Category Archives: History

Immigration and the Windrush story

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When you read the history of Black immigration to Britain, you’ll find the story of the Windrush looming large.

The story of what?

A ship called the Empire Windrush. It docked in Essex (that’s in England; you’re welcome) in 1948, bringing immigrants from the West Indies–and also from other places, including Poland, but only the West Indian immigrants became part of the story. Think of the story as a paper bag full of groceries. The bottom got wet and everyone else fell. They haven’t been seen since. Sorry.

The Windrush gave its name to a generation, not because it was the first ship to bring immigrants from the West Indies but because it was the first to arrive after the passage of the British Nationality Act, which gave people from the colonies the right to live and work in Britain. 

History’s funny like that. A few events get to be fixed points in the story while other things, things that happened before, after, and around those fixed points, go missing. They’re hanging out with those Polish immigrants at the Invisibility Cafe and they’ll be there until a new generation of historians comes along to resurrect them.

Irrelevant photo: Geraniums hanging out with a California poppy.

 

Postwar Britain

Britain came out of World War II exhausted, heavily bombed, and damn near broke. Wartime food rationing continued well into peacetime. To reconstruct, the country needed a lot of things, including workers. Some 260,000 British soldiers had died in the war. (That doesn’t count troops from the colonies, just the ones from Britain itself.) And when after the war some half a million migrants left Britain for the colonies to build new lives, Winston Churchill, by then a mere former prime minister, begged them to stay, saying “We cannot spare you.” 

To which they replied, in unison, “Your problem, buddy,” and off they toddled.

The government turned to its colonies, where they hoped to recruit workers who already spoke English from places where labor was cheap. 

Yes, it was all entirely high minded.

The West Indies were a prime target, since they were struggling economically, and West Indians responded, taking took jobs as manual workers, drivers, cleaners, and nurses, although when I took the Life in the UK test (you have to pass to get indefinite leave to remain), what I had to memorize was that they became bus drivers. Every last one of them.

Listen, when you have to pass a standardized test, you give ‘em what they want, no matter how strained its relationship to fact may be.

People from other colonies also took up the offer, but they too have dropped out of the story. If you want to know more about them, there’s this cafe I can recommend.

 

The welcome mat

So Britain put out the welcome mat, right? 

Sure it did. And the sun shone on this rainy island for 365 days straight. 

What happened was the usual hysteria about immigrants, because the thing about immigrants is that they’re from other countries. Where they do things differently. You know how it works: the country they come to may be divided against itself in six different ways, but drop in enough foreigners to hit critical mass and the country discovers it dislikes them  more than it dislikes its fellow countryfolk.

Sorry, I don’t mean to sound as cynical as I sound. It just sort of happens sometimes. 

Once you’ve cued up the usual hysteria, you can multiply it by the fact that the immigrants were Black and Britain was still overwhelmingly white. 

Result? As much as the country needed workers, jobs were mysteriously hard to find. One man from the Windrush generation said, “Apparently I was always just a few hours too late,” although they were so polite about it that he added, “The Englishman can be the nicest man out when he is telling you no.”    

Housing was equally hard to find. Rooms for rent were generally advertised on notices in the windows of local stores, and a lot of notices said, “No blacks.” Or in some cases, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.” 

Yes, kiddies, Irish and Black people were bundled into such a tight package that it was hard to tell them apart. In the rest of this paragraph I’ll be working from memory, so give me some leeway, but Ireland was the place where Britain honed its skills in justifying imperial conquest. It learned to write a story that showed the conquered people as a separate race, so incompetent, so inferior, that conquering them was damn near doing them a favor. In that contest, wrapping them all up together made a kind of sense. 

The things you learn, right?

Maybe the atmosphere of those early years is best summed up by a quick visit to MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech in Parliament. By then, hundreds of thousands of commonwealth immigrants had moved to Britain.

In a decade or so, he said, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

And it wasn’t just the immigrants he was talking about but their descendants, They’d erode the national character. He talked about a constituent who wouldn’t rent rooms to Black people. 

“She is becoming afraid to go out,” he said. “Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.

“They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist,’ they chant.”

He was trying to defeat the Race Relations Bill, and the speech was so over the top that it ended his political career. The bill passed, making race-based discrimination illegal. But the speech did succeed in cranking up antagonism against Black people, so multiply the anti-immigrant hysteria by twelve if you would and write your answer at the bottom of your test paper and leave it in the trash can on your way out. Thank you. Everybody gets an A.

Thousands of people turned out onto the streets protesting Powell. And thousands turned out in support. 

The speech has found echoes in a recent speech by the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, who warned that immigration would make us “an island of strangers.” The speech was somewhat less hysterical but was still full of talk about uncontrolled immigration and incalculable damage to British society.

Starmer’s favorability rating is now – 46. (He’s Labour.) His most vocal opponent–the right-wing voice he’s trying to out-right-wing–is Nigel Farage (Reform), whose favorability rating is -26. Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives) is at – 39. That leaves Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats) at – 8 the clear winner.  

I’d love to explain how those ratings are calculated, but it involves numbers and we’ll all be better off if I don’t try. What we really need to know is that (a) a minus rating isn’t good, and (b) if you want everyone to love you, British politics isn’t the right place for you just now.

 

The Windrush Scandal

But back to our story. The immigrants landed, they worked, they built lives and families. Those who had children back home brought them over once they were settled. The country rebuilt, and–

Do you remember how people in Britain clapped for essential workers during lockdown? Essential workers were the people risking their lives, generally for low pay, to keep the rest of us fed and to keep the lights on, the hospitals running, and the trash collected. Once a week, we acknowledged how much we depended on them, then lockdown ended and the world forgot about them. Did they get a raise? The hell they did. The only visibility they have now is that at our local supermarket the people who round up the shopping carts–or trolleys if we’re talking British–still wear vests (or in British, gillets) with some slogan about essential workers. Probably because the store doesn’t want to spend money on replacing them. 

That was a longish digression, but if you subtract the clapping and the acknowledgement, that’s what happened to the Windrush generation, but again you’ll need to multiply it by twelve. 

Or possibly more than twelve, because in 2012, in the midst of a new wave of hysteria about immigrants, the government introduced a “hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” Landlords had to check a potential tenant’s right to be in the country; employers had to do the same; so did the National Health Service. Bank account? Ditto. Local government couldn’t offer support to people unless they could prove their right to be in the country. 

And guess what: a significant portion of the Windrush generation couldn’t prove its right to be in the country. Not because they’d done anything wrong but because the government hadn’t kept a record of who’d been granted the right to remain. They’d never issued the paperwork people needed to document their status and in 2010 they’d destroyed the landing cards that would’ve documented their arrival. 

Many of the people needing those documents had arrived as children, traveling on their parents’ passports, giving them one less document to rely on. 

Overnight a swathe of people who arrived legally became, officially speaking, illegal immigrants. People lost their housing, their jobs, their driving licenses, their bank accounts, their access to healthcare. Some were deported to countries they no longer remembered. Some were detained within Britain as illegal immigrants. 

As the scandal became public and individual stories emerged, assorted politicians made all the appropriate noises and in 2019 reparations were promised. In 2021, a committee of MPs found that the system of compensating people was so torturous that applying for compensation had become another source of trauma. The Home Office was and still is in charge of the process, which leaves it investigating its own fuck-ups, and many of the people who should get compensation are, not unreasonably, afraid to make themselves known. Some 15,000 people are thought to be eligible for compensation. As of February 2024, 2,307 claims had been accepted. 

The people who have applied have faced long delays, and this is a group of elderly people, and the thing about elderly people is that we keep getting older. If the government stalls this group long enough–apologies for reminding you–they’ll start to die off. We all do that sooner or later.

Many cases that are denied are overturned on appeal, but that depends on being able to launch an appeal.

Is free legal advice available? Don’t kid yourself.

I think it’s fair to say that when compensation has been given, it doesn’t match the wreckage that was made of the recipient’s life. One man who was deported ended up living on the streets in Jamaica for ten years. He’s only just been promised a return, although his case hit the newspapers months ago. Whether he’s actually been brought home yet I don’t know.

What sort of compensation makes up for that?

A quick history of Greenwich Mean Time

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 1675, Charles II appointed  John Flamsteed as the first King’s Astronomical Observator, a.k.a., the Astronomer Royal. For that he got £100 a year, use of the brand new, empty Greenwich Observatory, and no equipment. What a deal! He organized some equipment, supplied whathe couldn’t get donated himself, took on students to stretch his income, and set about studying the sky, which was the key to accurate navigation. This mattered intensely because Britain was increasingly a naval power. That makes this a story about power and money and empire, although they’re not what I’m going to tell you about. Brush the words aside, though, and you’ll find them right under the surface.

Flamsteed had come to Charles’ attention by working out a formula for converting solar time to mean time, and for that to make the least bit of sense, we need to take a step or six back, to the time before time was standardized. But before we do, let me sneak in the information that Flamsteed did something at Greenwich that will become central to our story: he drew an imaginary line right through the place and claimed it as the world’s prime meridian–the line that would divide east from west the way the equator divides north from south. 

At the time, the only people who cared were astronomers. Everyone else measured east and west from wherever they were standing and life rolled on as if nothing had changed.

Vaguely relevant photo: Navigation at sea comes into the story. Do I need to tell you this is the sea?

Clock time and solar time

For those of us who grew up with clocks–and I’m guessing that’s all of us–it goes against the grain to think that the hour hasn’t always been a fixed measurement, but it hasn’t, and this makes a certain kind of sense. As soon as you wander away from the equator, the day’s length varies over the course of the year, and–oh, hell, you know this–in the interest of domestic harmony, so does the night’s. So when people decided it would be convenient to divide the day into twelve equal segments and the night into twelve more, they came up with segments that were the same in the morning, at night, and at noon but that shifted over the course of the year, following the stretch and unstretch of the day.

Why twelve segments? Don’t ask. It’s what they did. Or at least what they did in the ancient Middle East. What they did elsewhere is on a different page of the book and I don’t have time to read it just now.

That system held until the astronomer, geographer, and mathematician Hipparchus (120 to 190 BCE; you’re welcome) realized that if he couldn’t find a more reliable way to divide time his brain would melt, so he took hold of the equinoxes, when day and night are equal, and measured the length of the segments, and said, “That’s it. This is the length of an hour.”

