DOUMENTS FROM the 15th and 16th centuries show that Africans were present in most of the royal courts.
For example, John Blanke, an African trumpeter, served in the court of King Henry VII and King Henry VIII.
Blanke may have come to England as one of the African attendants of Catherine of Aragon in 1501. He is one of the earliest recorded Black people in Britain after the Roman period.
Court records from Queen Elizabeth I’s reign relating to the Baskerville campaign of 1595–96 document a large number of Spanish and African prisoners of war captured in an assault by Sir Francis Drake on a Spanish pearl-fishing settlement in Rio de la Hacha in the Spanish West Indies during the Anglo-Spanish War.
The prisoners were later traded for the return of English prisoners held in Spain and Portugal. Elizabeth I also employed an African court dancer called Lucy Negro (or Black Lucy) who later ran a brothel in Clerkenwell, north-east London and is considered to have partly inspired Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets.
Outside of their presence in courts, parish documentation confirms that Africans were part of London society at all levels. Reasonable Blackman, a silk weaver who probably emigrated from the Netherlands, lived in Southwark around 1579–1592.
Mary Fillis, a basket weaver’s daughter from Morocco, came to London around 1583–84 and rose from a servant to a dressmaker and reputable Black figure.
By the end of the 18th century Britain was the leading slave trader in human lives across the Atlantic, with over a million enslaved Africans in the British West Indies.
This led to Black people arriving in all parts of Britain, unwillingly and willingly, for over two centuries. Current estimates are that at least 10,000 lived in London, with a further 5,000 throughout the country.
The involvement of British merchants in the transatlantic slave trade contributed most to the development of the Black British community.
Communities flourished in port cities involved in the slave trade, such as Liverpool and Bristol. Some Liverpudlians can trace their Black heritage in the city back ten generations.
Early Black settlers in the city included seamen, the mixed-race children of traders sent to be educated in England, servants, and freed slaves.
As a result, Liverpool is home to Britain’s oldest Black community, dating at least to the 1730s. By 1795, Liverpool had 62.5 per cent of the European slave trade.
By the mid-18th century, Africans comprised between 1-3 per cent of London’s population, thanks to the slave trade. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries many Black people were brought to London as slaves from plantations in the Caribbean and Americas by slave owners, ship’s captains, colonial officials, merchants, slave traders and plantation owners.
This led to a growing Black presence in the northern, eastern and southern areas of London.
One of the most famous slaves to attend a sea captain was known as Sambo. He fell ill shortly after arriving in England and was buried in Lancashire where his plaque and gravestone still stand. Freed slaves and seamen also arrived from West Africa.
Many of these immigrants were forced to beg due to a lack of jobs, their low social status and racial discrimination.
In 1610, Prince Dederi Jaquoah, 20, was brought to the City of London from Liberia by an English merchant. The prince, whose father ruled a kingdom in today’s Liberia, was baptised in London on New Year’s Day 1611 and stayed in London for two years
In 1684, Katharine Auker was brought to England from Barbados by her owner Robert Rich, a planter from Barbados.
Following her baptism, Katherine was increasingly maltreated by Rich and eventually turned out of his house. He forbade her from seeking employment; condemning her to destitution. In 1690 she succeeded in a court petition to be discharged from his enslavement. An official record of this is held in The National Archives.
In 1687, a “Moor” was given the freedom of the city of York. He is listed in the freemen’s rolls as “John Moore – blackie”.
Around the 1750s, London became the home of many Africans, with The Gentleman’s Magazine reporting in 1764 that there was “supposed to be near 20,000 Negroe servants.” The numbers of Black residents in London are also evidenced through registered burials.
In the 1780s, with the end of the American Revolutionary War and the collapse of the British campaigns, several thousand Black troops (some with their families) fled to British-held territories. Over one thousand made their way to Dublin, Liverpool and London. Many became poverty-stricken and were reduced to begging.
In London Blacks lived among the white population in Mile End, Stepney, Paddington, Isleworth and St Giles. The majority of these were not slaves but domestic servants to wealthy whites.
Many were labelled as the “Black Poor” defined as former low-wage soldiers, seafarers and former plantation workers. During the late 18th century there were many publications and memoirs written about the “Black Poor”. One example is the writings of Olaudah Equiano, who became an unofficial spokesman for Britain’s Black community.
