Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Black Tudors: The Untold Story
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.mirandakaufmann.com/
CITY:
STATE:
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NATIONALITY:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2012115457
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2012115457
HEADING: Kaufmann, Miranda, 1982-
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100 1_ |a Kaufmann, Miranda, |d 1982-
670 __ |a Africans in Britain, 2011, i.e. 2012: |b t.p. (Miranda Kaufmann, Christ Church; D.Phil. thesis in history) author’s declaration form (Univ. of Oxford) thesis cat. inf. form (Kaufmann, Miranda Clare, b. Apr. 15, 1982)
PERSONAL
Born April 15, 1982.
EDUCATION:University of Oxford, B.A., M.St., D.Phil, 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, journalist, historian, and educator. Rugby Football Union, researcher, 2010-12; Periscope Post and BBC, intern, 2012; freelance historian and journalist, 2012–; Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, England, senior research fellow, 2015–. Also worked as a freelance journalist and historian for the Sunday Times, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the National Trust, English Heritage, the “Oxford Companion” series, andQuercus publishing. Speaker at conferences, seminars and schools; has appeared on Sky News, the BBC, and Al Jazeera networks.
AVOCATIONS:Travelling, dancing, cinema, theatre, art, and baking white-chocolate-chip chocolate brownies.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the BBC History magazine, the Guardian, the Times, History Today, Periscope Post, and the Times Literary Supplement. Contributor to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
SIDELIGHTS
Miranda Kaufmann is a historian and freelance writer who, while attending Christ Church at Oxford, England, served as college captain of the women’s rugby team. An avid traveler, Kaufmann tended bard in Sydney in Australia during the 2000 Olympics, taught English in Ecuador, and retraced the steps of Sir Francis Drake’s sixteenth-century expedition in Colombia. A contributor to periodicals, Kaufmann is also the author of Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which tells the stories of black Africans who lived free in Tudor and early Stuart England. Addressing many misconceptions concerning life in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, Kaufmann explores how free black people lived, worked, and died, from a court trumpeter and a prostitute to a sailor and an African prince.
In an interview with Medievalists.net website contributor Natalie Anderson, Kaufmann noted that the origins of the book dated back to her last year as an undergraduate when she had to come up with something to study for her doctorate. In one class, she learned that the Tudors, a former royal dynasty in England, began trading in Africa during the mid-sixteenth century, which led her to ponder how the Tudors and the Africans viewed each other. Subsequent research revealed to Kaufmann that Africans actually lived in Tudor England. Kaufmann went on to research parish registries and other sources, leading Kaufmann to write about 10 Africans living in England. Kaufmann includes an historical context to each of the individual stories. “Putting their lives in the context of what was going on in society at that time gives us more of an understanding of just what it meant to be a prostitute or a trumpeter or a sailor–it helps to show us what was going on,” Kaufmann told Medievalists.net contributor Natalie Anderson. In the process of telling the individual stories, Kaufmann shows that the blacks lived much like other Tudors, including earning wages. She also provides insights into how they came to be in England, what they did, and how they were treated.
Kaufmann points out in the book’s introduction that one of the largest misconceptions modern people have of Africans living outside of Africa prior to the mid-seventeenth century is that they were all slaves. She also clarifies the standing of Tudor England in the world at the time, noting that Tudor England existed primarily before England became a world power. At the time, England was a lesser nation on the world stage, which, in terms of exploration and colonialism, was dominated by countries such as Spain and Portugal.
“Understanding the world of Black Tudors means becoming familiar with the sixteenth-century mind-set and its ideas about religion, politics, life and death, so very different from our own,” writes Kaufmann in the introduction to Black Tudors. Kaufmann’s profiles reveal that blacks living at the time in England worked at various levels of society. In her interview with Medievalists.net contributor Anderson, Kaufmann commented on the who she would have liked most to meet of the people she profiled, noting: “I think either Diego [a mariner] or Dederi Jaquoah [a prince]. Let’s go for Diego, because he’d have so many good stories; like there’s the amazing story of him travelling around the world with … Drake.” Jaquoah lived with an English merchant for two years after arriving in England in 1610. Baptized in London, Jaquoah was the son of a ruler of a kingdom in what became modern Liberia. Diego ended up circumnavigating half of the world with Sir Francis Drake but was also enslaed by the Spanish in Panama and spent some time in Plymouth, England before dying in Moluccas, which became the Indonesian Maluku, also known as the Spice Islands.
“The narrative is engaging, and the author’s argument about how Africans were generally accepted in Tudor England is persuasive,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews Online contributor. Nathen Amin, writing for the Henry Tudor Society website, remarked: Black Tudor “is an ambitious book loaded with little-known Tudor trivia that has long been overdue in the study of 16th century England, and fortunately for the future of this little-explored topic, the result is a fascinating production of the utmost quality that takes a close look at ten individuals who could, quite accurately, be considered Black Tudors.”