Only since he was Greek and ancient, he said it in classical Greek. And no, I’m not going to translate.

It was a brilliant idea and everybody who wasn’t a mathematician, astronomer, or some sort of specialist ignored it. Daylight went right on lasting for longer and shorter periods of time over the course of the year and in practice so did the length of an hour. And people kept on using those expandable, contractable hours until–oh, let’s say the 14th century, when mechanical clocks ruined the fun.

And that, children, is the difference between clock time and solar time.  

Hipparchus did one other thing that we need to know about: he introduced longitude and its non-identical twin, latitude. Between them, they kept geography from being as slippery as hours.

 

Longitude

Even after an hour in May had been strong-armed into being the same length as an hour in January, time was still slippery. Everyone could agree that noon came in the middle of the day, but the middle of the day came at different moments in different places, and people set their clocks to local time.

Well, what else would they set it to? Since transportation was slow and phones didn’t exist, hardly anybody cared and I’m willing to bet not many people even noticed.

The people did care, though, were sailors, because you need two fixed points to calculate your longitude. Or to put that in plain English, to figure out where the hell you are, and I’d love to explain why and how but it’s way above my pay grade. 

Knowing where you are is less of a problem on land, since you have, ahem, landmarks, and fixed points stay politely fixed, but at sea they’re badly behaved, and the difficulties this posed crashed into public and political awareness in 1707, when four British ships wrecked off the Isles of Scilly and 1,400 lives were lost, all because, through no fault of their own, they hadn’t been able to calculate their position reliably. 

Now let’s circle back to Flamsteed and his imaginary line through Greenwich. It was a fixed point that ships could compare their location to. If I understand this correctly–and that’s not guaranteed–they could use solar time at their location and compare it to clock time at Greenwich. All they needed was a clock they could set to the time at Greenwich. 

Nothing to it, except that the clocks of the era couldn’t keep time on a ship that was going up, down, and sideways. 

At more or less this point, Parliament offered a £20,000 prize–that would be something like £2 million today; in other words, more than enough money to hold people’s attention–for the person who could invent a seaworthy clock, and in 1773 John Harrison, a joiner and watchmaker, did just that. All sailors had to do after that was set it to the time at Greenwich and as long as they remembered to keep it wound they had their second fixed point. 

 

Greenwich Mean Time

For some hundred years, ships used that imaginary line as their ultimate reference point. Think of it as Patient Zero of the world’s time zones.

As the railroads grew, treating time as a liquid began to became less and less workable on land, and Britain’s railroads introduced Railway Time, which was basically Greenwich Mean Time under another name. Localities were welcome to adapt it or not, but since the trains ran on Railway Time, I expect there’d have been a good bit of pressure to reset village and town clocks so people could catch them. 

In 1880, Britain adopted Greenwich Mean Time as the national time.

In1884, the international Global Meridian Conference accepted the imaginary line through Greenwich as the world’s prime meridian. By then, the US had already based its time zones on it and 72% of the world’s commerce used sea charts that relied on it. But the conference’s acceptance didn’t commit individual governments to doing anything they weren’t already doing, and most of them didn’t.

Then the Titanic met the iceberg–this was in 1912–and it turned out that a French ship had radioed a warning of the danger, but it based its time on the Greenwich meridian and its longitude on the Paris one. The article I found that says said it wasn’t “the overall cause of the disaster,” but it made a hell of a good argument for getting everyone to use the same system and it actually swung a few more countries behind it.

The original imaginary line is now marked in brass, making it a real line, even if it’s not exactly the line that’s in use anymore, In the name of accuracy, efficiency, and confusion, it’s been nudged sideways a few times. Never mind, it made its point.

These days, international standardized time is called Coordinated Universal Time. And Greenwich Mean Time? It’s been downgraded to a simple time zone.

England’s Star Chamber and the rule of law

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Let’s talk about England in those messy years before the Civil War broke out and everything got even messier. If you find a few modern resonances tucked into the tale, I didn’t put ‘em there–they’re baked in–but they did draw my attention to the tale. As usual, though, we’ll start a century or so earlier.

The Star Chamber

England’s Court of the Star Chamber grew out of the medieval tradition of a king presiding over a court that was made up of his councilors, and in  1487 Henry VII established it as a judicial body separate from the king’s council. Its judges were his councilors and it acted as the council’s judicial arm. The name came  from the star-patterned ceiling in the Westminster Palace room where it met. 

From 1485 to 1641 it acted as a law court and also supervised common-law courts. The number of cases it heard expanded from 150 a year in the 1530s to more than 700 by 1600, and its powers also grew.

Under the Tudors people seem to have thought well of it. It cut through the web of corruption and influence that entangled the common-law courts in, and it could deal with actions that weren’t illegal but did cause problems. To steal a contemporary phrase, it could get things done. 

Irrelevant photo: camellia blossom

I probably don’t need to say this, but that doesn’t usually stop me: there’s a good and a bad side to getting things done. Let’s say you’re the ruler. You are, of course, wise and good, so you only want good things to get done, and you set up a Get-things-done mechanism to do them. It’s efficient, it’s powerful, an lo, Things Get Done. But you don’t live forever. You may not even stay in power for the rest of  your life, so at some point you lose control of the Get-things-done machine, and eventually a person who’s not wise and good gets control of it they get to decide what things need doing. 

Remember how hard you made it for anyone to stop the machine? Yeah, history’s an ironic sumbitch, isn’t it? And we haven’t even talked about the possibility of you not being as wise or as good as you meant to be, or about the machine running out of control. 

But back to the Star Chamber. Its cases included issues of public disorder, riot, forcible entry, assault, fraud, official and judicial corruption, municipal, land enclosure, and trade disputes, and the occasional accusation of witchcraft. One source says that if you dig deeper you’ll find they private disputes about property rights. For our purposes, I’m not sure it matters.

Power

Since it was so closely aligned to the king or queen and since it functioned outside the common law, the Star Chamber Court wasn’t bound by rigid form the way common-law courts were. It didn’t need juries: it could indict or convict on its own say-so. It could act on someone’s complaint or petition but it could also act on information it received, without anyone initiating a complaint. In other words, it was effective and it didn’t have to listen to anyone except itself. Except of course the monarch-of-the-moment. 

Under Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Official You-Name-It-and-More, the court began prosecuting forgery, perjury, riot, slander, and anything else he considered a breach of the peace. And offenses against legislation or the king’s proclamations. 

Since it was operating outside the law, its punishments weren’t set by law. It couldn’t sentence anyone to death, but short of that it had a free hand, and its punishments included imprisonment, fines, the pillory, whipping, branding, and mutilation. 

We’ve now run out of Tudors

Under the Stuarts, the Star Chamber turned its attention to religious dissenters–England was rich in religious dissenters–and under Charles I (one of the Stuarts) it also ran out of popularity. Charles was trying to govern without Parliament, since it hadn’t done what he wanted, and that left him filling the gap with royal proclamations, then using the Star Chamber to enforce them. He could issue a proclamation and the Star Chamber–his own advisors, remember–to enforce it, making it both executive and judiciary.

This united a range of opponents who might otherwise have wanted nothing to do with each other. The common-law courts saw the Star Chamber as a rival to its powers. A substantial faction of parliamentarians saw it as a rival to theirs. Dissenters–its prime target–were guaranteed to oppose it. The surprise component, though, was the gentry. Their influence was already being threatened by government centralization and they were horrified–according to the Britannica–by the use of the pillory and corporal punishment against dissenters.  

Why? Because the dissenters were fellow members of the gentry. Common-law courts would never have treated them that way. I mean, it was one thing to nail some peasant’s ear to a post, but a gentleman’s? It was unthinkable.

Charles wasn’t playing by the established rules.

And then what happened?

Eventually Charles had not choice but to recall Parliament–he needed money–and two women, Sara Burton and Susanna Bastwick, galvanized opposition to the Star Chamber by petitioning Parliament for the release of their husbands, Henry and John. 

By way of–of course–background, both men (and presumably the women) were dissenters and both men (and of course not the women) had published books criticizing the Church of England. Printing was strictly regulated and they’d cheated the system, so the Star Chamber made accusations against them and when they didn’ appear, the judges read that as a confession of guilt. Burton was stripped of his university degree and license to act as a minister. Both were fined impossible amounts of money, and sentenced to be pilloried and have their ears cut off. Then they were to be imprisoned for as long as the king pleased, but outside of England, on Guernsey and the Isles of Scilly, so a writ of habeas corpus wouldn’t apply. Or at least might not apply. 

I did warn you about those contemporary resonances, didn’t I?

The heavy fines had become pretty standard by then. It was a way to pour money into the king’s treasury. 

When they put Bastwick in the pillory and cut off his ears, Susanna climbed on a stool and kissed him, and once his ears were cut off demanded to have them handed to her so she could carry them away in her handkerchief.  

I know, but you have to admit, she made her point.

When they cut off Burton’s ears, they cut so close that they severed an artery. 

So that’s your background. When Parliament reconvened, the two women called for their husbands to be released and their cause was taken up by John Pym, a Member of Parliament, who brought their petition to the Commons, and before long other people were petitioning for the release of men imprisoned by the Star Chamber, and the house ordered a committees to evaluate both individual cases and the “excesses” of the court.

Both women were gutsy as hell and I’d planned to focus this post on them, but other than their petition to Parliament and that thing about the ears, I found next to nothing about them. I couldn’t even find online bios of them. They appear only in bios of their husbands.

Shutting down the machine

Not long after the women’s petition to the Commons, Sir Richard Wiseman petitioned the House of Lords for his freedom. He’d lost a case in the Star Chamber and turned to the king, alleging that he’d lost because his opponent bribed the judges. 

Bad move. It landed him back in front of the Star Chamber, this time charged with insulting the court. He was ordered to pay damages plus a £10,000 fine to the king, and to lose his ears and his knighthood. When he couldn’t pay (it was a huge amount of money at the time), he was dumped in the Fleet prison for years. 

Lord Montagu wrote that Wiseman “moved such compassion in us, especially the poor and beggarly array the man was in, that we fell into speech against the exorbitancy of the court, and chose a special committee to consider the proceedings thereof.” 

