Black Tudors

by Miranda Kaufmann

  64 Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2, Scene 2; Anonymous, Lust’s Dominion, Act 3, Scene 1; Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of Malta, Act 1, Scene 1.

  65 Dekker, The Honest Whore, Part II, Act 5, Scene 2.

  66 The Lord Chamberlain at this time was Thomas Howard, Earl of Suffolk. Shugg, ‘Prostitution in Shakespeare’s London’, p. 305; ‘Poor and vagrants’, in Analytical Index to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia 1579–1664, ed. W. H. Overall and H. C. Overall (London, 1878), pp. 357–364. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/index-remembrancia/1579-1664/pp357-364 [accessed 1 April 2017].

  67 Griffiths, Lost Londons, pp. 11–13; Merritt, The social world of early modern Westminster, p. 8.

  68 A Pepysian garland, ed. Rollins, pp. 40–43.

  69 Massinger, The City Madam, Act 5, Scene 1.

  70 Female Transgression in Early Modern Britain, ed. Ruberry–Blanc and Hillman, p. 81. Porter, ‘Lupton, Donald (d. 1676)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  71 Nashe, Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem, pp. 144–145.

  72 LMA, WJ/SR/NS/13, no. 18 (Daniel Powell accuses Jane Bankes of ‘misdemeanours’, Westminster Sessions Roll, 22 March 1624).

  73 Samuel Rowlands, Greene’s Ghost Hunting Coney Catchers (1602), cited in Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, p.117.

  74 Clement Edwards graduated from Corpus Christi, Cambridge, and was ordained as a deacon on 23rd May 1619 by Bishop Thomas Dove at Peterborough Cathedral. He was Rector of Witherley in Leicestershire from April 1619 until June 1622: Clergy of the Church of England Database, Person ID: 139450.

  75 This was during the Trinity session. The Westminster Sessions were held quarterly (at Epiphany, Easter, Trinity and Michaelmas) in Westminster Hall. Merritt, The social world of early modern Westminster, p. 8.

  76 William Camden, Britannia (1586), cited in Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, p. 81.

  77 The indictment is in Latin. This translation is from an unpublished finding aid at the LMA.

  78 ‘Preachers and preaching’, in Analytical Index to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia 1579–1664, ed. W. H. Overall and H. C. Overall (London, 1878), pp. 364–369. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/index-remembrancia/1579-1664/pp364-369 [accessed 28 March 2017].

  79 ‘Heywood, Peter (d.1642), of King Street East, Westminster’, The History of Parliament; Merritt, The social world of early modern Westminster, pp. 334, 350.

  80 There is no record of what was said, but we know that the Grand Jury thought there was enough evidence to commit the case for trial at the next Quarter Session because the court clerk wrote ‘a bill of vera’ on the back of the indictment.

  81 Lovelace, ‘To Althea, from Prison’, (1649).

  82 LMA, WJ/SR/NS/17/127 (List of Prisoners in the Gatehouse, 3 October 1626).

  83 Creighton, A History of Epidemics, I, p. 429, and p. 424, citing William Clowes, A short and profitable Treatise touching the cure of the disease called Morbus Gallicus by unctions (1579).

  84 Richard Ames, The Female Fire–Ships. A Satyr Against Whoring (1691), p. 14.

  85 Sydenham, A New Method of Curing the French–Pox (1690), p. 20.

  86 Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Dick, (1957), p. 86; Edmond, ‘Davenant, Sir William (1606–1668)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For further discussion of the woman’s ethnicity, see Habib, Black Lives pp. 157–9 and Kaufmann, ‘Africans in Britain’, pp. 187–188.

  87 Shugg, ‘Prostitution in Shakespeare’s London’, pp. 302–3. William Clowes recommended stewed prunes in his ‘Treatise on Lues Venerea’ included in his A profitable and necessarie booke of obseruations. (1596).

