Staying Power

The History of Black People in Britain

Peter Fryer

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786803344
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Staying Power is a panoramic history of black Britons. Stretching back to the Roman conquest, encompassing the court of Henry VIII, and following a host of characters from Mary Seacole to the abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, Peter Fryer paints a picture of two thousand years of Black presence in Britain. First published in the '80s, amidst race riots and police brutality, Fryer's history performed a deeply political act; revealing how Africans, Asians and their descendants had long been erased from British history. By rewriting black Britons into the British story, showing where they influenced political traditions, social institutions and cultural life, was - and is - a deeply effective counter to a racist and nationalist agenda. This new edition includes the classic introduction by Paul Gilroy, author of There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, in addition to a brand-new foreword by Guardian journalist Gary Younge, which examines the book's continued significance today as we face Brexit and a revival of right wing nationalism.

1. ‘Those kinde of people’

Africans in Britannia

There were Africans in Britain before the English came here. They were soldiers in the Roman imperial army that occupied the southern part of our island for three and a half centuries. Among the troops defending Hadrian’s wall in the third century AD was a ‘division of Moors’ (numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum) named after Marcus Aurelius or a later emperor known officially by the same name. Originally raised in north Africa, this unit was stationed at Aballava, now Burgh by Sands, near Carlisle. It was listed in the Notitia Dignitatum, an official register of the Roman administrative system,¹ and there is an inscription referring to it on a third-century altar found in 1934 built facing down into a cottage wall at Beaumont, not far from Burgh.²

Though the earliest attested date for this unit’s presence here is 253–8, an African soldier is reputed to have reached Britain by about the year 210. ‘Of great fame among clowns and good for a laugh any time’ (clarae inter scurras famae et celebratorum semper iocorum), this ‘Ethiopian’ has gone down in history as a man daring enough to mock the emperor who, in all probability, had brought him to Britain. It happened near Carlisle. Septimius Severus, the Libyaborn emperor who spent his last three years in what was then a remote province, had been inspecting Hadrian’s wall. He had just defeated the wild Caledonians who lived on the other side and, being very superstitious, was hoping for a good omen. He was far from pleased to encounter a black soldier flourishing a garland of cypress boughs. Sacred to the underworld god Pluto, the cypress could mean only one thing to a Roman: death. Severus was troubled, not only by the ominous nature of the garland, but also by the soldier’s ‘ominous’ colour. ‘Get out of my sight!’ he shouted. The soldier replied sardonically: ‘You have been all things, you have conquered all things, now, O conqueror, be a god!’ Matters were hardly improved when, wishing to make a propitiatory sacrifice, Severus was provided with victims which also happened to be black. Abandoning the sacrifice in disgust at this further bad omen, he found that his attendants had carelessly brought these animals to the very door of the palace.³ It was a black day, as we say, for the emperor – we share some puns with the Romans, and some superstitions – and he died not long afterwards, at York.

Besides African soldiers and slaves, there may well have been officers (praefecti) from the flourishing towns of north Africa serving in Roman Britain in the second and third centuries.⁴ And, though no remains have yet been positively identified, there can be little doubt that Africans were buried here. Among 350 human skeletons found in an excavation at York in 1951–9 – the greatest number yet exhumed in any Romano-British cemetery – were several of men whose limb proportions suggest that they were black Africans.⁵

Africans in Scotland

There are traces of an African presence in the British Isles some 400 or 500 years after the Romans left. An ancient Irish chronicle records that ‘blue men’ (fir gorma) were seized by Vikings in Morocco in the ninth century and carried off to Ireland, where they stayed for a long time.¹ And the remains of a young African girl were recently found in a burial, dated c. 1000, at North Elmham in Norfolk, about 25 miles north-west of Norwich.² Then the records are silent until the early sixteenth century, when a small group of Africans was attached to the court of King James IV of Scotland, experiencing in the royal service what has been called a ‘benevolent form’ of the black slavery that had become common and fashionable in southern Europe during the preceding 200 years.³ These Africans were probably taken from Portuguese slavers by the Barton brothers, Scottish privateers whose father’s ship, loaded with rich merchandise, had been seized by a Portuguese squadron and who had been authorized by James IV to seize Portuguese ships until the equivalent of 12,000 ducats was recovered.⁴