I mean, it was one thing to see a beggar looking beggarly, but one of their own? They freed him and voted him £50 for clothes and food–and they set up a committee to consider both Wiseman’s case and the Star Chamber itself.

Before long, Parliament had 47 petitions relating to the Star Chamber and the question became whether to regulate it or abolish it. Commons was the first to propose abolition, but within a few months the Lords fell into line. It had, Parliament wrote, “undertaken to punish where no law doth warrant, and to make decrees for things having no such authority, and to inflict heavier punishments than by any law is warranted.”

The king resisted for a while but he needed money, Parliament held it back, and he gave in.

A spy in Henry VIII’s court

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Henry VIII’s more famous for his wives than for his spies, but the wife story’s so well known that it’s hard to wring anything new out of it, so let’s talk about a spy: Petrus Alamire. Or Pierre Alamire. Or Peter van den Hove, Petrus Van den Hove, Petrus van den Hove (we lost a capital letter there, but spelling was still a liquid so we shouldn’t make too much of that), or if you like, Petrus van den Imhove. Because what’s a spy without a few names to spare? We’ll call him Petrus Alamire, because that’s the name he was wearing when I stumbled over him and it seems to be the main name he wears on the internet.

Which had not been invented when he was alive, you understand, but he might have enjoyed knowing he’d have a virtual afterlife.

Irrelevant photo: I was going to tell you this was an ornamental cherry but my phone swears it’s a plum. Either way, it doesn’t believe in growing fruit.

 

The family stuff

Alamire was born in 1470 and by one account was German-Dutch.  By another he was Netherlandish or German. Take your pick. I expect he did, more than once. Doesn’t any good spy need at least one extra nationallity? 

He had even more skills and occupations than names and nationalities: he was a scribe, specializing in illuminated copies of musical compositions. He was also a singer, composer, instrumentalist, mining engineer, merchant (he sold manuscripts, musical instruments, lute strings, and paintings), diplomat, courier, and spy. And somewhere in there he found time to be a chaplain, although only one source mentions that. But what the hell, why not? TV hadn’t been invented. A fellow had to do something in those long hours before the candle itself burned itself out.

He was from a family of merchants–details are thin; make them up if you’re in the mood–and created the name Alamire from the syllables given to the musical scale (la, mi, and re are notes six, three, and two), tossing A–a note on an instrument–in front for good luck. 

At some point he married, and I have a name–Katlyne vander Meeren–but not a date or anything substantial about her.

 

The times

The Netherlands were cranking out more composers than the rest of Europe rolled in together, spreading the gospel of polyphonic music, so it was the right time and place to be a skilled copyist and illuminator, and as musicians spread outward into the European courts, so did Alamire’s work and reputation.

To remind you of what you may already know, because that’s part of my job description, music was a Big Thing in the European courts, and moving it from place to place involved hand-made copies, which take a bit longer than downloads or even sheet music, and Alamire made work for Philip I of Castile and Archduke Charles, among others.

Alamire’s manuscripts weren’t just for some low-life musician to play, though. They were collectables made for royals and aristocrats. Each copy had to be unique and a thing of beauty, hence the illuminations. Think of them as singable, playable works of art, which made them nifty gifts. Want to buy a vote in the election of the Holy Roman Emperor? One of Alamire’s manuscripts would be perfect, which is why when Archduke Charles emerged from his cocoon he was, thanks to many expensive gifts, some made by Alamire, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

But when I talk about Alamire’s work, I’m not talking about Alamire alone, I’m talking about is him and all the people working under him, because he had an entire atelier–a workshop full of skilled but unfamous people doing his bidding.

 

Henry’s court

It’s impossible to tell Alamire’s story in any sane sequence without making things up, so we’ll skip over I have no idea how many crucial events and drop in at the point where Alamire gave Henry some musical gifts, including a beautiful manuscript. 

Why did he do that? Dunno, but gifts were the oil that kept the court machinery of many countries working smoothly, so let’s assume he was trying to catch Henry’s eye. Or ear. In return, he might get trade concessions, information, orders, connections. Sadly, he wouldn’t have gotten a cup of tea out of it because it wasn’t available yet. Tea didn’t hit Europe until 1555, and it took longer than that to reach England. Still, I’m sure it was worth his while.

People who know these things (which is to say, not me) believe the manuscript he sent was made for Louis XII and of France and his wife, Anne of Brittany, but they died before he could deliver it and–well, hell, you don’t just chuck something like that behind the filing cabinet and move on. He changed the names and poof, it was made for Henry and only Henry.

We need a date here, don’t we? Louis died in 1515, and 1515 was when Alamire started traveling between England and Europe, doing his merchant/musician/chaplain thing, and dropping in, ever so casually, on Richard de la Pole, who Henry had every reason to want to keep tabs on.

Who was de la Pole? He could–and oh my, did he–trace his descent back to the Yorkist kings–the ones Henry’s father had run off the playing field. His mother was a Plantagenet and the sister of Edward IV. and Richard III, and Richard was pretty clear about wanting to be de la Pole the First. 

Okay, it probably would’ve been Richard IV, but far be it from me to get it right on the first try. And it doesn’t matter because he never became king. In an effort to keep his head attached to his neck, he went into exile and planned to invade England a couple of times but the first draft was rejected by the publishers and he died in 1525, before the rewrite could go to press.

All of that, since he wasn’t dead yet, made him into a person Henry wanted to keep an eye on, and musicians made good spies. They had a reason to travel from court to court, and they may have had a certain invisibility, since as commoners–servants of a sort–they weren’t people who mattered. They might be off to the side, doing their music thing and in a position to eavesdrop, in rooms where important stuff was discussed. Or so says one of the sources I used. I’m not 600% convinced about the eavesdropping. If you’ve ever tried to sing in the car when the news is on,  you’ll know how little of the news you actually take in. But the other stuff–the travelling from court to court and all the rest of it–that makes sense.

It’s worth mentioning that at this point Henry, his court, and his country were still Catholic. He was still married, uncontroversially, to Catherine of Aragon. But that didn’t exempt him from worrying about invasions, enemies, spies, and things that went bump in the night. He had enough worries to make you wonder why de la Pole would want to be king.

Here again we’ll skip a few important bits of information. We don’t know what information Alamire sent back to Henry or how useful it was. What we do know is that Alamire became a counter-spy, giving de la Pole information about Henry’s court and Henry’s travels in England, which would’ve been many since kings were constantly on the move, stitching their realms together by being seen, keeping their nobles’ loyalties in place, and not so incidentally getting their extensive retinues fed at someone else’s expense.

Alamire’s letters to both the king and de la Pole have survived, making it clear that he was playing for both teams.

At some point, Henry and his chief advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, started to distrust him and not even a gift of five part books (see Ubi Dubium’s comment, below, for a convincing explanation of what a part book was), a parchment choir book, eight cornetti, many lute strings, and some political information were enough to buy his way back into Henry’s good graces.   

Alamire had the good sense to make himself scarce. He never returned to England and not many English composers show up in his manuscripts. 

That didn’t end his career, though. During the 1520s he was a diplomat and courier (getting banned from Henry’s court didn’t mean he was banned from all courts) as well as a music illustrator and copyist, and he carried letters between leading humanists of the time, including Erasmus, who described him as “not unwitty,” which probably wasn’t the glowing praise he was hoping for but could be worse. In his surviving letters, he has assorted clever and insulting things to say about other musicians. 

At some other point Christian III of Denmark paid him a hefty (if unspecified–sorry) sum of money for what’s called in the records instruction in the “craft of mining.”

Was that a way of saying spying? Or did mining really mean mining? We’re back to my old friend Dunno here. 

In 1534, Maria of Austria gave him a generous pension in return (presumably) for a number of manuscripts. Although another source calls her Maria of Hungary. Either way, she was the governess of the Low Countries after Margaret of Austria, all of which is a bit of history I’ve never stubbed my toe on until now.

And then he disappears. As will I for another week.

*

My thanks to 63Mago for suggesting spies and spying when I asked what people would like to read about. I’m sure that thought will have me wandering into related corners at some point.

And finally, apologies for posting this late. It’s been sitting around and ready to go for a week but I screwed up. I plead temporary insanity.

Dido Elizabeth Belle: more on the ambiguities of slavery in England

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Dido Elizabeth Belle was born a slave, raised in an aristocratic English family, and given the education and many of the and-so-forths of an English aristocrat. Her story messes with pretty much any assumptions we carry in our luggage. In some tellings, she’s Britain’s first Black aristocrat. That makes a great headline but it stretches the truth.

Let’s call her Dido, since her mother comes into the story and her last name was also Belle.

Dido Elizabeth Belle (left) and her cousin, Elizabeth Murray. 

Maria, John, and Dido

Dido was born in 1761. Her mother was Maria Belle, who was then a slave, which would have made Dido a slave, and her father was John Lindsay, an officer in the Royal Navy.

Sorry, Make that Sir John Lindsay. I just love italics. They do sarcasm so well. 

It’s not 600% clear how he and Maria Belle met, but Lindsay was where you’d expect a naval officer to be, on a ship, and his particular ship was protecting British trade routes and capturing the ships of countries Britain was at war with, along with the ships’ cargoes. In other situations, that’s called piracy, but when you have your government’s stamp of approval it’s called foreign policy. 

Exactly how John and Maria (what the hell, let’s call them all by their first names) crossed paths isn’t clear. Maria might’ve been part of the–ahem–cargo on a ship he captured. She also might not have been. 

Whatever happened, they met, Dido ensued, and John and Maria seem to have had something approaching a relationship, because in 1774 Maria built a home in Pensacola, Florida, where John had bought a plot of land for her. The property record calls her “a Negroe Woman of Pensacola in America but now of London afore and made free.” Her manumission papers are also from  1774 and acknowledge “the sum of two hundred Spanish milled dollars . . . paid by Maria Belle a Negro Woman Slave about twenty eight years of age.”

Although having said that, another source talks about John having given her her freedom, not sold it to her. Either way, working backward from those numbers, Maria would’ve been around fifteen when Dido was born.

