Georgian Black Population

georgianIt is sometimes assumed that the migration to the UK of significant numbers of people of African origin started with the Windrush after World War 2. In fact, black soldiers served in the roman army of occupation, Catherine of Aragon came to England accompanied by black servants and musicians. Small numbers of black musicians and entertainers were present in the Tudor court. Britain gained control of the West Indies and planted sugar cane as a commercial crop in the 1600s and by 1680 was importing slaves from Africa to the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations as part of the enormously profitable triangle trade. In 1713 the treaty of Utrecht deprived Spain of its grip on slavery and handed this trophy to Britain. Until abolition in 1807 Britain had bought and sold more than 2.5 million men and women in 11,000 ships. The profits were enormous. The British paid for slaves with products often collected locally and of low value such as cowrie shells. Numerous new products were introduced to Britain, agriculture was transformed in the 18th century and the accumulation of capital from the slave trade was used in early industrial ventures in Britain. The Bristol based Goldney family sponsored Abraham Darby who in 1709 perfected the method of smelting steel. Member of Parliament Anthony Bacon used his £67,000 earned in the slave trade by 1765 to buy 400 acres around Merthyr Tydfil and start mining for iron and coal.

During the 18th century several thousand black Africans were living and working in London but unlike other migrants who were often escaping great hardship and persecution and came of their own volition, the African population had come as slaves and servants as the newly wealthy plantation owners and investors returned to Britain. Estimates of the numbers of black people in Georgian London can vary enormously from 4,500 to 50,000 depending on your sources. The lower estimate is from a crime statistic from Norma Myers. Between 1785-1789 0.55% of recorded crimes were committed by blacks, the population of the city of London was 780000 and by assuming that crimes are committed equally by both white and black people she reaches a figure of 4,290 Africans. The gentleman’s magazine (1764) talks of 20,000 negroe servants, the Morning Gazette (1765) 30,000 Gilbert Franklin (1788)40,000 and Scobie (Black Britannia 1972) 50,000. The first three estimates the authors are using alarmist guesses swollen by a desire to have black Africans deported and Scobie is probably amplifying the numbers to emphasise the barbarity of the crime. Modern historians who have combed parish lists, marriage and baptismal registers, criminal records, property tallies and sales contracts have extrapolated a figure of 10,000 black Africans living in London. This population almost completely disappeared.

The Africans who came to Britain with their masters as house slaves had an uncertain status in Britain. In theory no Christian could be a slave and Africans who were baptised were arguably free men. In 1706 Lord Chief Justice Holt declared that ‘ No man can have property in another…. there is no such thing as a slave by the laws of England’ These judgements were largely ignored, adverts for the return of runaway slaves feature in the press and on locally distributed handbills and some tried to overturn the judgement. Thomas Papillon describes his black servant to be in the ‘nature and quality of my goods and chattels’ and many argued that since slaves were the property of other men they could not be people and should be treated as commodities. Even if black people tried to live as freemen it did them little good as they remained barred from paid employment. In 1731 the lord Mayor of London ruled that ‘no Negroes shall be bound apprentices to any tradesman or artificer in this city’. So inevitably they ended up in service, initially in the most fashionable homes. Aristocratic women were accompanied by their lavishly dressed young black pages. They were given heroic names such as Pompey, Caesar, and Socrates and may have lived comfortable lives but occupied a position similar to pets. In Maria Edgworth’s novel Belinda (1802) the black servant and the family dog are both called Juba.

