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.