But that business about the house, the property, and her freedom jumps ahead of the story. Somehow–again it’s not clear how–Maria and Dido show up in London when Dido’s around five, something we know because her baptism is recorded, thanks to Henry VIII having introduced the requirement that churches record baptisms, marriages, and burials. Maria’s listed as the wife of Mr. Bell, whoever he might’ve been.

John isn’t listed as the father, although she was widely acknowledged as his child and he was involved enough that Dido was placed with his brother’s family at Kenwood House.

Before you decide that Dido’s parents had the love affair of the century, defying differences of class, color, and national origin to explore their mutual passion until the end of the earth or their deaths, whichever came first, I should tell you that John made a socially acceptable marriage in 1768 and had four more children with four more women, none of whom was his wife. He doesn’t sound like lasting romance material to me.

Somewhere along the line he was knighted and in 1776 he became a part-owner of a plantation in Nevis, which was worked by slaves, as they all were at the time, so off the top of my head I’d say we can’t count him as an opponent of slavery any more than we can nominate him for faithful non-spouse of the year.

And Maria? We’re not going to find out. She drops off the historical record.

 

Dido

Dido went to live with the family of her father’s uncle, William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice–in other words, the most powerful judge in England. In the spirit of rampant inconsistency, we’re not going to call him by either his first or last name but Mansfield. Don’t ask me to justify that. It’s what most of the articles I’ve read call him. If you have a grand enough title, you get handed a whole poker hand’s worth of names to choose from.

Have you noticed that everyone in this tale has a last name that could also be a first name?

Mansfield and his wife were childless and had already taken in Dido’s cousin Elizabeth Murray, whose mother had died. The two girls were raised and educated together. 

What was usual and what was unusual about this? If a family sat high enough on the class scale, society wouldn’t faint from shock if it become guardians to a relative whose parents hadn’t been married. Or–hell, I’m dancing all over the lot, trying to avoid talking about legitimate and illegitimate children. The idea that a child could be illegitimate is bizarre, but that was the way people thought at the time. Let’s use the word. It simplifies my sentences. 

So, taking in an illegitimate child wasn’t shocking. What was unusual was for a mixed-race child, and the child of a slave or former slave, to be raised not as a servant but as a gentlewoman.

And yes, since we’re talking about absurd phrases that we’re more or less stuck with, let’s add mixed race to the list. Humans don’t divide into races. It just doesn’t work. The problem is that I haven’t found a phrase that slots into a sentence as well, so put a mental asterisk beside it and understand that we need some new language there.

But back to our story. We now have Dido safely ensconced in the very grand home of an earl and accepted into the heart of the family.

 

But . . .

. . . the family made a clear distinction between Dido and Elizabeth. Dido got an allowance of £30 a year. Elizabeth got £100. Mind you, £30 a year was good money–several times more than a domestic worker made and she didn’t work for it–but it says a lot about their ranking. When it was just the family present, she was family. When they had guests, she joined them after dinner, not during. In the portrait at the top of the page, Dido’s the secondary figure. It’s a portrait of her cousin.

Was that about color, legitimacy, or a bit of each? I don’t know that anyone can untangle those threads at this point. An illegitimate child was always ranked below a legitimate one. On the other hand, all the money that was being made from slavery guaranteed that racism had infused itself into the British belief system. In the portrait, she gets the turban and the bowl of exotic fruit; the cousin gets the chair and the more traditional headpiece.

Portrait artists were pretty heavy handed with their symbols. I’m not stretching things to mention those.

On a personal note, I was raised in the US and spent most of my life there, inevitably surrounded by the American brand of racism. I’m constantly noticing that the British brand is different. I don’t know of any story from the US that’s comparable to Dido’s. But that’s not to say that Britain’s free of racism. It’s just–you know, different wrapper, different ingredients, slightly different weight to the candy bar inside.

When Dido’s father died, his obituary described Dido–”his natural daughter”–as having an amiable disposition and accomplishments [that] have gained her the highest respect from all his Lordship’s relations and visitants.”

Accomplishments were a big thing for a lady of the period. Dido played music and had beautiful handwriting. Mansfield often dictated his letters to her–a job normally reserved for a male clerk. She also supervised the dairy and poultry yard, as genteel women of the time often did. (Come on, they had to do something or they’d have perished from  boredom, every last one of ’em.)

In 1784 Mansfield’s wife died and in 1785 Dido’s cousin Elizabeth married, leaving Dido to care for Mansfield until his death in 1793. His will left her £500 (about £40,000 today) as well as £100 a year–not as much as he left Elizabeth but nothing to sneeze at. And to clear up any doubt about her status, his will stated that she was a free woman. Or in some tellings, he granted her her freedom.

Does that mean that she and the family considered her to still be enslaved? Or was he only being cautious? I can’t begin to guess, but even if it was caution, knowing that he didn’t clear that up from the beginning kind of makes your blood curdle, doesn’t it?

After Mansfield’s death, Dido married a steward. To locate him in the all-important class hierarchy, he was a senior servant, so if she’d been fully a lady that would’ve been a shocker of a marriage. No one says that he wasn’t white, so we can probably assume he was. He was from France. That gets a mention. They had three sons and lived in London. Dido died in 1804, at 43. 

 

Dido, Mansfield, and slavery

Before we go on, let’s spend a moment remembering–or if you didn’t already know this, finding out–that Mansfield (Chief Justice, remember) presided over the 1772 Somerset case, which ruled on the legality of slavery in England. His ruling was, like so much of this story, ambiguous.

The question in front of him was whether James Somerset, an escaped slave, could be forced onto a ship and sent to the Caribbean, where he’d be sold. Mansfield ruled that he couldn’t, setting in place the precedent that no slave could be made to leave the country against his or her will. 

The ruling was widely believed to have ended slavery in England, but it didn’t. Slaves continued to work as slaves, and to be bought and sold. Escapees continued to be recaptured–or at least sought, since it was far easier for an escaped slave to disappear in England than in, say, the Caribbean, and many people freed themselves instead of waiting 61 long years for the law to do it for them.

Legal scholars argue about what precedent the ruling actually set. Unfortunately, I’m  no legal scholar, although I did once pass myself off–accidentally and in an email–as a lawyer, so we won’t dive into that. Instead, let’s acknowledge that although Mansfield described slavery as odious and argued that it was “of such a nature” that it couldn’t be introduced without some positive law to uphold it, which England didn’t have, he still stopped short of ruling it illegal. The economic fallout of that was more than he could face–or at least that’s the best explanation I’ve seen offered. His ruling made it clear that the case posed an important moral question, he picked up the legal bricks that could’ve built a case for abolition, and he put them down again without building it.

And he made sure in his will that his great-niece could live out her life as a free woman.

Mary Prince & the ambiguity of slavery in England

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In 1831, a couple of years before the British Empire abolished slavery, a former slave named Mary Prince published The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. It’s credited with giving a good strong push to the abolitionist chariot and it’s one of Britain’s pivotal slave narratives, the first written by a woman, remembered with Ottobah Cugoano’s from 1787 and Olaudah Equiano’s from 1789, although Cugoano and Olaudah are, I think, better known.

Why am I weaseling around saying “I think” there? Because I’m not originally British. I’ve lived here for–hang on, I’ll need access to my toes to count this high–18 years, give or take a toe, but when you come to a country as an adult there’s some ground you just don’t make up. You bring other gifts. Immigrants are handy to have around, although you wouldn’t know that if your only contact with us comes from following the news. But some of the stuff that happens in your brain when you’re young doesn’t happen when you’re not. And I’m very much not. So I have the impression that Prince is less well known, but y’know, most of British history is new to me, so I’m not the best judge. 

To be fair, a lot of British history would be new to most of the British if they were to stumble over it, just as most of American history would be new to most Americans, and a lot of people are working overtime to make sure it stays that way.

Irrelevant photo: daffodils growing in a hedge. I’d love to run a picture of Mary Prince but there are none.

 

But back to Mary Prince

Prince was born into slavery in the Caribbean, sold away from her family when she was twelve, and shuffled between islands and slaveholders until well into her adulthood. She escaped once briefly, as a child, and as an adult married a free Black man Daniel James, who offered to buy her freedom but was refused. 

In 1828, about a year and a half after her marriage, the last in that collection of slaveholders, John Adams Wood, took Prince to England as a servant, and–

You remember that first paragraph where I said she was a former slave? That’s both true and not true. Her status in England was ambiguous. 

 

The bit about whether slavery was legal

To make sense of this, we have to go back to a 1772 court ruling involving  James Somerset, a slave who escaped in England just as he was about to be shipped overseas and sold. The court freed him and that ruling was generally taken as putting an end to slavery within England’s borders, although not in its empire. 

In fact, it didn’t end slavery. A year after the Somerset ruling, a newspaper reported that an escaped slave had been recaptured and committed suicide. Other newspapers ran ads for the sale of slaves. In 1788, two anti-slavery campaigners bought a slave in England to prove that slavery continued within the country’s borders. 

In fact, the judge in the Somerset case, was aware enough of slavery’s ambiguous status that his 1782 will freed his grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle, who’d been born into slavery but who he’d raised and educated and who lived in England with his family. What he had in fact ruled illegal in the Somerset case was taking a slave out of the country without his or her consent. That left England in a thoroughly weird position: none of its laws gave slavery any standing, but none of them made it illegal either. 

 

And back to Mary Prince again

Not long after Prince arrived in London, she walked out on the slaveholders who’d brought her, and I’d love to tell you how long “not long” was but nothing I’ve found makes it clear. The sources I’ve found do say her health was getting worse–she had arthritis–and a couple of the sources make it sound like she struggled to do the work that the Wood family demanded. One source says they threatened to throw her out on the street.

Whatever happened, she walked out and turned to the Moravian Mission, a Protestant church that she’d joined in Antigua, and at some point she found her way to the Anti-Slavery Society and met Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the London branch. She also found work and, the ambiguities of the law be damned, lived as a free woman.

What Prince wanted was to return to Antigua as a free woman, though, and she and Pringle tried, first through a lawyer and later through a minister, to negotiate with Wood for her freedom. Wood refused to free her on any terms. 

In 1829 she petitioned Parliament, asking them to free the enslaved people of the Caribbean, making her the first woman to petition Britain’s Parliament. And in what seems to be a separate petition, the Anti-Slavery Society petitioned for her manumission. 