  88 O’Connell, The Book of Spice, p. 124.

  89 Haynes, Sex in Elizabethan England, p. 187.

  90 Sins of the Flesh, ed. Siena, p. 41.

  91 Taylor, ‘A Whore’, in All the Works of John Taylor the Water Poet, p. 112.

  92 Nashe, Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem, p. 142.

  93 Fabricius, Syphilis in Shakespeare’s England, pp. 136–7.

  94 Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor, pp. 62–67.

  95 City of Westminster Archives Centre, St Mary Le Strand Parish Registers, vol. 1 (3 July 1626).

  96 Galen, Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, tr. Tallmadge May, II, 633. Samuel Purchas reported that some, including Herodotus, attributed dark skin to the ‘blacknesse of the Parents sperme or seed’: Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage (1613), p. 545.

  97 Dorset Record Office, PE/SH: RE 1/1 (Sherborne Abbey, Sherborne, 15 January 1631).

  98 Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England, p. 50; McFarlane, ‘Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in English History’, pp. 73–4.

  99 Dorset Record Office, Mayors Accounts (town and County of Poole) 1609–10, MA 10, transcript, 15. For further examples and discussion see Kaufmann ‘“Making the beast with two backs” – Interracial relationships in Early Modern England’, pp. 22–37.

  100 Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex, p. 13; Ridley, John Knox, p. 417; Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, p. 238; Capp, England’s Culture Wars, p. 134.

  101 Essex Record Office, D/AEA 16, ff. 162v, 196. (Archdeacon of Essex, Act Books, 17 February 1593, 24 March 1593); Emmison, Elizabethan Life: Morals and the Church Courts, p. 19; West Sussex Record Office, Ep.I/17/8, ff. 139r, 140r (Diocese of Chichester Detection Books, 15 December 1593 and 19 January 1594); in April 1632 ‘Grace, a blackamoore’ was accused by Stepney churchwardens of ‘living incontinently’ with Walter Church: LMA, MS 09065E/1 f. 81(London Commissary Court ‘Ex Officio’ Book).

  102 Personal correspondence with Peter Bluck, Jetto’s nine times great-grandson. See Chapter 4, p. 126, n. 50.

  103 Personal correspondence with one of Adam Ivey’s descendants, Clem Lee Canipe III of Kinston, North Carolina.

  104 King, Parkin, Swinfield, et. al., ‘Africans in Yorkshire?’, pp. 288–293; Redmonds, King, and Hey, Surnames, DNA, and Family History, pp. 200–4.

  105 Shakespeare, W. Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 2; Cranley, Amanda: or the Reformed Whore, p. 33.

  106 Griffiths, ‘The structure of prostitution in Elizabethan London’, p. 52.

  107 City of Westminster Archives Centre, St Clements Danes Parish Registers, vol.1 (11 June 1626); LMA, CLC/L/HA/C/007/MS15857/001, f. 209 (Worshipful Company of Haberdashers, Register of Freedom Admissions, 1629).

  108 William Hogarth, ‘A Rake’s Progress, 3: The Orgy’, 1733 painting, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, and 1735 print, plate 3; Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks, pp. 96–97 and Fig. 62, p. 92; Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Sea Stores’, 1812, Royal Collection.

  109 M. Kaufmann, ‘“Making the beast with two backs” – Interracial relationships in Early Modern England’, pp. 29–31.

  110 Gesta Grayorum, ed. Bland, p. 17.

  111 Archer, The Pursuit of Stability, p. 213; Salkeld, ‘Black Luce and the “Curtizans” of Shakespeare’s London’ p. 5, Hotson, Mr. W.H., p. 252.

  112 TNA, SP 12/270/119 (Denis Edwards to Thomas Lankford, 28 May 1599); CSPD, 1598–1601, p. 199.

  113 Sugden, A Topographical Dictionary to the Works of Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists, p. 533.

  114 Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2, Act 3, Scene 2. III.