Even so these forced involuntary immigrants were often resented. It was often assumed that Africans had been plucked from savagery and premature death and should be grateful for being rescued and introduced to Christianity and civilisation by their European masters. Lack of gratitude by Africans began to anger the public, a headline in the Daily Journal (April 5th1723) claimed ‘A great number of Blacks come daily into this city, so that tis thought in a short time that if they be not suppress’d the city will swarm with them’

In the second half of the 18th century the abolition movements began as well as philosophical ideas on the rights of man and notions of equality. The society for the abolition of slavery was formed in 1787 but prior to this many prominent Methodists and Quakers had been calling for abolition. Ironically 84 Quakers were amongst the early investors in the slave trade, one of the ships had been called ‘The Willing Quaker’ Thomas Clarke, James Ramsay and particularly Granville Sharp were all active campaigners against slavery before William Wilberforce. Granville Sharpe had represented James Somerset, a slave, before Judge Mansfield in London. Mansfield ruled that Somerset’s master could not force him to board a ship bound for the West Indies .The abolition of slavery became fashionable in liberal circles. Ladies organised boycotts of sugar and rum, Josiah Wedgewood produced a range of anti slavery china, heroic black characters were sentimentally depicted in novels. In 1792 parliament received 500 petitions against slavery. By 1807 British ships were banned from carrying slaves and by 1834 slavery had been replaced by apprenticeship in the British colonies.

Africans in London were not all passive recipients of injustice. A parallel organisation called the ‘Sons of Africa’ also campaigned for abolition. Similarly some remarkable Africans made their mark in Georgian society when given access to education by their more enlightened employers. Ben Solomon worked as a translator of Arabic at the British museum. Francis Barber was Dr Johnson’s servant. Francis Williams, a protégé of the Duke of Montagu, first went to grammar school and then studied mathematics at Cambridge. Phyllis Wheatley wrote poetry, George Bridgetower was a child prodigy who became first violin in the Prince of Wales orchestra and was admired by Beethoven. Some former slaves wrote books and had anthologies of letters published. Ignatius Sancho was born on a slave ship in 1729 and was given to three sisters who lived in Greenwich after he was orphaned. He was taken into the Duke of Montagu’s household, educated became a valet and after receiving a private pension from the Montagus became a fashionable grocer. He wrote letters to Lawrence Sterne and other 18th century luminaries. His letters were published as an anthology in 1782 and ran to nine editions. He was able to vote in elections in 1774 and 1780.Ottabah Cuguano was much more radical but published in 1787 ‘Thoughts and Sentiments on the evil and wicked traffic of the slavery and commerce of the human species’ His language was biblical and he held everyman in Britain responsible for slavery to some degree. The loudest and most eloquent memoir was published by Olaudah Equiano using the name Gustavo Vassa, the African. He was born in 1745 in what is now Nigeria and enslaved as an 11 year old boy. He was initially sent to Barbados and then Virginia. He converted to Christianity, read widely and bought his freedom in Mont serrat in 1763. He came to Britain, was baptised at St Margaret’s Westminster. In 1772 he joined the crew of the ship ‘Race Horse’ serving with a fifteen year old Horatio Nelson and attempted to sail to the North Pole. On another voyage in 1776 the captain attempted to enslave him again, he was lashed to the mast but freed by a crewman and set free in a canoe. He worked as a servant, tried to become an Anglican priest and married an English woman, Susannah Cullen in 1792. His memoir and descriptions of the true horrors of life as a slave moved and shocked people and swelled the ranks of the abolitionists.

However, most black Londoners lived a precarious existence amongst the urban poor. They did not meet parish residential requirements and did not meet the criteria for pauper relief. With most trades closed to them many blacks became beggars, musicians, prize fighters and other casual labour ring jobs along the docklands. Some black men became seamen occasionally serving as crew on slave ships. They lived in slums and rookeries with the white urban poor. Some historians claim that amongst the poorest levels of Georgian society race relations were relatively good with both blacks and whites eking out a precarious existence in the slums. Some black beggars became successful and well known and some white beggars would black up in the hope of higher donations from the public. Amongst the saddest groups of African migrants to London were soldiers who had fought for the British in the American war of Independence (1776-83) After the Somerset case many American slaves joined the British army hoping it would lead to freedom. After the war many loyalists were betrayed. They were dumped in Nova Scotia, Jamaica and a large number returned to Britain as veterans. They were unwelcome and in the bitter winter of 1783 many died begging on the streets. A plan was made to return them to Sierra Leone and 700 men signed up for the repatriation agreement. In the end 400 turned up and were pressed onto two ships in the Thames estuary along with 59 white wives (in reality drunken prostitutes carried on board by a press gang) Eighty people died before reaching Sierra Leone. On arrival, in the rainy season, no provision had been made for them. After four years only sixty people were still alive.