Sorry for the murkiness. I’m working from multiple articles here and frankly some of them are better on rhetoric than on detail. Anyway, if there were two petitions, both failed. If there was one– 

Yeah. You get it.

At some point she became unemployed and the Pringles hired her as a domestic servant, and it was while she lived with them that she suggested testifying, in book form, to the brutality and violence of slavery. 

“I have felt what a slave feels,” she wrote, “and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free.”  

Prince could read and write, but she dictated the book to an English abolitionist, Susanna Strickland, who compiled it, and an abolitionist who’d lived in Antigua “helped on the Antigua section,” whatever that means. An additional slave narrative, by Louis Asa-Asa, was added to the book. He testified to his experience of being captured in Africa and brought ashore in St. Ives, Cornwall, when storms took the ship off course. 

Scholars argue about the extent to which Strickland and Pringle shaped the manuscript. By extension, I’d guess they’re arguing about how much the voice is Prince’s. No one these days seems to question the reality of her evidence, which is graphic and raw. 

 

The book and the lawsuits

At the time, though, the book was questioned, and it wasn’t long after the book was published that the lawsuits started. First Pringle, as the publisher, sued someone who claimed in print that the story was a fraud. Pringle won and was awarded £5 (more or less £485 in 2025 money, and from here on I’ll leave you to do the calculations) plus costs–a total of £160. 

Then Wood–the last in that line of slaveholders, remember–sued Pringle for defamation and Pringle countersued. The court decided that story was exaggerated and Wood was awarded £25 but not costs. All of which added to the book’s popularity. It went through three editions in its first year. 

 

And after that . . . 

. . . Prince drops out of the public record and we don’t get the end of the story. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the British empire, except for, ahem, the parts controlled by the British East India Company, and that first ahem is followed by a second ahem, because for a period of years slavery was replaced with an apprenticeship system that was slavery under a different name.

Still, it’s possible that Prince returned to Antigua and her husband. It’s also possible that she didn’t. 

Bermuda counts her as a national hero and observes a holiday in her honor.

A quick history of Britain’s railways

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Britain’s first railroads revolutionized the country, in a profit-making sort of way. Goods–coal, fruit, newspapers, stuff–could now speed around the country. So could people. Time was standardized. Once people could move fast enough, they noticed–or at least cared–that different places were using slightly different times.

Companies formed. Track was laid. Stations were built. More companies formed, laying track parallel to where some other company had already laid track. Money was made. Money was lost.

We’re talking about frenzied amounts of money here: £3 billion between 1845 and 1900. In 2025, that would amount to £216.5 billion, give or take a few million, because who cares about the small change? 

That’s based, in case you care, on the 1900 value of the pound and I recklessly used artificial intelligence as the calculator. Sue me if it’s wrong. I’ll happily refund the money you spent reading this free post, although I draw the line at paying for your computer, your internet connection, your time, or any other background expenses.

At the end of that frenzy, Britain had something like 120 railroad companies, a lot of them in direct competition with each other, maintaining parallel tracks and parallel infrastructure and parallel administrative structures. 

Irrelevant photo: crocuses

 

World War I

Then World War I started and the railroads were put under state control. Not nationalized–the businesses still made the business-type decisions and pocketed whatever profits they made–but under the control of a government committee, the Railway Executive Committee. 

If your eyebrows just shot up, you can let them float gently back into place. The same thing happened in France and Germany. It was wartime. War has an odd habit of making the politically impossible possible. All those troops and their supplies had to be moved from here to there, and that took priority. Timetables were revised, civilian travel was curtailed, and priority was given to the military, to keeping the country fed, and before long to moving the wounded to hospitals on ambulance trains, because war, you may know by now, has certain unfortunate side effects.

After the war, the chaos of the old system was visible enough that nationalization was considered, although that’s as far as the idea got. Instead, but in the name of efficiency, the 120 companies were consolidated into 4 regional monopolies–Southern; Great Western; London, Midland & Scottish; and London North Eastern–and left in private hands.

 

World War II

Cue another world war and In 1939 the railroads went back into government control. The number of passenger trains was reduced. Seat reservations, restaurant cars, and some reduced fares disappeared. It was all about moving soldiers to ports, evacuating civilians from cities, and keeping the country fed.  

How many people are we talking about in those evacuations? In 1939, 1,334,360, mostly of them kids but some adults. That involved 3,823 special trains. In four days.

After the 1940 disaster at Dunkirk, when retreating allied troops had to be rescued from the beaches by an improvised flotilla of small boats, no one had any idea how many soldiers would be landing or where they’d land. Trains were put together from the rolling stock from all four companies and waited at central locations so they could be sent where they were needed as soon as somebody figured out where that was. They ended up moving 319,000 troops while still evacuating children. 

Add bombing raids to that picture if you would. 

Enough numbers. You get the point: the trains were crucial and the logistics were–I’m guessing here–a nightmare.

 

Nationalization & Dr. Beeching

By the end of the war, the rail network needed serious investment and the rail companies were in no shape to do it. The system was nationalized and updated. That included replacing the steam engines with diesel and electric and repairing bombed-out track.

It’s not all a happy story, though. By now the system faced competition from roads–for passengers, for freight, and for public funds. It was losing money, and in 1962 a guy called Dr. Beeching was appointed to head the newly formed British Railways Board and make the trains profitable.  

Yes indeed, folks. It was time to Make the Railways Great Again, only MRGA isn’t pronounceable and nobody embroidered it on a hat. I don’t think baseball caps had discovered Britain yet in any case.

His solution was to shrink the service, closing smaller lines and stations, and to lure more freight off the roads and onto the trains with a faster, simplified service.

And passengers who’d been served by smaller lines? They could take the bus. 

The trains did attract more freight, although I can’t find a clear answer to whether it worked as well in reality as on paper. I’m not convinced anyone has a clear answer. What is clear is that Beeching overestimated the savings he could make. The trains continued to lose money. Cars and roads were the hot new technology.  

Some 5,000 miles of track had been closed and more than 2,300 stations closed. Beeching is still hated today. 

 

A couple of reversals

Time staggered forward, as it will if you turn your back on it, and in 1993 the network was privatized into a system that’s too complicated to explain, creating a ticketing system that’s even more complicated than that. 

Want to buy the cheapest ticket? You’ll need a PhD. 

I could find you articles arguing that it wasn’t full privatization, but I won’t. They’re out there. I could probably find you articles arguing that they had to be on drugs to put the pieces together the way they did, but I haven’t looked. Pretty much anyone over the age of five could find reams of articles arguing that it’s been a disaster. In a 2014 poll, 60% of the public wanted the trains re-nationalized and only 20% didn’t. What about the remaining 20%? They were eating supper when the pollsters called and either hung up or offered them a few of their chips. 

If you’re American, those are french fries.

Four years later, that had risen to 64% and people were keeping their chips to themselves.

The main reasons people support re-nationalization seem to be 1) fares that have risen well over the rate of inflation and 2) service that on some lines is so bad you almost have to admire it as an art form, although there’s also 3) the companies making high profits while letting the system fall apart. 

How high are the profits? Using a study done under a Conservative government, the rail union estimates that £31 billion has flowed out of the rail system, mostly to shareholders, and that £1.5 billion a year could be saved by nationalization. The government estimates it could save an extra £2.2 billion a year by cutting waste.

I don’t doubt there’s waste to be cut, but I break out in hives lately when politicians talk about cutting waste. It means they’ll cut funding and then shrug when things fall apart. Or if you’re in the US, they send in a team of nutburgers with electronic axes. It’s so much easier than actually thinking about what might work better–or what might work at all.

But I’ve wandered off topic, haven’t I? You have no one to blame but yourself. Who did you think was supposed to keep an eye on me? 

The current government, before it was in office and when was still in campaigning mode, swore it would renationalize the trains within five years. Since the government licenses the private rail companies, that’s both cheap and, politically speaking, simple. They might even do it.

Meanwhile, trains have been making something of a comeback. In spite of high fares and poor service, more people are riding–9% more in 2024 than in 2023. You could also measure that in kilometers traveled, or in revenue, or in cups of tea consumed in transit, but instead let’s move on and go . . . 

 

. . . back to Dr. Beecham

The current momentum is in the direction of reopening branch lines and stations that Beecham closed in the fifties and sixties. It’s more expensive to drive than it used to be, and increasing numbers of people are counting the environmental cost of driving. 

So how many lines and stations have been reopened? Forgive me for getting technical about it, but it’s a fair number. 

Okay, I couldn’t find a number. The best I can do is refer you to a survey of the reopened line near me, impeccably conducted by Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Surveys, Inc., which reports that the line is well used. There’s even talk of extending it. There’s also talk of not extending it because the land was sold off. 

You can always rely of Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Surveys, Inc. We won’t discuss what you can rely on them for.

Education in medieval England

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England’s medieval era dragged on long enough for a lot of things to change, and I’m not going to give you dates because they vary depending on who you ask. I’m not even going to give you centuries. We’ll start with the Norman invasion, not because that marks the beginning of the medieval period but because I wrote about schooling in Anglo-Saxon England last week. If you want to read about that, follow the link.

So that’s our fairly arbitrary starting point. When does the medieval period end? 

Oh, you know, eventually. Like I said, it depends on who you ask. What matters for our purposes is this: life changed a lot and schooling changed with it. Every so often I’ll narrow down the time period, but to some extent, inevitably, I’ll be rolling all those years in together. Sorry. You want anything less generalized, go find a real historian. They’re wonderful, and unlike me, they actually know stuff. Some of them write beautifully, although that’s not a requirement, unfortunately.

Irrelevant photo (yes, we’re back to them): daffodils for sale outside the shop. I don’t know what the weather’s doing where you are, but here it’s spring.

Latin, French, and English

Medieval schooling was mostly in the hands of the church, and for a long time it concentrated on producing people who knew enough reading and Latin to oil the wheels of Christianity, because those wheels could only be oiled in the church’s very own, special language, Latin. To make Latin even more special, it wasn’t anyone’s native language anymore, so everyone involved had to learn it, word by rule by painful declension.

Do I sound like I have a little trouble taking this seriously? Sorry. You need a certain mindset to talk about it with a straight face. I don’t have it.