BIOCRIT
BOOKS
Kaufmann, Miranda, Black Tudors: The Untold Story, Oneworld Publications (London, England), 2017.
PERIODICALS
Booklist, November 15, 2017, Margaret Flanagan, review of Black Tudors, p. 15.
New Yorker, February 5, 2018, Jocelyn Hannah, “Briefly Noted,” includes review of Black Tudors, p. 67.
ONLINE
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (October 29, 2017), Bidisha, “Tudor, English and Black–and Not a Slave in Sight,” review of Black Tudors.
Henry Tudor Society Website, https://henrytudorsociety.com/ (September 24, 2017), Nathen Amin, review of Black Tudors.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (November 14, 2017), review of Black Tudors.
Medievalists.net, http://www.medievalists.net/ (November 22, 2017), Natalie Anderson, “The Lives of Black Tudors: An Interview with Miranda Kaufmann.”
Miranda Kaufmann Website, http://www.mirandakaufmann.com (March 18, 2018).
San Francisco Review of Books, http://www.sanfranciscoreviewofbooks.com (August 16, 2017), David Wineberg, review of Black Tudors.
Miranda Kaufmann
Picture
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She read History at Christ Church, Oxford, where she completed her doctoral thesis on 'Africans in Britain, 1500-1640' in 2011. As a freelance historian and journalist, she has worked for The Sunday Times, the BBC, the National Trust, English Heritage, the Oxford Companion series, Quercus publishing and the Rugby Football Foundation. She is a popular speaker at conferences, seminars and schools from Hull to Jamaica and has published articles in academic journals and elsewhere (including the Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Guardian, History Today, BBC History Magazine and Periscope Post). She enjoys engaging in debate at the intersection of past and present and has been interviewed by Sky News and the Observer.
Recent projects include establishing the "What's Happening in Black British History?" series of workshops at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies with Michael Ohajuru, the Influential Black Londoners exhibition at the National Trust's Sutton House in Hackney, and an entry for John Blanke (fl.1507-1512) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Her first book, Black Tudors, will be published by Oneworld in 2017.
Miranda discovered rugby at Oxford, where she became college captain at Christ Church and eventually got two winning Blues, beating Cambridge 20-0 and 35-7 in 2005 and 2006. She enjoys travelling (highlights include bar-tending in Sydney during the 2000 Olympics, teaching English in Ecuador, and retracing Francis Drake’s steps in Colombia), dancing, cinema, theatre, art, and baking white-chocolate-chip chocolate Brownies.
About the Author
Miranda Kaufmann is a senior research fellow at the University of London’s Institute of Commonwealth Studies. She has appeared on Sky News, the BBC and Al Jazeera, and she’s written for The Times, Guardian and BBC History Magazine. She lives in London.
The Lives of Black Tudors: An Interview with Miranda Kaufmann
NOVEMBER 22, 2017 BY NATALIE ANDERSON
The Lives of Black Tudors: An Interview with Miranda Kaufmann
By Natalie Anderson
Miranda Kaufmann’s new book, Black Tudors, explores the lives of Africans in the world of Tudor and Stuart England. In it, she traces the paths of ten individuals whose places in society ranged from court trumpeter to household porter; sailor to silk weaver; African prince to prostitute. The book challenges long-standing conceptions of what life in sixteenth and early seventeenth century England looked like and examines how these individuals – and many others like them – lived, worked, were married, and were buried alongside other Tudors. I recently had the opportunity to talk with Dr Kaufmann about her research.
Miranda Kaufmann
Natalie Anderson: Let’s start at the very beginning. What was the genesis of this research?
Miranda Kaufmann: I was in my last year [as an undergraduate] at Oxford, and I had to think of what to do for my Masters and my Doctorate. I was in a lecture and they mentioned that the Tudors had started trading in Africa in the middle of the sixteenth century, which was new to me. I started wondering what Tudor sailors made of the Africans they encountered and vice versa. Then, when I started reading around, I found references to there actually being Africans in Tudor England, which I’d had no idea about. So, I just wanted to find out more and started searching for them, because there didn’t seem to be much written about it.
NA: So there was a gap in the research. Was that what got you initially interested in this time period and subject area, or was it something you had a prior interest in?
MK: Well, I think I’d loved the Tudors from primary school onwards, really. I think, probably like most people, it was the drama of the royal family and what they were up to, but then I became interested in the wider society.
NA: And the book does tip over into Stuart times a bit, but maybe the name ‘Tudors’ is more marketable, or more instantly familiar to people, and conjures up certain images?