Despite their poverty and poor treatment London’s black population did form a community. In 1773 when two blacks were sent to Bridewell for begging they were visited by 300 fellow Africans who held an impromptu whip round to raise funds on their behalf. The London Chronicle (16-18 February 1764 describes a black only musical evening in a Fleet Street pub that did not finish until 4:00am.

My assumption when I started this research was that this community had quietly been absorbed into the host white community by marriage and that we are all products of the genetic melting pot. However, recent population genetics show that the British population remains largely Anglo-Saxon in the south east and Celtic in Wales and Scotland. In America the commonest Afro American genotype is 75% sub Saharan African, 23% white and Native American 2%. The African population in Georgian London was 80% male and although there are recordings of mixed race marriages these were insufficient in number to leave a mark on the population. Most of the community passed away uncelebrated and unremembered.

Dilys Cowan

Bibliography

Books

  • Bloody Foreigners the story of immigration to Britain by Robert Winder
  • Black London : Life before Emancipation by Gerzina Gretchen
  • The Slave Trade by James Walvin ( history files series}

Websites

Films

Dido

Leghorn / Livorno

leghornLivorno Jews have played a prominent part in the emancipation of the Jewish religious and civil community living in London. David Nieto was born in January 1654 in Venice, but spent his early professional life in Livorno. In 1701 he was called to London as haham (chief rabbinical authority) of the Spanish and Portuguese Jewish congregation which that year had moved to the newly built Bevis Marks Synagogue at no. 4 Heneage Lane.

An intellectual with a keen interest in astronomy and the scientific thinking of Newton, he spent most of his energy on helping crypto-Jews who, newly arrived from the Iberian Peninsula, were returning to open Judaism. One of his successors was Raphael Meldola who was actually born in Livorno in 1754.  His son David served as Chief Rabbi for over twenty-five years until his death. He was a co-founder of the London Jewish Chronicle.

The word milliner, meaning a maker of hats, was first recorded in reference to the products for which Milan and the northern Italian regions were well known (i.e. ribbons, gloves and straws). The haberdashers who imported these popular products were called ‘Millaners’. Another staple import from Italy was the straw bonnet, associated with the name of Leghorn (Livorno), which became popular in England owing to the patronage of the stunningly beautiful Irish-born sisters Maria and Elizabeth Gunning. Leghorn bonnets, made from straw turned into a sparkling bleached white, became the height of fashion. They played a notable part in England’s fashion history of the age.

During the eighteenth century Italian immigrants dominated the London hat trade, both as sellers and makers. A strong impulse had been given to Anglo-Italian trade through the establishment, in 1740, of a branch of the great Venetian and Levantine banking house of Treves in London, and consequently Italians, chiefly Jews, were flocking into the country throughout the 1740s. Moses Vita (Haim) Montefiore was a Sephardic Jew who had emigrated from Livorno to London in the 1740s, but retained close contact with the town. He was involved in the bonnet trade and laid the foundation for the wealth of this notable Italian family in London.

Benjamin Disraeli, grandfather of the politician, author and Conservative Prime Minister, was born in Cento, near Ferrara, in September 1730. He moved to London in 1748 where he was employed in the counting-house of Joseph and Pellegrin Treves in Fenchurch Street. Soon after, he established himself as a merchant. He had brought with him a sound knowledge of the traditional Italian straw bonnet trade and he specialised in the import of Leghorn hats, Carrara marbles, alum, currants, and other merchandise.

For a decade he devoted himself to his import business, which he carried on at no. 5 Great St Helens. In 1769 the business had become one of the leading London coral merchants (a trade dominated by Jews). He also acted as an unlicensed broker at the Stock Market. In 1779 he invited two partners and together they founded the firm of Disraeli, Stoke & Parkins which became successful dealers. When, in 1801, plans were laid out to build new premises at Capel Court for the Stock Exchange, Disraeli was appointed as a member of the Committee for General Purposes entrusted with the plan of conversion.