  115 Gowing, ‘Language, power and the law: women’s slander litigation in early modern London’, p. 30.

  Chapter 10

  1 This is the conclusion drawn by Habib, Black Lives, p. 116.

  2 I first came across Cattelena in Dresser, Slavery Obscured, p. 11. She was also mentioned in Jones and Youseph, The Black Population of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, p. 2; Linebaugh and Redikker, The Many Headed Hydra, p. 78 mistakenly refer to Cattelena as the first African recorded in Bristol.

  3 Thomas Gray, An Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard (1751), p. 6.

  4 When Death Do Us Part, ed. Arkell, Evan
s and Goose, p. 72.

  5 Bristol Record Office, FCI/1620-1632/19, frames 1–2 (Probate Inventory of Cattelena of Almondsbury, 24 May 1625).

  6 Froide, Never Married, p. 3.

  7 Martyr de Anghiera, The Decades of the New World, tr. R. Eden, f. 355.

  8 Bristol Record Office, FCP/Xch/R/1(a)4 (Christ Church, 4 January 1612). See also Kaufmann, ‘Africans in Britain’, p. 65 and Appendix, 1: Baptism Records and 2: Burial Records.

  9 Kelly, ‘Ealhmund (784)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Britton and Brayley, The beauties of England and Wales, (1810), V, 728–9; ‘Almondsbury’, Open Domesday, http://opendomesday.org/place/ST6084/almondsbury/; Walker, The Book of Almondsbury, p. 14.

  10 Smyth, A description of the hundred of Berkeley, in The Berkeley manuscripts, ed. Maclean, III, p. 54; ‘Smith (Smyth), John (1567–1641), of Warrens Court, North Nibley, Glos.’, The History of Parliament; Warmington, ‘Smyth, John (1567–1641)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

  11 Walker, The Book of Almondsbury, p. 37.

  12 Wells, ‘Baker [née Willcocks], Mary [alias Princess Caraboo] (bap. 1791, d. 1864)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. See also Catherine Johnson’s 2015 novel, The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo.

  13 Northamptonshire Record Office, Microfiche 120p/3 (St Nicholas, Eydon, 16 December 1545).

  14 County Record Office, Huntingdon: HP5/1/1 (St Mary’s, Bluntisham-cum-Earith, 16 December 1594); Mayo, ‘Parish Register of Stowell, Somerset’, p. 6 (St Mary Magdalene, Stowell, 12 May 1605); Suffolk Record Office, FC 61/D1/1 (St Peter’s, Sibton, 25 December 1634). See also Kaufmann, ‘Africans in Britain’, Appendix, 1: Baptism Records and 2: Burial Records.

  15 Bristol Record Office, FCP/Dy/R/1(a)1 (St Peter, Dyrham, baptisms: 28 October 1578, 25 February 1581, burial: 9 June 1583). Ivie himself was baptised in the same parish on 15 August 1575 – see Chapter 7, p. 179, n. 100 and Chapter 9, p. 264, n. 116.

  16 Cornwall Record Office, P99/1/1(St Keverne, Cornwall, 14 January 1605).

  17 Dresser, Slavery Obscured, p. 11; TNA, STAC 5/S14/26 (Court of Star Chamber, Hugh Smyth v Sir John Younge, Sir George Norton et. al., Interrogatory 3, and testimony of Anne White, 11th April 1580).

  18 These were in the parishes of St Philip and St Jacob (3), St Augustine the Less (3), Temple (2), St John the Baptist (2), and one each in St Nicholas, St Stephen and Christ Church. See n.19 below; Dresser, Slavery Obscured, p. 11 and Kaufmann, ‘Africans in Britain’, Appendix, 1: Baptism Records and 2: Burial Records for further details.

  19 Bristol Record Office: FCP/StP+J/R/1(a)2 (St Philip and St Jacob, 18 August 1600); FCP/StP+J/R/1(a)4 (St Philip and St Jacob, 14 December 1600); FCP/Xch/R/1(a)4 (Christ Church, 4 January 1612); FCP/St.Aug/R/1(a)3 (St Augustine the Less, 12 and 28 September 1632); FCP/St. JB/R/1(a)2 (St John the Baptist, 14 August 1636); The Oxford English Dictionary, ‘maudlin, n,’ and ‘maudlin, adj.’, OED Online.