MK: Yeah, I did raise this with my editor – does it matter that some of them are a bit Stuart? They technically might have been born in the Tudor period. And my editor was very keen on the title Black Tudors.
NA: Once you got started on this project, where did you begin your research?
MK: I got in touch with this organisation called the Black and Asian Studies Association, because one of their members had written an article for History Today briefly talking about black people in Tudor England, but it didn’t have any footnotes. So I was like, ‘Can I have your footnotes please? Where did you get this all from?’. And [the author] was really helpful and sent me in the right direction, because they had been gathering information about [the subject]. So that was my starting point. One of the big sources is parish registers, and they had begun informally collecting some parish registers, so I had those as a kind of list, and I went back to the parishes and found more there, and I also started looking in southern ports – places where they might have turned up. And once people got to know what I was looking for, other historians sent me things sometimes. And I went to the National Archives and started searching in their database.
NA: And you did end up with such a fascinating range of people. How did you choose the ten people who wound up featured in the book?
MK: Those were the ones that I was able to find out the most about. Because sometimes, in a parish register for example, it only says something like, ‘John, a blackamoor, was buried’, and then you can’t find out anything more about them. So the ones in the book we know more about. John Blanke [a trumpeter in the court of Henry VIII] appears in the royal household accounts and records, so we find out more about him there. For Mary Fillis [a Moroccan convert] there’s this long baptism record, which goes into great detail in the parish clerk’s memorandum books; [there is] a long account of her baptism with a lot more detail about her life. Also, quite a few of them appear in court cases as witnesses, so with those you can get a bit more of a story as well.
NA: If you could choose, which of the ten individuals would you most like to meet?
MK: Oh, hm, I think either Diego [a mariner] or Dederi Jaquoah [a prince]. Let’s go for Diego, because he’d have so many good stories; like there’s the amazing story of him travelling around the world with [Sir Francis] Drake.
NA: With all the different professions featured – you’ve got trumpeter, in John Blanke’s case, or diver, or silk weaver, or prostitute, or mariner – where do you go to find the different records for each of those people?
MK: Well, John Blanke appears in the exchequer papers, [which include] the records of him being paid and his different petitions. That’s all in the National Archives in Kew. Jacques Francis [a salvage diver] appears in the high court admiralty records. Diego appears in voyage accounts of the period, and also some of the Spanish records where Spanish officials are reporting back about what Drake’s been up to on the coast of South America. Edward Swarthye [a porter] appears in a Star Chamber court record. Reasonable Blackman [a silk weaver] is in a parish register in Southwark. Mary Fillis, like I said, is in a parish memorandum book. Dederi Jacquoah again has a detailed baptism record, and I also found him in a later East India Company letter. Who else have we got? John Anthony [a mariner] writes two petitions to the privy council, so he’s in the State Papers. Anne Cobbie [a prostitute] is in the Westminster sessions. And for Cattelena [an independent singlewoman] we have an inventory of her goods.
NA: Was it then a challenge to construct an entire book around these relatively fragmentary records? You do supplement each chapter with wider historical context and information, which helps to pad things out when you don’t have a lot of detail about one individual.
MK: Yes! Putting their lives in the context of what was going on in society at that time gives us more of an understanding of just what it meant to be a prostitute or a trumpeter or a sailor – it helps to show us what was going on.
NA: I was also really interested in what inspired your device of opening each chapter with a small fictional vignette about each ‘character’. How did you come up with that idea?
MK: I don’t really know now. It was such a long time that the whole thing was in genesis. I think it’s another function of us not knowing as much as we would like about them, so I thought it was a different way to explore what their lives were like, and just to draw in the reader into the chapter and to get the reader going – get them asking questions and trying to imagine what their lives were like.
NA: Did you find it easy or fun to access their voices and to imagine what they might have really thought about or sounded like, rather than just reading a clinical historical record – to try to get into their heads a little bit?
MK: Yeah, it was an interesting exercise. It was about trying to think of a moment in their lives which was maybe the most exciting moment, or the most dramatic moment. To try and draw the reader in. I did quite enjoy that exercise.
NA: I liked it, too, as a way of drawing you into a chapter.
MK: Oh, some people don’t like it. A couple of reviewers have said they didn’t like it at all.
NA: It just made me think, ‘I wish someone would write some historical fiction to go along with this book’.
MK: It would be great if it inspired some historical fiction!
NA: You highlight several times how it’s more someone’s religion than their skin colour which affects how much they’re accepted or integrated into English Tudor society.
MK: I think that has to do with [the fact that] it was just such a highly religious society. They’d just gone through the Reformation, and religion was so important to people. If you look at the way they talk about Catholics, and the fact that Catholics were penalised under the law at the time. I think that [religion] was just a more important differentiator.