One of the Africans in Edinburgh was a drummer (‘taubronar’) and choreographer. For the Shrove Tuesday festivities in 1505 he devised a dance with 12 performers in chequered black-and-white costumes, specially made at a cost of £13 2s. 10d. The king loved music, himself played both lute and clavichord, and was generous to other musicians; and he seems to have liked the drummer. He bought him a horse costing £4 4s. and took him at least once, with four Italian minstrels and three falconers, on the annual royal pilgrimage to the shrine of St Duthac in Tain.⁵ He bought him clothes (a yellow coat, for instance), spent 28s. on having his drum painted (‘to pay for paynting of his taubron’), paid his doctor’s bills, and gave money to his wife and child – perhaps the same ‘Moris barne’ whom the king asked specially to see, tipping the nurse 28s. for bringing the baby to him.⁶

There were several young women (‘More lasses’) among the Africans in Edinburgh. On 11 December 1504, one of them was baptized – ‘the More las wes cristinit’, says the account.⁷ A few years later one of these women had a poem written about her by the great Scottish poet William Dunbar, according to whom she had recently disembarked (‘landet furth of the last schippis’). Dunbar describes her participation in the tournament of the black knight and the black lady, one of the spectacular shows that James IV loved as much as he loved music. The king himself played the part of the black knight – some sources say ‘wild knight’ – who championed the black lady in the lists, and the event was so successful in 1507 that it was repeated, more elaborately still, in the following year. The poet says the black lady had full lips and a snub nose, and skin that shone like soap; in her rich costume she gleamed as bright as a barrel of tar; when she was born the sun had to tolerate eclipse.⁸ Her tournament gown alone cost £29, a tidy sum in those days. It was made of damask flowered with gold, trimmed with green and yellow taffeta; her gauze-covered sleeves and her gloves were of soft black leather and about her arm she had a gauze kerchief. Her two female attendants wore gowns of green Flemish taffeta trimmed with yellow and her two squires were dressed in white damask. She was carried in a ‘chair triumphale’ covered with white, yellow, purple, green, and grey Flemish taffeta – altogether £88 was spent on this stuff, which in those days was always pure silk.⁹ One of her tasks was to guard the Tree of Esperance, a great artificial tree of chivalry on which the shields of challenge were hung.¹⁰ As black knight the king beat all challengers, whether with spear, sword, or mace¹¹ – which was just as well since, if Dunbar’s ribald poem is to be believed, the winner was rewarded by the black lady’s kiss and close embrace, while losers had to ‘cum behind and kis her hippis’.¹² After the 40-day tournament there were three days of feasting, culminating in a display by a conjuror who caused a cloud to descend from the roof of the Holyroodhouse banqueting hall and, as it seemed, snatch up the black lady so that she was seen no more.¹³

In 1513 there were still at least ‘twa blak ladeis’ at the Scottish court, and the king spent £7 on ten French crowns as a new year gift for them.¹⁴ Clothing and shoes were bought for ‘Elen More’, otherwise referred to as ‘Blak Elene’, and she was given five French crowns in 1512, while a gown for ‘blak Margaret’ in the following year cost 48s.¹⁵ The Scottish queen’s attendants included a ‘blak madin’, who was given four and a quarter ells (just under five yards) of French russet, at a cost of £3 16s. 6 d.¹⁶ In the same period the bishop of Murray too had a black servant (‘the Bischop of Murrais more’), who earned himself a tip of 14s. when he carried a present to the king.¹⁷ In 1527 ‘Helenor, the blak moir’ was paid 40s., ¹⁸ and in 1567 and 1569 ‘Nageir the More’ had clothing bought for him.¹⁹

