Being black way back when
ON DECEMBER 3, 1596, “in the county of Gloucestershire”, one servant whipped another in front of their master at a large house called White Cross Manor.
Nothing odd about this, you might think. After all, servants were flogged all the time in Tudor England.
What makes this case unusual was that the man being flogged was white, while the man doing the flogging – he was called Edward Swarthye – was black.
Perhaps the strangest thing of all was that no one present that day thought there was anything remarkable about this. And yet conventional wisdom – along with a string of history books – tells us that to be black in 16th-century England was to be stuck in a kind of living hell. If you weren’t enslaved, then your days were still likely to pass in endless drudgery and toil.
But as Miranda Kaufmann reveals in this consistently fascinating, historically invaluable book, conventional wisdom has got it hopelessly wrong.
Although life may not have been a bed of roses if you were black in Tudor England, it wasn’t necessarily that bad, either.
Take the case of an African court trumpeter called John Blanke, who played at the coronation of Henry VII in 1485 and was held in such high esteem that the king paid for his wedding outfit.
Far from being enslaved (as Kaufmann points out, slavery was never legal in Britain itself, only in the colonies), Blanke demanded, and received, good money for his services.
By the end of the 16th century, there were 10 Africans living in Southampton, one of whom, Jacques Francis, was a diver searching for the wreck of the Mary Rose, Henry VIII’S great warship, which had sunk in 1545. At the time, the idea of immersing oneself in water was regarded with considerable suspicion by most of the population, and so home-grown divers were hard to come by.
And far from there being any sexual prejudice against black people, a number of them married white men or women.
The splendidly named Reasonable Blackman, a silk weaver, is thought to have married an English wife in around 1587. Tragically, their two children both died young.
Many Africans died in the Plague, with some of them given funerals “grander than those recorded for non-african parishioners”. And, not surprisingly, many immigrants ended up being baptised. One Mary Fillis, a Moroccan girl, came to England in the 1580s and began working, aged six or seven, as a maid. At about 20, she converted to Christianity.
Despite being so far from home, she is unlikely to have felt too lonely. By 1589, there was even a Moroccan embassy in London.
The identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady – to whom he wrote several of his sonnets – is one of literature’s most enduring mysteries. Kaufmann suggests she might have been an African prostitute called Anne Cobbie, known as “the Tawny Moor with soft skin”, who was greatly esteemed by a number of prominent men of the period. Anne was in such high demand that she was able to charge five times as much as her white colleagues.
Meanwhile, in 1613, a South African man named Coree arrived in London and spent six months living as a guest in the house belonging to the owner of the East India Company.
There, he was dressed in Western clothes and even had a suit of armour made for him. But when he returned to Africa a year later, Coree promptly threw off his Western clothes, put a sheepskin on his back, draped “some guts around his neck”, as one witness put it, and strode off into the jungle, never to be seen again.
Official records make few references to black people, and so Kaufmann has had to try to reconstruct these lives from whatever information is available. As a result, there’s often rather more background in her book than foreground.
In an apparent effort to compensate for a shortage of hard detail, she kicks off each chapter with a breathless fictionalised passage from each of her subjects’ lives. Frankly, these should have been tossed straight into the dustbin.
But this is a small quibble in an otherwise admirable book. The narrative is pacey, the research thorough and the tone mercifully free of sermonising. Anyone reading it will never look at Tudor England in quite the same light again. – Daily Mail