NA: Could that also be partly because, as you’ve mentioned, parish registers are one of the better preserved and more plentiful sources, so you’re more likely to find a record having to do with religion relating to black Tudors?
MK: I suppose. I mean, parish registers were a really good way of demonstrating the numbers of Africans who were here. In terms of the numbers, that’s where a lot of [the evidence] comes from and how we know for certain these individuals were here. But I suppose that does mean you’re thinking about them more often in terms of whether they were Christian or not. But then equally I think when they’re appearing in a court of law, they have to be Christian to give evidence.
NA: What sort of audience were you trying to reach with this book?
MK: As wide a one as possible. Definitely beyond the academic audience. I wanted to make it accessible to the generally educated reader. Anyone! Because I think it’s important to get a wide range of people to read it and to get beyond academics.
NA: Do you think there’s a benefit or value to bridging that gap between ‘popular history’ and ‘academic history’? Because this falls nicely in between.
MK: Yes. The research and the source material was the result of my academic PhD, but I wanted to translate it into a more accessible and engaging story that would reach more people. But I think it’s important, even if you’re writing a popular book, to make sure that the research behind it is academic.
NA: How are you hoping it might be used in the future?
MK: Well, like I said, I think it would be great if it inspired some historical novels. But it would also be great if historians took it up, maybe disagreed with some of it, or did some more investigation. I think, as the source material for the early modern period becomes more accessible, if more and more things are transcribed or digitised, then it would be possible to find even more information about black Tudors using word searches and such, which you can’t do at the moment. A lot of the time, if you find someone in a court record or something, it’s good luck that you found that particular case, because there’s no way that you would be able to find it [deliberately]. The court records are usually catalogued by the names of the prosecutor and the defendant, so unless one of those was African, you wouldn’t know that there was an African witness in the case. With Edward Swarthye, for example, it was just lucky that his deposition was filed separately and got separated from the rest of the records of the case, and so when I searched for ‘negro’ in the search engine at the National Archives it came up, because that was his alias. But that was just dumb luck, really. Whereas if everything was digitised, then you could just search for ‘blackamoor’, or whatever, and it would come up, so you’d be able to find even more.
One other thing I’d love to see done with it is I’d love for it to be read by literary historians – people studying the literature of the time – because I think quite a lot has been written about race in the early modern period without any reference to the actual Africans who were living in England. You know, they write based on the literature of the time but without much reference to the history. So it would be good if they took what I found on board next time they analyse Othello.
NA: What have you made of the reaction to the book and its popularity, because it’s done really well. Were you expecting it to take off the way it has?
MK: No – I mean, it’s been reviewed in all the main papers and reviewed really positively. And I wasn’t sure it was going to get reviewed anywhere at all, so I think the publicity department of [publisher] OneWorld have done really well. But obviously it’s intrigued people, because it’s something a bit new about the period. There’s loads of people who love the Tudor period, so I hope that I’ve hooked some of them into thinking about something different about the period.
NA: Do you think the book has come also at quite a prescient time – not just to do with wider debates which are happening now about immigration, but even debates within the world of medieval studies itself? This keys in quite well to a lot of current discussion about conception of the medieval and early modern world as being isolated, and this is a good study in showing it as quite global, actually.
MK: I’ve tried to contribute to the immigration debate in a way. I think a lot of people assume that immigration is a modern phenomenon, and I want to show that we’ve had diverse immigrants for centuries. A lot of stuff written about the Tudor period gets quite insular. A lot of it’s based around the royal court and the religious struggles, which possibly brings you onto the Continent, but if it’s not just England then it’s just England and Europe without going beyond. And, in fact, global issues were already [present]. You read about the [Spanish] armada, and you know about Drake’s circumnavigation [of the globe], but you don’t read about all the other raids he made on the Caribbean and the wider impact of that.
NA: Do you have any plans to develop the research further in any way?
MK: I think I’ve said everything I need to say about the black Tudors now. I’ve been living with it for a long time.
NA: Well, it’s inspired some really great spin offs already, it seems. Like the John Blanke Project.
MK: Oh, that’s a great project. Michael [Ohajuru] has become really inspired by John Blanke – almost obsessed – and he’s commissioned all these artists to draw portraits of him, and poets have written poetry inspired by him, and musicians have written music. It’s really great. We had an evening at the British Library where all those people performed or talked about their art. There’s another one happening at the College of Arms on the first of December. It was a really inspiring evening and it was really great to see where it’s all gone.
NA: Did you have a favourite research moment – one of those moments of connection or breakthrough in a library or archive?