A generation later there was still at least one African living in Edinburgh. By standing in for a lion as a pageant performer in 1594 he helped celebrate the birth of Henry Frederick, eldest son of James VI of Scotland (soon to be England’s James I). It had been planned to use a lion to pull a chariot, 12 feet long and 7 feet across, bearing a ‘sumpteous couered Table, decked with all sortes of exquisite delicates and dainties, of pattisserie, frutages [i.e. decorative arrangements of fruit], and confections’. But at the last minute it was feared that the lion might frighten the spectators or worse, especially if startled by the torches. So ‘a Black-Moore’, ‘very richly attyred’, pretended to haul on ‘great chaines of pure gold’ attached to a chariot in fact propelled by ‘a secreet convoy’. Grouped around the sumptuously decked table were ‘six Gallant dames’, representing Ceres, goddess of agriculture, Fecundity, Faith, Concord, Liberality, and Perseverance.²⁰ Nothing whatever is known about the black man who ‘pulled’ the chariot, not even his name, but he could well have been a descendant of the group that had arrived in Scotland some 90 years earlier.

Africans in England

Around the same time as that group of Africans reached Edinburgh, a solitary black musician was living in London, employed by Henry VII and his successor, Henry VIII. Whether he came straight from Africa or from Scotland – or, indeed, as is quite possible, from Spain or Portugal – is not recorded. Nor do we know his real name. The accounts of the treasurer of the Chamber, who paid the king’s musicians their wages, refer to him as John Blanke – but this, since it means ‘John White’, was surely an ‘ironic jest’.¹ We know however that he played the trumpet, that Henry VII paid him 8d. a day, and that he had to wait a week for the 20s. due to him for the month of November 1507.² This ‘blacke trumpet’, as the accounts call him, is pretty certainly the man who is twice portrayed in the painted roll of the 1511 Westminster Tournament, held to celebrate the birth of a son to Catherine of Arragon. The most precious treasure of the College of Arms, the roll shows a black trumpeter mounted on a grey horse with black harness; his five white companions are also on horseback. All six wear yellow halved with grey and have blue purses at their waists. The white trumpeters are bare-headed, but the black trumpeter is wearing a brown turban latticed with yellow. The double-curve fanfare trumpets are decorated with the royal quarterings, fringed white and green.³

Forty years later, the first group of black Africans came to England. It was the summer of 1555 – before we had potatoes, or tobacco, or tea, and nine years before Shakespeare was born. Queen Mary was on the throne, had recently married Philip of Spain, and was much occupied with having heretics burnt. Some of her subjects were more interested in getting rich than in arguing about religion, and it was the pursuit of riches that caused them to bring here a group of five Africans. The visitors came from the small town of Shama, which can be found in any large atlas, on the coast of what nowadays we call Ghana. Three of them were known as Binne, Anthonie, and George; the names, real or adopted, of the other two have not come down to us. A contemporary account speaks of ‘taule and stronge men’ who ‘coulde well agree with owr meates and drynkes’ although ‘the coulde and moyst ayer dooth sumwhat offende them’ (tall and strong men [who] could well agree with our kind of food and drink [although] the cold and damp air gives them some trouble).⁴

The same account refers to these five Africans as slaves. Whatever their status, they had been borrowed, not bought. Englishmen were not to start trafficking in slaves for another eight years. For the time being, English merchants were simply after a share in the profits to be gained from African gold, ivory, and pepper. The Portuguese had been hogging this lucrative West African trade for more than 100 years and had long managed to keep their rich pickings secret from their European neighbours. Now the secret was out. Portugal had ardent competitors to face. But the English needed African help if the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Preface
• 1. ‘Those kinde of people’
• 2. ‘Necessary Implements’
• 3. Britain’s slave ports
• 4. The black community takes shape
• 5. Eighteenth-century voices
• 6. Slavery and the law
• 7. The rise of English racism
• 8. Up from slavery
• 9. Challenges to empire
• 10. Under attack
• 11. The settlers
• 12. The new generation
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index