  20 Idle or vagrant persons were punishable under legislation such as the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, and the 1576 Act for the setting of the poor on work and for the avoiding of idleness. Tudor Economic Documents, ed. Power and Tawney, II, p. 331; Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England, p. 180, n. 6.

  21 BCB, IV, f. 209v; Salkeld, Shakespeare amongst the Courtesans, p. 112.

  22 Dorset History Centre, DC/DOB 8/1 f. 181v (Dorchester Offenders’ Book, 8 July 1633).

  23 Brooks and Verey, Gloucestershire: The Vale and the Forest of Dean, p. 142.

  24 Walker, The Book of Almondsbury, p. 39.

  25 Inwood, ‘The Chesters of Bristol’, p.27; APC, 1554–1556, p. 358.

  26 TNA, STAC 5/S14/26 (Court of Star Chamber, Hugh Smyth v Sir John Younge, Sir George Norton et. al., Interrogatory 3, and testimony of Anne White, 11th April 1580).

  27 Chester had acquired the former Carmelite friary in 1569: Inwood, ‘The Chesters of Bristol’, pp. 24–5. Colston Hall is named after the slave trader and merchant Edward Colston (1636–1721), but after much public debate it is due to be renamed when it reopens in 2020.

  28 Chester Waters, Genealogical Memoirs of the Families of Chester of Bristol, Barton Regis, London and Almondsbury, pp. 31–35; ‘Caplyn, John II (d.c.1603), of Southampton’,The History of Parliament; Southampton tax returns: TNA, E179/174/432 (26 September 1598), E179/174/446 (24 September 1599), and E179/175/488 (4 March 1611); Central Hampshire Lay Subsidy Assessments, 1558–1603, ed. Vick, pp. 32–38.

  29 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘bed, n.’, OED Online.

  30 We don’t know how old Cattelena was. More women (about half) over the age of 45 headed their own households. Froide, Never Married, p. 19; Wall, ‘Women alone in English society’, p. 311.

  31 Burial records of ‘Suzanna Pearis a blackamoore’: LMA, MS 09221; MS 09222/1 (St Botolph Aldgate, 8 August 1593) and John de Spinosa: LMA, MS 09234/4 (St Botolph Aldgate, 7 July 1594) See also Chapter 5, n. 46 above; BCB, V, f. 94v (29 March 1606); LMA, MS 09222/1 (St Botolph Aldgate, 31 September 1616).

  32 Erickson, Women and Property, p. 191.

  33 Bristol Record Office, EP/J/4/6 (Will of Richard Ford of Almondsbury 25 April 1639).

  34 Karras ‘Sex and the Singlewoman’, p. 131.

  35 Froide, Never Married, pp. 21, 159.

  36 Forgeng, Daily Life in Elizabethan England, p. 118; Worsley, If Walls Could Talk, p. 5; TNA, PROB 1/4 (Will of William Shakespeare, 25 March 1616); Oxford English Dictionary, ‘flock, n.2’, and ‘bolster, n.1’. OED Online; Gretton, L., ‘Beds in Late Medieval and Tudor Times’, Old and Interesting, http://www.oldandinteresting.com/medieval-renaissance-beds.aspx.

  37 Harrison, W., Description of England, ed. Edelen, pp. 200–1.

  38 Milward, A glossary of household, farming, and trade terms from probate inventories, p. 45; Buxton, Domestic Culture in Early Modern England, p. 192.

  39 Milward, A glossary of household, farming, and trade terms from probate inventories, p. 44.

  40 Strachan, ‘Coryate, Thomas (1577?–1617)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Coryat, Coryat’s Crudities, I, 236–237; Jonson, The Devil is an Ass, Act 5, Scene 4.

  41 Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1; Oxford English Dictionary, ‘trencher, n.1’, OED Online; Milward, A glossary of household, farming, and trade terms from probate inventories, pp. 56–7.