John Ystumllyn (c.1738-1786) was the first well-recorded Black person of North Wales. He may have been a victim of the Atlantic slave trade, and was from either West Africa or the West Indies. He was taken by the Wynn family to their Ystumllyn estate in Criccieth, and christened with the Welsh name John Ystumllyn. He married local woman Margaret Gruffydd in 1768.
According to English Heritage, in October 1796, ships from the Caribbean carrying over 2,000 Black and mixed-race prisoners of war docked at Portsmouth Harbour.
By Shirin Aguiar
Comments Form
5 Comments
African-heritage people have been in England since the Tudors.
Indeed, African people arrived in England, with the Romans, and indeed, recent report claim ancient, and stone aged Britons, looked more like African-heritage people; as they had dark skin, rather than Western Caucasian people of England, and Europe.
Nevertheless, England. and Western Caucasian Europe, are the natural home of homogeneous Western Caucasian men, and women of Catholic, and Protestant heritage.
England, and Western Europe, are not the native, and historical home for African-heritage men, and women: despite our huge military, and economic contribution to the wealth of England, and Western Europe.
It’s quite obvious that Africans have been in the UK prior to the Tudor period. Even before looking at records, one can infer that during the Atlantic Slave Trade, thousands of Africans were brought to the UK to work in the arts and craft sector and menial odds and ends jobs. This shouldn’t shock anyone, given the geographical contiguity of Africa to Europe.
I have been reading a flurry of comments on social media concerning the case of the black girl in Ireland who was snubbed during the gymnastics medal ceremony and it caused me to reflect deeply on the period in which i lived and worked in Ireland. I worked as a nurse and on one occasion when i, a black man, and a white Irish nurse, were going to tend to a white Irish patient, the patient told me that he didn’t want a ‘monkey’ to touch him because he had ‘negative experiences with monkeys’ like me when he worked in London. I will never forget the horror on the face of the Irish nurse as she looked to the floor. At the same hospital, i shared a changing room with all male Irish nurses and on one occasion when i went to change into my unform to go on shift, i found it on the floor. Apparently someone had thrown it on the floor and all the nurses who entered that room, saw it on the floor and left it right there.
Then there was another issue for my children who were very young, they experienced quotidian racial bullying. I will never forget my son telling me that his friends told him that i was a ‘drug dealer’ His classmates, like him, were 10 year-old-children. They didn’t know me. Where did they get that from? Adults in their home i suppose.
Many blacks in the UK are very naive about the Irish with whom they come into contact on a daily basis at work, schools, colleges, universities and in the streets of the UK. I lived with them and their approach to living in a multicultural society is to adopt the group evolutionary strategy of survival. Ireland is still an infrastructurally poor country and many young Irish nationals are still emigrating to the USA, Australia and Canada in large numbers. Some Blacks used to say this to to me: “Oh no, the Irish are not racist because they too were treated badly by British” I always posed this question: How well do you know the Irish? The Irish are largely most deeply uncomfortable in multinational, multicultural and multi-ethnic settings, but they know how to manage and subdue racist and racial instincts better than other groups when they have no alternative but to be in such settings to earn a living. At a superficial level, they appear to work well with other racial groups in London, and this is so because it’s a bread and butter issue, but when they return to Dublin, Belfast and Cork, it’s a different matter all together.
Thank you! This is a very interesting and useful article and thank you for the links to pursue on particular areas
Blacks have been in England since time immemorial, just as whites have been in the Congo since time immemorial.
This article, to me, is working towards making what has been made invisible, over time, visible. We are all (no matter who we are racially) that there is a whole picture to be seen not the one that is narrowed to a narrative that protects the status quo that ‘being white’ is superior and in control. That said, by knowing more of the truth of our past we enable everyone to learn to notice how it colors are present and possibily our future. As a person of color, I will not blame people who live now for what happened to the past in the enslavement and later socio-political enslavement that people of color have to endure because of the color of the skin. What I do hold everyone accountable for in this day and age is how we continue to allow the socio-political agendas of the past continue to disinfranchise people because of race, religion or sexual orientation. We cry out that it is wrong but continue to go behind closed doors and assume it doesn’t affect us. This article helps us learn and begin to see what we allow to happen today. This angers me more than the past which we can not change. Thank you for this article.