MK: Perhaps one of the most dramatic experiences for me was early on in my research, when I went to the National Archives, and I spoke to the archivist and said, ‘This is what I’m looking for’, and they said, ‘Oh, you won’t find anything about that here’. So, I went to the search engine and started typing in various search terms for the Tudor period, and one of the results was this ‘Edward Swarthye alias negro”s deposition in this court case. When I pulled it up I couldn’t read it very well, but the one word that jumped out at me was ‘whipped’. And I assumed that he was the one being whipped rather than doing the whipping, and so it was quite a moment when I managed to read the document and realised that Edward Swarthye was the one holding the cudgel rather than being whipped. That sort of turns it upside down – all the assumptions you make about what was going on. That was perhaps my first inkling that the story was going to be different to what one might have thought.
NA: My final question is if you have any recommended reading for people who’d like to go from here and learn a bit more about this topic.
MK: There have been a couple other books written on the subject, mostly academic. There’s a book based on a conference, Black Africans in Renaissance Europe – I don’t agree with everything they say, but that’s alright. If they want to follow the history of Africans in England through to the modern period, there’s a book called Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain by Peter Fryer, which was written 30 years ago now, but it’s still great. Or there’s also David Olusoga’s Black and British.
Dr Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Her book, Black Tudors, is available now, and her upcoming talks may be found on her website.
Click here for more from Natalie
Follow Natalie on Twitter: @DrMcAnderson
quote from "Introduction"
Book Author
Black Tudors: The Untold Story
2017 – Present (1 year)
A black porter whips a white Englishman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A Moroccan woman is baptised in a London church. A Mauritanian diver is dispatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose. From long-forgotten records emerge the remarkable stories of Africans who lived free in Tudor England…
They were present at some of the most defining moments of the age. They were christened, married and buried by the Church. They were paid wages like any other Tudors. The untold stories of the Black Tudors, dazzlingly brought to life by Kaufmann, will transform how we see this most intriguing period of history.
Senior Research Fellow
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London
October 2015 – Present (2 years 6 months)
I co-organise the biannual "What's Happening in Black British History?" workshops with Michael Ohajuru. See www.blackbritishhistory.co.uk
Freelance Historian and Journalist
Freelance Historian and Journalist
January 2012 – Present (6 years 3 months)
I write articles about history and other things that interest me. Published in The Guardian (online), The Times, Times Literary Supplement, History Today, BBC History Magazine and The Periscope Post. For more info and cuttings see:
www.mirandakaufmann.com
I also continue to do historical research, give history talks and lectures at universities, schools and libraries, as well as places like The British Library and The National Archives.
Public Speaker
Miranda Kaufmann
2006 – Present (12 years)
Giving talks about my research into the history of Africans in Renaissance Britain.
I've spoken at the British Library, the National Archives, the Department for Education, the Universities of Edinburgh, Leicester and Oxford and various schools and local libraries.
I'm happy to address any audience- from the U3A (University of the Third Age) to primary schools, from universities to local history societies or community groups.
For more info on upcoming and recent talks see: http://www.mirandakaufmann.com/talks.html
Times Literary Supplement
Freelance Reviewer
Times Literary Supplement
2007 – Present (11 years)
I review books related to my areas of expertise, including Tudor and Stuart history, Black history, the Slave Trade.
Consultant
National Trust
September 2013 – September 2013 (1 month)
I wrote interpretation for the Influential Black Londoners exhibition at Sutton House in Hackney, which will be on display 29th Sept- 30th November.
http://www.mirandakaufmann.com/3/post/2013/09/writing-letters-from-sutton-house-to-influential-black-londoners-c1507-1912.html
Freelance Writer
The Sunday Times
December 2012 – February 2013 (3 months)
Wrote company profiles for the "Top 100 Best Companies to work for" supplements: http://features.thesundaytimes.co.uk/public/best100companies/live/template
BBC
Freelance Researcher
BBC
June 2012 – December 2012 (7 months)London, United Kingdom
Writing briefs for Radio 4's In Our Time: this involves interviewing experts and summarising their thoughts for Melvyn Bragg.
I spoke to Princeton professor Melissa Lane about Scepticism: you can listen to the programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01kblc3
And to Charles Melville, Professor of Persian History at Pembroke College, Cambridge about the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi: you can listen to the programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p7dcv
Freelance Researcher
The Sunday Times
October 2012 – October 2012 (1 month)
I wrote restaurant descriptions for and copy-edited the Sunday Times Food List.
Editorial Assistant
Diplomat Magazine (Envoy Media)
July 2012 – July 2012 (1 month)London, United Kingdom
I assisted the editor with a wide range of tasks including writing copy, proof-reading, copy-editing and fact-checking.