Michael (Meyer) Solomon was a Bishopsgate manufacturer, and one of the first Jews to be admitted to the freedom of the City of London. Solomon’s family had arrived in England from Europe, possibly Holland or Germany, sometime at the end of the eighteenth century. Aaron Solomon had started a hat business in London in 1779. Michael and his family lived among a well-established Jewish community at no. 3 Sandys Street, Bishopsgate, and his considerable wealth allowed him to be accepted by London society. His main business concern was as a manufacturer of Leghorn hats.

Three of his children, Abraham, Rebecca and Simeon, were notable painters. Simeon was identified with the Pre-Raphaelites through his friendship with D. G. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

He was one of several notable artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle commissioned by the brothers George and Edward Dalziel who ran a highly productive firm of engravers to produce drawings for their projected illustrated Bible. The project was never completed, although the illustrations appeared in Dalziel’s Bible Gallery (1880) with narrative captions. His life ended in tragedy. In 1873, Simeon was arrested in a public lavatory and charged with committing buggery. Although the incident was not reported in the newspapers his public career was effectively at an end. Most of his former friends disowned him and he began a precarious existence which led him to the workhouse and dependence upon institutional and family charity. In May 1905 he collapsed on the pavement in High Holborn and died shortly after.

Evidently, not all of the Livornesi were hat makers. Domenico Angelo Tremamondo was an immigrant from Livorno who, after arriving in London, established a School of Arms in Carlyle Street, Soho. He also ran a riding school in the rear garden of the house (where Johann Christian Bach was a tenant). As an instructor of swordsmanship to royals and aristocrats he turned fencing from an act of war into an elegant sport.

In 1763, he published the popular and often reprinted folio École des armes with forty-seven splendid plates after draughtsman John Gwynn, a founding member of the Royal Academy. Around 1785, his Eton-educated son Henry Angelo took over the running of the fencing academy (Sheridan, Fox and Lord Byron were among his many pupils). He moved the academy from his fathers’ residence in Carlisle House, first to the Royal Opera House in Haymarket and then, after a fire in 1789, to Bond Street, where he shared premises with the former champion boxer John ‘Gentleman’ Jackson (to whom boxing-mad Lord Byron referred to as his ‘corporeal pastor and master’). In 1828, looking back at his life, he wrote a series of entertaining Reminiscences that give a unique insight in the urban eccentricities of his time. Henry was a full-blooded Londoner. Social and intellectual integration demands little more than a generation. After all, it took two generations for an immigrant’s descendant to become Prime Minister of the nation.

Source

https://abeautifulbook.wordpress.com/2016/03/20/leghorn-bonnets-and-politics-leghorn-bonnets-and-politics-great-st-helens-bishopsgate/

Muslims in Elizabethan England

Sixteenth-century Elizabethan England has always had a special place in the nation’s understanding of itself. But few realise that it was also the first time that Muslims began openly living, working and practising their faith in England, writes Jerry Brotton.

From as far away as North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, Muslims from various walks of life found themselves in London in the 16th Century working as diplomats, merchants, translators, musicians, servants and even prostitutes.

The reason for the Muslim presence in England stemmed from Queen Elizabeth’s isolation from Catholic Europe. Her official excommunication by Pope Pius V in 1570 allowed her to act outside the papal edicts forbidding Christian trade with Muslims and create commercial and political alliances with various Islamic states, including the Moroccan Sa’adian dynasty, the Ottoman Empire and the Shi’a Persian Empire.

She sent her diplomats and merchants into the Muslim world to exploit this theological loophole, and in return Muslims began arriving in London, variously described as “Moors”, “Indians”, “Negroes” and “Turks”.

Before Elizabeth’s reign, England – like the rest of Christendom – understood a garbled version of Islam mainly through the bloody and polarised experiences of the Crusades.