The Normans took over a country with a network of churches, cathedrals, and monasteries–and probably some convents. Nuns had originally been part of dual monasteries, where nuns and monks lived side by side. When those were closed down, I believe convents were founded but that’s a different topic and we’re not going down that rabbit hole today. Many of the cathedrals and monasteries ran schools, and so did some of the churches, and as the Normans took control of the church structure and positions, they also took control of, reorganized, and eventually expanded the network of schools.

That expansion wasn’t because the Normans valued education more than the Anglo-Saxons. It was because time passed and society changed, as society will when time passes. 

The Normans left the schools in the hands of the church–I doubt anyone could imagine anything else–and since they were still far more French than English, they imported books and teachers from France, and students stopped translating Latin into English and translated it into French, the language of the conquerors, which quickly became a language the people who did business with or served the conquerors learned. An article I’m leaning on heavily here defines that group as “the middle classes in towns, and the whole cultured and clerkly class.” 

Move outside those circles, though, and people spoke English. 

In the early years after the conquest, not many aristocrats wasted their time learning to read. They had people to do that for them. Their children learned the important stuff: how to fight, hunt, ride, fight, behave well at mealtimes, and look down on the classes below them. And a few other things as well, but we’ll leave all that offstage. We’re talking about schooling, not other forms of education. If we broaden the topic too much, I’ll drown.

The dominance of the French language held until–well, these things are gradual, but the Edwardship of Edward III (1327 -1377; you’re welcome) marked a turning point: the aristocracy had somehow noticed that its country spoke an entirely different language than it did and thought, Gee, maybe we outta try that out ourselves. 

Bit by bit, English replaced French in the classroom and in respectable circles and gained acceptance as a language for business, for literature, and for anything I’ve left out. By 1420, English had pretty well shoved the French language (although not the Norman aristocracy who’d imposed it) off the island.  

Latin was losing its grip, although it remained the language of the church. In 1731–long after the medieval period had packed its bags and gone home–it was finally dropped by the law courts. You could now be summarily convicted of a crime in a language you understood. 

Isn’t progress wonderful?

Not unconnected with Latin’s weakened grip, literacy grew and an increasing number of lay people got an education.

 

The schools themselves

These days, learning Latin sounds like a trick best left to academics, but in post-conquest England it was vocational, and so were the schools that taught it. 

  • Song schools trained church choristers, and for that they needed at least some Latin. 
  • Grammar schools provided the education you’d need to become a lawyer, clerk, statesman, civil servant, priest, or cleric, so more Latin. Grammar at the time didn’t mean just the structure of a language. It meant reading–especially aloud–along with comprehension and commentary. l

Different sources mention a few other kinds of school, but not necessarily the same ones, which makes me nervous, but Oxford Bibliographies sounds impressive, so let’s rely on that. It mentions:

  • Reading schools, which–no prize for guessing this one–taught basic reading, although in literate families kids were likely to learn this at home. That’s as far as most girls got. If you go any higher, you’ll find only boys. 
  • Specialized schools, often connected to cathedrals and monasteries, teaching logic, philosophy, canon law, and philosophy. Another group of specialized schools taught what a business person would need to know, including French.

So we’re still talking basically about vocational training, but for fairly elevated vocations.

 

The students

Before the 14th century, if you wanted to go to school you’d be well advised to have parents with enough money to pay your fees and keep you fed and housed and wearing the right clothes. Beyond the elementary level, you’d be well advised to be born male. So most students would’ve been the sons of freeholders, tradesmen, officials, or gentlemen. They were probably the sons of women as well–that’s the usual way of things but hey, who cared about that?

By the time we get to 1179, the church’s Third Lateran Council decreed that every cathedral should have a schoolmaster to teach ”the clerks of that church and poor scholars freely”–in other words, without charge. By the 14th century, we find some wealthy individuals and the occasional guild endowing schools, sometimes with the aim of teaching the poor, which made it possible for the sons of peasants to attend. But becoming a priest was one of the few legal ways for a person to escape serfdom, and until 1460 it was the only way a bondsman was allowed to send his son to school, so a peasant’s child didn’t have a wide spread of vocational choices. 

It wasn’t just school fees and serfdom that kept the poor outside the school doors. Their families had to manage without the wages the boy would otherwise have earned or the work he would have done. Kids had to pay their way through life from an early age.

Overall, literacy spread throughout the medieval period–not (I’d argue) because the country’s rulers became more enlightened or the rich more benevolent but because towns and commerce were growing, and with them the number of artisans and craftsmen, creating a class of people who needed to read, probably write, and certainly work with numbers. Their kids needed an education. There was benevolence involved in funding free schools, but it didn’t so much magic up a literate group of people as respond to a need society had recently developed. 

 

Two more points about students

1, Most boys started school at seven and those who went on to college might’ve started at fourteen, but it wasn’t unusual for adult students to be sprinkled in among the kids. As David Gillard says in Education in the UK (although the part I’m leaning on covers the period long before the UK existed), in an era before clocks or when clocks were still rare, “Age seems to have mattered little. This was characteristic of medieval society.” Time was still a liquid and age only semi-solid. 

2, It seems to have been a given that being a student involved being beaten. It was all part of the joy of learning. 

 

The schools

As education expanded, the chancellor of a cathedral could license someone to teach its school and grant him a monopoly on the teaching of grammar in that city. Or if the bishop waved the correct magic feather over the correct piece of parchment, the chancellor could also license other schoolmasters in the city. 

Did the chancellor or the cathedral make money from the arrangement? Believing it didn’t is beyond me. 

Schools also opened in an increasing number of towns, and assorted patrons claimed jurisdiction over them–some to organize and regulate them and (until the Third Lateran Council spoiled their fun) some to charge the schoolmaster for the right to teach. 

Do you see where things are headed here? Not only are more students, and more categories of students, being educated, but schools are inching away from the church. The articles I’ve read call them secular schools, although they’re secular only in churchly terms: they were out in the world, not enclosed in cathedrals or cloisters, but they were still religious to the core. The masters might now be priests instead of monks or friars, and they were open to any student the master accepted–assuming the family could pay or an endowment provided for them. In the 12th century, there were 30 secular schools in England.

With time, endowed schools became more common, and wealthy benefactors or guilds began to establish chantries, which had their own priests to celebrate masses for the repose of the benefactors’ souls–and, in an early version of two-for-the-price-of-one, often to conduct a school. 

And with all that out of the way, Gillard (remember  him? the last link I threw in?) quotes Never Mind Who to say that most teaching probably took place outside of organized institutions, making it casual, sporadic, and (I’d add) hard to count. Parish priests–if they were literate enough themselves; and not all were–were likely to do some local teaching. Parents who could afford to hire a tutor, or who had someone literate enough in the household, might educate their children at home.

From 14th or 15th century onwards, some endowed schools took both fee-paying students and “poor and needy scholars, of good character and well-conditioned, of gentlemanly habits, able for school, completely learned in reading, plain-song and old Donatus.” (Gillard quotes that. I’m stealing from him.) They drew students from across the country, not just the locality, and increasingly fee-paying kids edged out those annoying poor or relatively poor people students. Those schools developed into England’s network of public schools, which were no more public than I’m the prime minister. They’re private schools, perpetuating the country’s class structure.

Two of the earliest independent schools were Winchester and Eton. These days Eton costs £63,000 a year. The median annual income last year was £37,430. The annual income for a 40-hour-week on minimum wage was £23,795.20. But yeah, don’t let that slow you down.

 

The schoolmasters

Initially, teachers were mostly monks or priests, and teaching wasn’t a high-status job, so it was usually off-loaded onto junior clerks. In the 15th century, laymen began moving into the job, but priests still had a built-in advantage: endowed schools were often linked to churches. 

When schools looked for a teacher to hire, they generally advertised for a man–and it would’ve been a man–who knew grammar and had an honest reputation. Beyond that, nobody seemed to care. 

 

Higher education

Oxford University dates back to the 12th century and Cambridge to the 13th. They taught the seven liberal arts: the trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric led to the degree of bachelor; the quadrivium of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy led to the degree of master.

They were also vocational. You came out prepared to teach, preach, administer, or–damn, I can’t make verbs out of these next two: be an official or a lawyer. The pursuit of knowledge for its own silly sake was a luxury the society couldn’t afford–or else it didn’t want to or couldn’t imagine such a thing. Why should it? If you wanted to know the truth, all you had to do was look to the scriptures, the churchly fathers, and Aristotle. You read, you memorized, and you analyzed. You did not get too creative. 

Starting in the 13th century, the educated reaches of medieval society began assimilating Greek and Arabic science, medicine, and philosophy (that’s how Aristotle got on the list), and struggling to make them fit inside the framework of medieval Christianity. Cue lots of controversy. It wasn’t always an easy fit, but that’s a tale for another post.

Education in Anglo-Saxon England

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I’d planned to write about medieval education, starting in the year 1000, since as well all know nothing happened before that, but I made the mistake of taking a quick look at what didn’t happen and all that nothing got interesting, so let’s talk about education in Anglo-Saxon England instead. I’ll get to the stuff that happened later. 

Anglo-Saxon England ended with a crash in 1066, when the Normans invaded and we start talking about it as plain ol’ England. For a starting point we’ll take 597. You could argue reasonably enough that Anglo-Saxon England started in 410, when the Romans packed up their sandals and went home, but during that 410 to 597 stretch the Roman system of schooling seems to have collapsed and no one seems to have organized an alternative. Kids learned what their parents and their whoevers thought they needed to know, but it doesn’t seem to have involved the schoolroom.

I’m hiding behind the word seems a lot there. It’s amazing how much isn’t known about this stretch of time, and I won’t claim to know all of what is known. Let’s just move on.

That changed in 597, when a group of monks arrived from Rome, bringing with them both the Latin language and the Latin alphabet. 

 

Why Latin gets a mention

I’ll admit to a built-in bias toward the Latin alphabet–it’s the first one I learned and the only one I don’t have to sound out letter by letter–but it’s not like the Anglo-Saxons were illiterate before the monks stepped, seasick and salt-encrusted, onto English soil. They used a runic alphabet. It doesn’t mean much to me, and I doubt it does to you, but an alphabet it was. If you can read it, leave me your email address and I’ll send you a batch of homemade brownies compressed into an attachment. 