Diplomat Magazine has been serving London's diplomatic community (the largest in the world) for 65 years. See my online reports here:
http://www.diplomatmagazine.com/local-news/682-ekhaya-centre-opens-on-london-s-southbank.html
http://www.diplomatmagazine.com/local-news/680-apco-worldwide-diplomat-magazine.html
BBC
Intern
BBC
May 2012 – June 2012 (2 months)London, United Kingdom
I was a researcher for the BBC World Service programme, The Forum which "tackles the big questions of our age with some of the world's most eminent minds." Podcasts available here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004kln9
Intern
Periscope Post
March 2012 – April 2012 (2 months)
I summarised news stories into bite-size nuggets for the busy but bright and wrote a few opinion pieces too.
Rugby Football Union
Rugby Football Foundation Researcher
Rugby Football Union
September 2010 – January 2012 (1 year 5 months)
I research funding opportunities and write funding bids for the Foundation, which aims to do good through Rugby Union. For example, we coach inner-city kids and young offenders, who then benefit from rugby's core values of Teamwork, Respect, Enjoyment, Discipline and Sportsmanship. See: http://www.hitzrugby.com/
D. Phil Student
Christ Church Oxford
2005 – 2011 (6 years)Oxford, United Kingdom
Completed my thesis, 'Africans in Britain, 1500-1640' in October 2011.
Short Abstract:
This study of Africans in Britain 1500-1640 employs evidence from a wide range of primary sources including parish registers, tax returns, household accounts, wills and court records to challenge the dominant account, which has been overly influenced by the language of Shakespeare’s Othello and other contemporary literature. I explain the international context of growing trade and increased diplomatic relations with Africa and a concomitant increased level of contact with Africans in the Atlantic world. I then explore the ways in which Africans might come to Britain. Some travelled via Europe in the entourages of royals, gentlemen or foreign merchants; some came from Africa to train as trade factors and interpreters for English merchants; large numbers arrived as a result of privateering activity in which they were captured from Spanish and Portuguese ships. Once in Britain, they were to be found in every kind of household from those of kings to seamstresses. Some were entirely independent, some poor, though few resorted to crime. They performed a wide range of skilled roles and were remunerated in the same mix of wage, reward and gifts in kind as others. They were accepted into society, into which they were baptized, married and buried. They inter-married with the local population and had children. Africans accused of fornication and men who fathered illegitimate children with African women were punished in the same way as others. The legacy of villeinage coupled with the strong rhetoric of freedom in legal and popular discourse ensured that Africans in Britain were not viewed as slaves in the eyes of the law. Neither were they treated as such. They were paid wages, married, and allowed to testify in court. Those scholars who have sought to place the origins of racial slavery in Elizabethan and early Stuart England must now look elsewhere.
Education
University of Oxford
University of Oxford
BA, M.St., D.Phil., History
2001 – 2011
Activities and Societies: OUWRFC: 2 Blues Cherwell: Deputy Features Editor and Contributor
3/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1520189156301 1/3
Print Marked Items
Black Tudors: The Untold Story
Margaret Flanagan
Booklist.
114.6 (Nov. 15, 2017): p15.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Black Tudors: The Untold Story.
By Miranda Kaufmann.
Nov. 2017. 352p. illus. Oneworld, $27 (97817860718421.941.0508996.
Racial diversity in Tudor England? Kaufmann, senior research fellow at the University of London, shines an
illuminating beacon on a fascinating subject that has long been relegated to a dimly lit historical closet. In a
series of lively, informative sketches, she plays historical detective, unearthing little-known facts,
anecdotes, and records pertaining to 10 individuals representing a socioeconomic cross section of the AfroBritish
population of the era. A small yet visible and viable subgroup, these Tudor citizens participated in a
variety of occupations (court trumpeter, diver, sailor, silk weaver, prostitute, etc.) that reflect the economic
and cultural diversity of their demographic. Predating formal British involvement in the transatlantic slave
trade by approximately 100 years, this slice of social history provides a fresh, new slant on one of British
history's most popular and well-trod periods.--Margaret Flanagan
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Flanagan, Margaret. "Black Tudors: The Untold Story." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2017, p. 15. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517441695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ee5889d7.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517441695
3/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Briefly Noted
Jocelyn Hannah
The New Yorker.
93.47 (Feb. 5, 2018): p67.
COPYRIGHT 2018 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The
Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
Black Tudors, by Miranda Kaufmann (Oneworld). Seeking to overturn the common assumption that there
were no black communities in Britain before Caribbean immigration after the Second World War,
Kaufmann presents characters such as John Blanke, a trumpeter at the court of Henry VIII, and Reasonable
Blackman, a London silk weaver who lost two children in the plague of 1592. Many slaves fled Spanish or
Portuguese territories in the New World, boarding ships bound for England after hearing rumors that all
men there were free; one helped Sir Francis Drake recruit Africans for attacks on the Spanish. Kaufmann
speculates about cultural aspects: three decades after Drake's ship abandoned a pregnant African woman on
an island, Shakespeare created Sycorax, the mother of Caliban.