English view of Islam was viewed through the bloody experiences of the Crusades

No Christian even knew the words “Islam” or “Muslim”, which only entered the English language in the 17th Century. Instead they spoke of “Saracens”, a name considered in medieval times to have been taken from one of Abraham’s illegitimate offspring who was believed to have founded the original twelve Arab tribes.

Christians simply could not accept that Islam was a coherent religious belief. Instead they dismissed it as a pagan polytheism or a heretical deformation of Christianity. Much Muslim theology discouraged travel into Christian lands, or the “House of War”, which was regarded as a perpetual adversary of the “House of Islam”.

But with Elizabeth’s accession this situation began to change. In 1562 Elizabeth’s merchants reached the Persian Shah Tahmasp’s court where they learned about the theological distinctions between Sunni and Shi’a beliefs, and returned to London to present the queen with a young Muslim Tatar slave girl they named Aura Soltana.

She became the queen’s “dear and well beloved” servant who wore dresses made of Granada silk and introduced Elizabeth to the fashion of wearing Spanish leather shoes.

showing the court of Shah Tahmasp receiving the Mughal emperor

Hundreds of others arrived from Islamic lands and although no known memoirs survive, glimpses of their Elizabethan lives can still be gleaned from London’s parish registers. In 1586 Francis Drake returned to England from Colombia with a hundred Turks who had been captured by the Spanish in the Mediterranean and press-ganged into slavery in the Americas.

One of them, known only as Chinano, is the first known Muslim to convert to English Protestantism.

He was baptised at St Katharine’s Church near the Tower of London, where he took the name William Hawkins, and insisted that “if there were not a God in England, there was none nowhere”.

Perhaps he meant it and relished his new Anglican identity, or he knew what to say to his new English masters. Whatever the truth, like many of his fellow Turks he quickly disappeared into London’s bustling life, taking with him his true religious beliefs.

How sincere Chinano’s conversion was may never be known, but he was not alone, and others like him were clearly keen to make a living in diverse urban occupations.

They included weavers, tailors, brewers and metalsmiths. Other registers record Muslim women being baptised like Mary Fillis, a “blackamoor” daughter of a Moroccan basket-maker who after working in London as a seamstress for 13 years and “now taking some hold of faith in Jesus Christ was desirous to become a Christian”.

– busy enough for foreigners to disappear into

She was baptised in Whitechapel in 1597 where she presumably lived out the rest of her life. The faith of others was less certain, like the unnamed Moroccan who was buried the same year “without any company of people and without ceremony”, because church authorities “did not know whether he was a Christian or not”.

Nor were such conversions one-way. Hundreds of Elizabethan men and women travelled into Muslim lands in search of their fortune, and many converted – some forcibly, but others willingly – to Islam. They included the Norfolk merchant Samson Rowlie, who had been captured by Turkish pirates off Algiers in 1577, where he was imprisoned, castrated and converted to Islam.

He took the name Hassan Aga and rose to become Chief Eunuch and Treasurer of Algiers as well as one of the most trusted advisers to its Ottoman governor. He never returned to England or the Christian fold.

Elizabeth’s alliances with the Ottoman, Persian and Moroccan empires also brought more elite Muslims to London. Records show that Turkish diplomats were sent over in the 1580s, though no trace of them survives.

More details remain of Moroccan embassies from later that decade. In 1589 the Moroccan ambassador Ahmed Bilqasim entered London in state, surrounded by Barbary Company merchants, proposing an Anglo-Moroccan military initiative against “the common enemy the King of Spain”.

Although the anti-Spanish proposal came to nothing, the Moroccan ambassador sailed in an English fleet later that year that attacked Lisbon with the support of the Moroccan ruler, Mulay Ahmed al-Mansur.

Just over 10 years later another Moroccan ambassador called Muhammad al-Annuri arrived in London, with a large retinue of merchants, translators, holy men and servants who stayed for six months living in a house on the Strand where Londoners watched them practising their religious faith.

ambassador to England, 1600

One reported that they “killed all their own meat within their house, as sheep, lambs, poultry” and “turned their faces eastward when they kill any thing; they use beads, and pray to Saints”.