A runic alphabet. If I’m lucky, it’s the Anglo-Saxon one, but I can’t swear to that.

 

The thing about that runic alphabet is that most Anglo-Saxons couldn’t read it any better than you and I can. 

And after the monks brought the Latin alphabet? Same story: not many people could read the new alphabet, and things stayed that way for many a century. Reading was a specialized skill that a limited number of people needed, and the country got by just fine with the very small group who’d learned the trick. 

In spite of that, the Latin language and alphabet did make a difference. Latin was the language of the Catholic Church, and the religion had a baked-in need for people who could read it. In other words, the arrival of Christianity expanded the number of people who needed to know the secret handshake.

I’ll come back to that. Really I will. 

Latin was also Europe’s shared language. It allowed scholars, governments, and business people to understand each other, and that had a certain fairness to it, since nobody spoke it anymore so no one got to complain about favoritism. 

Should we backtrack here? 

Oh, go on, let’s: spoken Latin went out of use gradually, between 200 and 500 CE according to Global Language Services, which also says it became a dead language between 600 and 750 CE. Make of that what you can. My math’s terrible but I do recognize a difference between 500 and 600, and the difference between a dead language and one’s that’s no longer spoken is more than I can explain.

Maybe we should go with the Ancient Language Institute’s estimate, which is that (a) it’s complicated, (b) Latin didn’t so much die as morph into multiple separate languages, and (c) 476 CE is as good a date as any other.

We’ve gone off topic, haven’t we? I just love off-topic. But let’s go back to that handful of seasick monks landing in England. Their assignment was to convert the country–or countries, really, since what we call England was a bunch of kingdomlets–to the Roman brand of Christianity. 

Why did I say Roman? Because Cornwall and Wales had already converted to a Celtic form of Christianity, and we’ll leave that alone for now or we’ll never get to the next paragraph. 

In addition to a language and an alphabet, the monks brought the aforementioned churchly imperatives that demanded a literate clergy. And not just literate: literate in Latin. (See? I told you I’d get back to that.) If the church’s sacraments weren’t in Latin, everyone would be sent back five squares and stay there till they rolled a pair of sixes. On top of which absolutely no one would be allowed into heaven.

So one of the monks’ first tasks was to magic up a group of people native to this new country who could read, write, and mumble in Latin. In other words, they needed not just converts but priests to lead the converts, so they set up schools.

In The World of Anglo-Saxon Learning (it’s online but it’s a download, so no link; sorry), Patrizia Lendinara says in the earliest schools they set up “will have [had] the severely functional [aim] of teaching the future clergy how to read and understand the Bible and how to perform the liturgy. . . . Their principal concern was not with classical literature, nor with educating laymen: their sole work was God’s work, the opus Dei, that is, the performance of the Divine Office at regular intervals during each day; and in order to understand the Office, Latin was essential.” 

As the religion spread, more monasteries were founded; churches and cathedrals were built. And most monasteries and cathedrals ran schools, expanding the pool of literate specialists. 

Until late in the Anglo-Saxon period many monastic communities included both men and women, and some of them were led by women. The focus was still on educating boys–the church needed priests and women couldn’t be priests–but at least some of the schools also educated girls. I’d love to know how the numbers compared but I don’t think we’re going to find that. 

Among aristocratic Anglo-Saxon women, the literacy rate was high. For the era, of course.

 

What did the schools teach?

The evidence is sketchy. They taught reading and writing–and it wasn’t a given that a person who could read could also write. Writing–quill, remember, on parchment or vellum–was a difficult art, not something you mastered just so you could write yourself a quick note saying, “Pick up half a dozen eggs, you idiot.” Students learned to form perfect, beautiful letters. It was a more specialized skill than reading and nobles had scribes to do their writing for them. 

The schools also taught Latin, because that was the whole point of the exercise, along with heavy doses of religion. Bede–one of the few sources on the period–wrote that the school at Canterbury “gave their hearers instruction not only in the books of holy Scripture but also in the art of metre, astronomy and ecclesiastical computation.” Aldhelm, who’d been a student at Canterbury, adds that they also taught Roman law.

Classes would’ve involved a lot of memorization, and how could they not? No one could consult Lord Google, books were the wildest of luxury items. Public libraries were a thousand or more years in the future. If you hoped to use a piece of information at some point, you needed to store it safely in your head.

Latin was taught, in part, using a book called a colloquy, which gave students scenarios to play out in Latin, pushing them to use the language. Two seem to have survived, one dutifully embracing the monastic lifestyle and one, ahem, somewhat less dutifully showing what History Today calls “aspects of daily life in the classroom . . . monks throwing alcohol-fuelled parties, negotiating kisses from women, riding into town to get more beer and going to the privy with younger pupils, unaccompanied. . . . One colloquy . . . sets out a dialogue between master and pupil in which they exchange a vast array of scatological insults, including the memorable ‘May a beshitting follow you ever.’ . . . In one scene, . . . an older student barters and gains a commission to copy a manuscript for a fee of 12 silver coins.” 

 

Education in English

In a country that spoke English, even if it wasn’t a version of English we’d understand today, the spread of monastic education created a layer of educated people who read and wrote only Latin, which you may be aware is an entirely different language from English. That matched the situation in Europe, but Alfred the Great (Anglo-Saxon king, 871 to 899, known at the time as plain ol’ King Alfred) saw it as a problem and had a number of books translated into English. He pushed the country in the direction of using the spoken language for government documents, leaving a legacy of administrative documents written not in Latin but in–gasp!–-his country’s own language. 

He also founded a school that taught children to read and write English, and if that wasn’t unusual enough, according to that contradiction in terms History Today it taught all kids.

I’d take that with a grain of salt, though. The Britannica says the school was inclusive in that it taught the sons not only of aristocrats but also of freemen “of adequate means.” That leaves out the sons of slaves and of freemen of inadequate means. It also leaves out girls.  

Yeah, I know. It’s all about the context, though, right? For the times, that was inclusive. 

Whatever the school’s limits, Al the G’s drive to use the spoken language in written documents helped create a body of Anglo-Saxon literature.

 

But back to Latin . . .

Teaching Latin had a built-in problem, which is that the early Romans–gasp–weren’t Christians, and they wrote in (you got it!) Latin. And once you opened that linguistic door, you couldn’t entirely control what readers would drag through it. They were likely to read stuff the pope didn’t approve of. So Pope Gregory (590 – 604) wrote to a bishop (in Gaul, not England), “The same lips cannot sing the praises of Jove and the praises of Christ. Consider yourself how serious and shocking it is that a bishop should pursue an activity unsuitable even for a pious layman.”

I expect that danger hovered over the teaching of Latin for a long, pious and semi-pious time.

Eventually, English church schools were educating enough people to send missionaries out of the country, primarily to what’s now Germany, and to place scholars in impressive spots in Europe, reflecting impressiveness back on their increasingly impressive schools. Be impressed, please.

By the tenth century, things seem to have taken a nosedive. Viking raids and  settlement and all their associated wars would’ve had a lot to do with that. The century before,  Al the Great himself had written about how few scholars were able to read and write in either Latin or English, and he set out to remedy it. By the tenth-century, though, the criticism was tied up with a monastic reform movement led by the Benedictines that drove secular clergy*, many of them married, out of the monasteries, replacing them with celibate monks. As is wise when reading the commentaries left by any political or religious wrestling match, we might want to be a touch skeptical about the claims of scholarly decline, or at least about its cause. They might be accurate but they might also be overstated. Or just plain false. 

Aren’t we lucky stuff like that doesn’t happen anymore?

Whatever the situation was, the Benedictines are given the credit for a revival of Latin learning in the tenth century.

Since I bad-mouthed the Vikings a couple of paragraphs ago, I should give them their due: by the time we get to King Canute (1016 – 1035; you’re welcome; and yes, he was a Viking–or as I think we’re calling them by this point, a Norse king), we find him paying for the education not only of the sons of freemen “but also of the poor.” And by the 10th and 11th centuries, when churches, staffed by a single priest, were being built in small parishes, the priests at least had the potential to act as teachers.

The potential, you’ll notice. So did they act as teachers or didn’t they? I’m not sure. Let’s say “possibly” and sneak out before anyone notices us. We’re almost at the end of the post anyway.    

In 1066 the Normans invaded, busting up the furniture and recreating the bar fight scene from any western you ever watched on TV, before they settled down to run the place. 

And yes, I’ll admit I’m exaggerating the level of destruction–except for in the north, where I’m understating it–but let it stand. It’s shorthand. I’ll talk about education in Norman England next week.

* And you thought history today was a contradiction in terms.

Black British history: the parts that get left out

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Black people have been part of British society at least since the Tudor era. I could as easily say, “since the Roman era,” but we’re trying to keep this short so let’s skip over that. 

Who’s the we in that last paragraph? That’d be me. I’m trying to make you feel included. Don’t you just love how subtle I am?

 

The Tudor era

The work of writing Black people back into English (or British–take your pick) history is relatively new and seems to be at the stage where historians are still popping up saying, “Found one!” and “Found another!” Information is scattered and finding it depends on digging through archives full of information that’s no help at all. Starting in the time of Henry VIII, the Church of England kept records of baptisms, marriages, and deaths, so that’s one place to look, but sometimes they record people’s ethnicity and sometimes they don’t. Nothing was standardized. Even so, they’re a rich source of information.

At this point, we have enough information to know that Black people were present as musicians, as sailors, as ambassadors, as weavers, as servants, as seamstresses, as traders. A few were the sons of African kings. One was described as an independent single woman. She lived in a village in Gloucestershire and owned a cow–a valuable possession. Just enough is known about her to be thoroughly frustrating. What is known is that all of them were free.

Black people were present at the Tudor courts and could be found on all levels of Tudor society. According to one source, “skin colour was less important than religion, class or talent.” Some married into the overwhelmingly white population and within a few generations their descendants’ connection to Africa was likely to have been lost.

How many of us can trace our family history any further back than our grandparents or great-grandparents?