  42 Ransome, ‘Wives for Virginia, 1621’, p. 16.

  43 Lodge and Greene, A Looking Glasse for London and England, Act 1, Scene 3.

  44 Palliser, The Age of Elizabeth, p. 176; Digby, A late discourse made in a solemne assembly of nobles and learned men at Montpellier in France touching the cure of wounds by the powder of sympathy, tr. White, p. 117.

  45 Peters, Women in Early Modern Britain, p. 33.

  46 Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 96.

  47 Fudge ‘Farmyard Choreographies in Early Modern England’, p. 159.

  48 Markham, Countrey Contentments, Or, The English Huswife, pp. 174–190.

  49 Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, p. 311.

  50 Markham, Countrey Contentments, Or, The English Huswife, pp. 179, 182.

  51 Martin Parker, The Woman to the PLOW; And the Man to the HEN-ROOST; OR, A fine way to cure a Cot-quean (London 1629), University of Glasgow Library – Euing 397, English Broadside Ballad Archive, ID: 32024, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/32024/xml.

  52 Hill, Women Alone, p. 19; Valenze ‘The Art of Women and the Business of Men: Women’s Work and the Dairy Industry c. 1740–1840’, p. 145; Pinchbeck, Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution, pp. 22–3.

  53 Walter, The Book of Almondsbury, p. 43. Local lore has it that Sundays Hill was so-called because Bristolians used to drive out on Sundays by horse and carriage to the escarpment for the great views across the estuary.

  54 Thirsk, Chapters from The Agrarian History of England and Wales, III, p. 87.

  55 LMA, MJ/SBR/1 ff. 479, 498 (Middlesex Sessions Registers, 1612); Griffiths, Lost
Londons, p. 74.

  56 Oxford English Dictionary, ‘band, n.2’ and ‘pillow-bere, n.’, OED Online; Mortimer, The Time-Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England, pp. 167–8.

  57 The following discussion is based on these three examples: TNA, PROB 11/98, f. 301 (Will of William Offley, 1600); Hampshire Record Office, 1612B/036 (Will of Mary Groce, 14 October 1612) and TNA, PROB 11/52, ff. 194v–195 (Will of Nicholas Witchals, 1570).

  58 Habib, Black Lives, p. 116

  59 Erickson, Women and Property, p. 3.

  60 Devon Record Office, MFC 46/6 (St Peter’s, Barnstaple, 18 June 1565).

  61 Woodward, Men at Work, p. 172.

  62 LMA, P95/MRY1/413, pp. 15, 35 (Churchwardens Accounts, St Mary’s, Putney, 27 March 1625 and 20 March 1627). For Jetto, see Chapter 4, p. 126, n. 50.

  63 Her third and final marriage was to John Thornborough, Bishop of Worcester, in 1627. Habib, Black Lives, p. 149; Collins, The Peerage of England, VII, p. 316.

  64 Erickson, Women and Property, pp. 32, 204–6, 217. Froide, Never Married, pp. 46–49.

  65 Bristol Letters of Administration do not survive earlier that 1660, but Helen Ford is named as administrator in the inventory; Erickson, Women and Property, p. 34.

  66 Poynton ‘The Family of Haynes of Westbury-on-Trym, Wick and Abson, and other places in Gloucestershire’, pp. 277–297.

  67 Erickson, Women and Property, p. 33.

  68 Ibid., pp. 33–34. D. Hey (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Local and Family History, p. 239.

  Conclusion

  1 The copie of a leter, vvryten by a Master of Arte of Cambrige, to his friend in London (1584), p. 13.

  2 Hair, ‘Attitudes to Africans in English Primary Sources on Guinea up to 1650’, p. 47.

  3 See the Runnymede Trust website, Our Migration Story for examples: http://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/.

  4 Jordan, White Over Black, p. 44; Shore, ‘The Enduring Power of Racism: A Reconsideration of Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black’, pp. 195–226.

  Index