Creft, by Alexander Langlands (Norton). A pressing question lies at the heart of this exploration of potterymaking,
yarn-spinning, hedge-pleaching, roof-thatching, plowing with oxen, and other traditional crafts:
Was it wise of us to abandon skills honed over millennia? Langlands thinks not, and, drawing on his own
crafting experiences, offers both a how-to manual and a challenge to the idea that industrialized production,
with its reliance on cheap fossil fuels, is necessarily the way of the future. Arguing that the search for
sustainability may make costly, labor-intensive methods newly attractive, he also makes a case for the
psychological benefits of working with one's hands. "Crafts are a vehicle," he writes, "through which we
can be."
Theory of Shadows, by Paolo Maurensig, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux). The chess champion Alexandre Alekhine was found dead in a hotel room in March, 1946.
Although his death was attributed to a heart attack, doubts have lingered, enabling Maurensig to imagine
more sinister causes in this enthralling novel. Russian by birth, Alekhine emigrated to France; when France
fell to Hitler, he became an agent of the Nazi propaganda machine. With the Nuremberg trials taking place
in the background, the novel becomes a tribunal of sorts for Alekhine. "The game of chess was a war that
left no prisoners behind," Alekhine observes. By the novel's end, he has become one of its casualties.
The Safe House, by Christophe Boltanski, translated from the French by Laura Marris (Chicago). This
novel, based on the author's family history, takes place in a hetel particulier in Paris. At the center of the
story are an extraordinary matriarch-a writer who is paralyzed by polio but refuses any sort of walking aid,
and who keeps a fierce grip on her progeny-and her husband, a Jewish doctor who, during the Nazi
Occupation, hides for more than twenty months in a room on a landing that the family calls "the inbetween."
Moving through the house, room by room, chapter by chapter, the book takes us progressively
deeper into a family mythology that is grim and, at times, almost surreal.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hannah, Jocelyn. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 67. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A527789871/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=6eee6628.
Accessed 4 Mar. 2018.
3/4/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A527789871
Tudor, English and black – and not a slave in sight
From musicians to princes, a new book by historian Miranda Kaufmann opens a window on the hitherto unknown part played by black people in 16th-century England
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Black musicians in a Portuguese painting c 1520
Black musicians in a Portuguese painting of The Engagement of St Ursula and Prince Etherius, c 1520. Photograph: Bridgemanimages.com
Within moments of meeting historian Miranda Kaufmann, I learn not to make flippant assumptions about race and history. Here we are in Moorgate, I say. Is it called that because it was a great hub of black Tudor life? “You have to be careful with anything like that,” she winces, “because, for all you know, this was a moor. It’s the same with family names and emblems: if your name was Mr Moore, you’d have the choice between a moorhen or a blackamoor. It wouldn’t necessarily say something about your race.”
Her answer – meticulous, free of bombast, dovetailing memorable details with wider issues – is typical of her first book Black Tudors: The Untold Story, which debunks the idea that slavery was the beginning of Africans’ presence in England, and exploitation and discrimination their only experience. The book takes the form of 10 vivid and wide-ranging true-life stories, sprinkled with dramatic vignettes and nice, chewy details that bring each character to life.
Africans were already known to have likely been living in Roman Britain as soldiers, slaves or even free men and women. But Kaufmann shows that, by Tudor times, they were present at the royal courts of Henry VII, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and James I, and in the households of Sir Walter Raleigh and William Cecil. The book also shows that black Tudors lived and worked at many levels of society, often far from the sophistication and patronage of court life, from a west African man called Dederi Jaquoah, who spent two years living with an English merchant, to Diego, a sailor who was enslaved by the Spanish in Panama, came to Plymouth and died in Moluccas, having circumnavigated half the globe with Sir Francis Drake.
Miranda Kaufmann, author of Black Tudors
Miranda Kaufmann, author of Black Tudors. Photograph: Rosie Collins
Kaufmann’s interest in black British history came about almost by accident: she intended to study Tudor sailors’ perceptions of Asia and America for her thesis at Oxford University, but found documents demonstrating the presence of Africans within Britain. “I’d never heard anything about it, despite having studied Tudor history at every level. When I went to the National Archive for the first time, I asked an archivist where to start looking and they were like: ‘Oh well, you won’t find anything about that here.’” Kaufmann kept digging, contacted local record offices and ultimately built up to her book. So why has the existence of black Tudors been unknown, untold and untaught? “History isn’t a solid set of facts,” she replies. “It’s very much about what questions you ask of the past. If you ask different questions, you get different answers. People weren’t asking questions about diversity. Now they are.”
