Dawson, Matthew Dimmock, Madge Dresser, Kelechie Ezie, Peter Fleming, Catherine Fletcher, Helen Hackett, Jonathan Healey, Simon Healy, Alex Hildred, Aaron Jaffer, Bernhard Klein, Rosalyn Knutson, Alisa Miller, Kate Morrison, Michael Ohajuru, David Olusoga, Onyeka, Peter Robison, Duncan Salkeld, Cassander L. Smith, Richard Stone and Christian Wilson.
I greatly appreciate the continued efforts and patience of my agent, Charlie Viney of the Viney Agency, and the editorial brilliance and moral support of his associate Val Hudson. Thanks also to Martin Sheppard, Tony Morris and Janet Gough, who each spurred me on in different ways to believe that my research could become a book.
As a first-time author I have been extremely fortunate to have Oneworld as my publisher. Sam Carter has made Black Tudors a better book in so many ways, with his genuine interest in the subject, wide-ranging knowledge and incisive editing. Jonathan Bentley-Smith has gently given me a more active, emphatic and less verbose voice, and dealt with my manifold queries both patiently and promptly. Ann Grand has been grand. James Jones and Kishan Rajani have produced the most wonderfully eye-catching and resonant jacket. Margot Weale has guided carefully my boundless enthusiasm for publicity.
Thanks to Philip Murphy, director of the Institute for Commonwealth Studies for giving Michael Ohajuru and me both an institutional base and the opportunity to establish the What’s Happening in Black British History? workshop series, which has provided such an invaluable forum for wider debate and networking, allowing me to place my understandi
ng of my subject in a wider context. Michael himself has been the most wonderful colleague, friend and sounding board; thanks also to his partner Ebun Culwin for her artistic presence and tolerating our never-ending shop-talk!
I am also indebted to Margaret McGregor, Annette Walton, Luca Zenobi and Eilish Gregory as well as the staff of the many record offices and archives I visited or contacted for their assistance with additional research, translation and transcription of sources. Thanks also to all the scholars, local historians and other enthusiasts including Kathy Chater, Sylvia Coldicott, Kelechie Ezie, Helen Good, Martin Ingram, Stuart Minson, Duncan Salkeld, Marika Sherwood, Gustav Ungerer and Annette Walton, who drew my attention to, and generously shared evidence of, Africans they had found in the archives.
Above all I am deeply grateful for the love and support of my family and friends, which has sustained me throughout. Zanna Bankes, Jessica Barrett, Ann Berry, Emily Boldy, Zahler Bryan, Rosie Collins, Philip Day, Kathryn De Jesus, Ruth Evans, Jesse Galdal-Gibbs, Ciorsdan Glass, Emily Hacker, Sparrow Harrison, Elizabeth Hunt, Sophie Knox, Sarah Legrand, Kate Maltby, Issy Millard, Alisa Miller, John Morgenstern, Fiona Pearce, Jacqui Unsworth, James Weekes, Josephine Wynne-Eaton and Emma Young have all provided both moral support and light relief. I look forward to fulfilling all the promises I’ve made to you that began with the phrase ‘once I’ve finished with the book . . .’ Aunt Loraine has always been a supportive source of wisdom. My parents, Johanna and Peter and my sisters, Augusta and Olivia, have continued to give me endless unconditional love, and been incredibly supportive, especially in helping me make time to work alongside the new responsibilities of parenthood. Finally, I would like to thank my husband Olivier Dechazal, though the words to do so adequately escape me (the dedication should do it) and my little angels, Sophie and Juliette, for daily cuddles, smiles, kisses and songs and for inspiring me to make them proud.
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