Al-Annuri had his portrait painted, met Elizabeth and her advisers twice and even proposed a joint Protestant-Islamic invasion of Spain and naval attack on her American colonies. The plan only seems to have foundered because Elizabeth feared upsetting the Ottomans, who were at the time al-Mansur’s adversaries.

The alliance came to an abrupt end with Elizabeth’s death and her successor James I’s decision to make peace with Catholic Spain, but the presence of Muslims like al-Annuri, Ahmed Bilqasim and more modest individuals like Chinano and Mary Fillis remain a significant but neglected aspect of Elizabethan history.

It shows that Muslims have been a part of Britain and its history much longer than many people have ever imagined.

source

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35843991

Redemption

 

Early history of redemption

A method by which citizenship was acquired was payment or redemption. An adult person, who was not qualified for enfranchisement either by patrimony or apprenticeship, was by City custom regarded as a foreigner. To some extent this class of freemen was recruited from born Londoners, who raised themselves by thrift and industry from the unenfranchised labouring class. But the majority of new citizens by payment were undoubtedly newcomers to the City, attracted there by the opportunities which it afforded. If they were aliens by birth they were described as alien-born (alienigene) or strangers (estraunges), while native Englishmen were “foreigners” (forinseci) or denizens (indigene).

The alien element in London has always been large. At the Conquest there was so considerable a French element, that the French burgesses were mentioned first in the Conqueror’s charter, and in the 12th and 13th centuries several of the leading City families were of Italian, German and Low Country blood. Every century saw large accessions of aliens —financiers, merchants, weavers, beer-brewers, glassworkers, coopers and goldsmiths, until the last great whole sale immigration of the Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In even greater measure the population has been fed from the English country-side, the “uplaund” of the records; in fact, the vast majority of names in the Husting Rolls of Deeds and Wills are place-names. But this is true, not only of London, but to some extent of other medieval towns and villages. Apparently the population, in spite of the restraining influence of land-tenure and the manorial system, was even before the Black Death continuously fluid, with a constant drift towards the towns.

If we are to judge from the terms of City and company ordinances the attitude of the citizens towards the newcomers was almost invariably unfriendly, and the ordinances were such that it would appear impossible for the adult merchant, craftsman or labourer to gain a footing at all. Actually, apart from the natural xenophobia of all communities, there was no consistent feeling or policy towards immigrants. The wealthy foreign merchant was encouraged at one time as importing commodities and ideas, at another suspected of attempting to evade the customs; the skilled craftsman was welcome in one trade and unwelcome in another, or welcome and unwelcome in the same trade at different times, while the labourer’s position fluctuated with supply and demand. Many of the civic ordinances directed against them were either concessions to seasonal complaints or momentary expressions of exasperation, forgotten within a few months or disregarded when a chance of profit was discovered. This was especially the case from the middle of the 15th century onwards, when the enterprising “small master” often developed into a considerable employer of labour, and something like the factory system began to appear. It is true that citizenship was jealously guarded, but it was always purchasable by those who prospered. There is even evidence of a feeling that character and enterprise were qualifications as valuable as money. The “haunse” or fee for the freedom was more than once put on a sliding scale, so proportioned as to admit alike the handicraftsman and the leader of commerce.

for the remainder of the article see British History on Line

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/

 

Time Line

Year Date Event
1016 Cnut the Great of Denmark becomes king of all England.
1043 Edward the Confessor becomes king of all England.
1054 The Great Schism/Split of the Roman Catholic Church
1066 Battle of Fulford: English forces were defeated by Norse invaders in northeastern England.
Battle of Stamford Bridge: The remaining Norse under Harald Hardrada were defeated by the bulk of England’s army under the command of its king.
Battle of Hastings: England’s remaining forces were defeated by invaders from Normandy. This was known as the Norman Conquest, which causedWilliam the Conqueror to be crowned king of England and permanently changed the English language and culture.

 

 

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