I’m going to go ahead an repeat that Black residents in Tudor England were free, and the reason I’m honking on about it because when we think of Black people living outside of Africa at this stage of history, we tend to assume they were slaves–and you see how neatly I’ve convinced you that your mind works the same way mine does. So let’s repeat that once more, in four-part harmony: They were free.

Thank you. That was gorgeous.

England wasn’t heavily involved in the slave trade yet and although English law didn’t forbid slavery it also didn’t allow for it.  

 

Slavery puts down roots

Once England did get involved in the transatlantic slave trade, it made, to use academic terminology, a shitload of money–not just from the slave trade itself but from slavery in its Caribbean colonies. (Let’s keep life simple by ignoring its colonies in North America.) But even then,, England itself muddled on in that strange in-between state where slavery wasn’t banned within its borders but also had no legal foundation. At some point, though–and I haven’t found a source that says when–enslaved people were brought to England, stayed, and continued to be slaves. 

For the most part, they were the servants of returning planters, ships’ captains, government officials, and army and navy officers. This wasn’t a flood of people, but it was a significant trickle, and English society shaped itself to this change. Having a black servant became quite the fashion among the aristocracy and the well-to-do. 

Most of the newly arrived slaves continued to work as servants. In other words, slavery didn’t become central to the economy, but they were still treated as commodities. Some were sold; some were given as gifts. And some said the era-appropriate equivalent of “screw this” and took off, which was a lot easier to do in England than in, say, Jamaica.

This part of the story is relatively easy to document: newspapers ran notices calling for the return of runaway slaves.

June 1743: a woman called Sabinah was “deluded away [from a ship bound for Jamaica] by some other Black about Whitechapel.”

February 1748: “RUN away last Thursday Morning from Mr. Gifford’s, in Brunswick-Row, Queen-Square, Great Ormond-Street, an indentur’d Negro Woman Servant, of a yellowish Cast, nam’d Christmas Bennett; she had on a dark-grey Poplin, lin’d with a grey water’d Silk … and suppos’d to be conceal’d somewhere about Whitechapel.

“Whoever harbours her after this Publication shall be severely prosecuted; and a Reward of a Guinea will be given to any Person who will give Information of her, so that she may be had again.”

Why does it say indentured? Slavery and indentured servitude weren’t identical they did overlap. Much later, it was later used as a way to abolish slavery in the colonies without abolishing slavery in the colonies. You can find that in an older post.  

A University of Glasgow project has catalogued 800 runaway slave notices.  Slavery had become an accepted part of British life. Anti-slavery activists chipped away at it through the courts and through Parliament, until even before slavery was abolished it became illegal to take a slave out of Britain without his or her agreement. That didn’t make it illegal to hold someone in slavery within the country, mind you, but it was a milestone.

 

Free Black people

Having said all that, let’s not lose sight of the free Black community, because it was still out there and it’s important to any discussion of Black British history, and of the abolition slavery in the country. 

Most Black people–free or enslaved–worked in domestic service, but I’m not sure if that’s a comment on the work available to Black people. A lot of white people worked in domestic service. I tried to find out what proportion of the population worked as domestic servants and the best I could come up with was “considerable.” So let’s say a considerable proportion of the population worked as servants and some proportion of them were Black, then we’ll duck out the door before anyone notices that those aren’t numbers. (I got the “considerable” estimate from a reputable source in case that helps.)  

What other jobs did Black people do? There’s no centralized set of records to consult, so we’re back to the historians saying, “I found one!” Some were agricultural workers, craftsmen, laborers, seamen. Single mentions include a fencing master, an actor, a fire-eater, a minister, a hairdresser, and a contortionist. The range of jobs open to women, Black or white, was narrower than the range open to men, and Black women enter the record as laundry maids, seamstresses, children’s nurses, prostitutes, and one actress with a particularly fine singing voice.

In 1731, London barred Black people from becoming apprentices. Since apprenticeship was the only way to learn and then practice a trade, this kept them out of skilled work, at least within London. 

Did you just hear a bell ring? That was the Racism Alert Bell, marking a change in the culture. Black people could no longer integrate into the larger population as easily as they used to, and skin color was no longer less important than skill or religion or money.

If you were a legally free Black person and work was hard to find, it was that much harder if you were an escaped slave. Any time you spent in public put you at risk of being recaptured. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the historical record starts to mention Black beggars. 

As a side note, my point of reference is the United States, since that’s where I spent most of my life. Compared to American racism, the British brew was mild. I don’t want to get into a my-racism-can-beat-your-racism argument, but to give a single example, Black-white marriage was unremarkable in Britain at a time when it would’ve been damn near suicidal in the US. That doesn’t let anybody off the hook. It’s just a reminder that no good comes of uprooting assumptions grown in one country and importing them into another. 

 

Community

By the end of the 18th century, some 15,000 Black people were living in England, most of them in port cities–London, Bristol, Liverpool–but also in towns and villages around the country. 

Or possibly it was more than that. Or less. It’s all guesswork–educated guesswork but still guesswork. So forget the numbers. We won’t get them right anyway. What matters is that a Black community was forming. Assorted white writers left us a record of Black people gathering for serious discussions as well as to drink and dance and to celebrate weddings and baptisms. It’s shallow evidence but it does tell us that people were coming together and a community was defining itself. 

Listen, you take your historical records where you can find them. Black sources exist but they’re scarce. 

The Black community played a crucial part in the movement to abolish slavery. When I asked Lord Google for the names of British abolitionists, he gave me twelve; nine of them were white. But a host of people whose names we don’t know were busy helping slaves to freedom, and somewhere between many and most of them were Black. As Peter Fryer put it somewhere in Staying Power (I’m damned if I’ll reread the whole book to find you the exact quote),  for the most part the slaves within Britain freed themselves. 

London’s East End–an integrated, working class neighborhood and a center of Black community–had safe havens, including the White Raven pub, where “Black patrons formed a frontline against bounty hunters, and the church of St. George-in-the-East, which in the mid-18th century committed itself to baptising escaped slaves.” 

Why did baptism matter? An early legal ruling opened the possibility that holding a “heathen” as a slave was okay, but not a Christian. That escape route was closed off relatively early, but the belief lingered that becoming a Christian would free a person.

In 1773, two Black men were jailed for begging and they were “visited by upwards of 300 of their countrymen” and the community “contributed largely towards their support during their confinement.”

Sir John Fielding–brother of the novelist Henry Fielding–wrote scathingly that Black people entered “into Societies and make it their Business to corrupt and dissatisfy the Mind of every fresh black Servant that comes to England.” And if that wasn’t bad enough, they made it hazardous to recapture a runaway, because they got “the Mob on their side.” Blacks brought to England grew “restless” and conceived and executed “the blackest Conspiracies against Governors and Masters.”

And don’t we just want details of that? Sorry, we’ll have to settle for a detail or two about that mob. A few years earlier, Fielding listed among its members “an infinite number of Chairmen [those weren’t people who chaired meetings, they carried people in sedan chairs], Porters, Labourers, and drunken Mechanics.”

Drawing on the participants in the Gordon riots, Fryer (remember him? Staying Power?) lists more occupations: coal heavers, shopkeepers, sailors, apprentices, journeymen, weavers–the list goes on for another line or so but let’s stop there. What’s interesting is that he’s not talking only about Black workers. They were both white and Black and saw slavery as part of a system that degraded everyone: free and enslaved, Black and white. 

This was the community into which runaway slaves disappeared. If you know the history of the Underground Railroad in the United States,  you can think of the East End as an English version: a network of places and people who would take in fugitives. Predictably, that also made the East End a magnet for the people who hunted escaped slaves. 

 

The Communities of Liberation Project

We’re coming to the end of the post and it brings us to the news item that got me started on the topic: a new project is researching the Black presence in London’s East End in roughly the period I’ve covered, and it’s inviting non-historians to get involved. They’re looking for people who live in or have a strong connection to the Tower Hamlets neighborhood–or borough if we’re being all British about this–and who have an African or African-Caribbean background. They particularly welcome “people with no specific qualifications or experience,” which wins my heart. They’ll train them in archival research.

(This is as good a place as any to answer a question that’s been annoying me for a while: why’s the place called Tower Hamlets? Because it’s near the Tower of London. And because it used to be a bunch of hamlets. But that was a long time ago. It’s now part of London’s East End.) 

The project’s hoping to “identify the places, spaces and networks in which African people lived, worked or socialised during the period of the operation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade” by unearthing the”names, stories and experiences of everyday life of working Londoners” as well as “the buildings or spaces, the taverns and churches, where ‘working class’ African Londoners would gather, meet and coalesce as a community.”

 

Rewriting history

If you keep your ear to the ground, you’ll have noticed two things recently: one, you have dirt in your ear, and two, a lot of self-appointed defenders of the culture are complaining about wild-eyed lefties rewriting history. What particularly sets them off is people writing about aspects of history that go beyond what they learned from their grade-school textbooks.

As your official Wild-eyed Lefty Representative (see my photo at the top of the page; look at those eyes; they’d worry anyone), I’d like to remind you that every generation rewrites history. It’s commonly known as reinterpreting it, or correcting the biases of earlier generations, or incorporating new material. Otherwise we’d still be working with 1913 textbooks, when no Black history was taught because, basically, who cared? It wasn’t important.

So am I helping to rewrite history here? You bet your ass I am. That doesn’t mean I’m inventing it. It means I look for sources who’ve done the hard work of filling in the blanks. Long may they dig through the archives.

 

A few notes

  • If you want to fill in a few blanks I’ve left, I have two earlier posts about the history of British slavery. One focuses on the legal aspects of abolition but also works as a rough outline of British slavery and slave trading. Another focuses on abolition and the substitution of indentured servitude for slavery. (Isn’t progress wonderful?)  After you chase those down, I expect you’ll be sick of me and we can all ignore each other for another week.
  • I don’t have a topic up my sleeve to write about next. England has plenty of history left but I feel like I’m running out of ideas. If you have any suggestions, questions, or areas you’re particularly interested in I’d love to hear about them. I can’t promise to write about them all, but if something grabs my imagination and if I can find enough material to work with (neither of those is guaranteed), I’ll do it. 
  • In the meantime, thanks for reading. And if you leave comments, thanks for that. If they make me laugh or think or do both, even more thanks.