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Despite Kaufmann’s research, it is hard to swallow the idea that black people were not treated as extreme anomalies (or worse) in Tudor England. “We need to return to England as it was at the time,” says Kaufmann – “an island nation on the edge of Europe with not much power, a struggling Protestant nation in perpetual danger of being invaded by Spain and being wiped out. It’s about going back to before the English are slave traders, before they’ve got major colonies. The English colonial project only really gets going in the middle of the 17th century.” That said, she does leave a stark question hanging in the air: “How did we go from this period of relative acceptance to becoming the biggest slave traders out there?”
Black Tudors does not make overblown claims about ethnic diversity in England – in her wider research, Kaufmann found around 360 individuals in the period 1500-1640 – but it does weave nonwhite Britons back into the texture of Tudor life. Black Tudors came to England through English trade with Africa; from southern Europe, where there were black (slave) populations in Spain and Portugal, the nations that were then the great colonisers; in the entourages of royals such as Katherine of Aragon and Philip II (who was the husband of Mary I); as merchants or aristocrats; and as the result of English privateering and raids on the Spanish empire. “If you captured a Spanish ship, it would be likely to have some Africans on board,” says Kaufmann. “One prized ship brought in to Bristol had 135. They got shipped back to Spain after being put up in a barn for a week. The authorities didn’t know quite what to do with them.”
Although there was no legislation approving or defining slavery within England, it could hardly have been fun being “the only black person in the village” – such as Cattelena, a woman who lived independently in Almondsbury and whose “most valuable item … was her cow”. Nonetheless, Kaufmann uncovers some impressive lives, such as the sailor John Anthony, who arrived in England on a pirate’s boat; Reasonable Blackman, a Southwark silk weaver; and a salvage diver called Jacques Francis. Kaufmann points to them as “examples of people who are really being valued for their skills. In a later age, you get these portraits of Africans sitting sycophantically in the corner looking up at the main character, but they’re not just these domestic playthings for the aristocracy. They’re working as a seamstress or for a brewer. Even in aristocratic households they are performing tasks – as a porter, like Edward Swarthye, or as a cook – they are doing useful things, they get wages. John Blanke, a royal trumpeter, gets paid twice the average wage of an agricultural labourer and three times that of an average servant. They’re not being whipped or beaten or put in chains or being bought and sold.”
Portrait of a Moor by Jan Mostaert, early 16th century
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Portrait of a Moor by Jan Mostaert, early 16th century
I balk at the names black Tudors were given – Swarthye, Blanke, Blackman, Blacke – and at the idea that trudging out an existence as a Tudor prostitute, like Anne Cobbie, a “tawny Moor” with “soft skin”, is any great win for diversity. But it does seem that black Tudors are no worse off than white ones. At a basic level, they are acknowledged as citizens rather than loathed as outcasts. “It’s enormously significant, given how important religion was, that Africans were being baptised and married and buried within church life. It’s a really significant form of acceptance, particularly the baptism ritual, which states that ‘through baptism you are grafted into the community of God’s holy church’, in which we are all one body.”
Kaufmann says she feels “anxious, because people might not like” her book. “Part of it is the surprise element: people didn’t think there were Africans in Tudor England. There’s this fantasy past where it’s all white – and it wasn’t. It’s ignorance. People just don’t know these histories. Hopefully this research will inspire producers to get multiracial stories on our screens.”
Although she is very generous with her time, Kaufmann has been uneasy, even to the point of seeming dissatisfied, throughout our conversation. She goes cautiously silent when I try to link her concerns to current issues such as Brexit, racism or the rise of populist nationalism. Part of the reason might be wariness at the vicious online treatment meted out to women of expertise when they comment on current affairs or state a fact that goes against philistine fantasies. Earlier this year, the historian Mary Beard was the target of abuse for corroborating an educational film for children which showed a well-to-do black family living under the Roman empire.
This resistance to accepting a black history is not confined to the lower reaches of Twitter. The academic and novelist Sunny Singh has written about director Christopher Nolan’s film Dunkirk, which erased the presence of Royal Indian Army Services Corp personnel and lascars from south Asia and east Africa working for the British and, on the French side, Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian troops from France’s colonies. The comedian Mark Gatiss was so disturbed by the presence of one black actor in the cast for a Doctor Who time travel episode he was filming that he sent a “very difficult” email to his bosses protesting that “there weren’t any black soldiers in Victoria’s army”. Rattled, he did his own research and discovered that there had indeed been one black soldier there, whereupon he relented.
Despite her work in filling in these historical blanks, Kaufmann laments the scarcity of complete evidence: “I wish they had kept diaries or preserved letters. Much as I’ve pieced together these lives, they’re not satisfying biographies where we know everything – more often, they are snapshots of moments.” Nonetheless, the tide is turning against the myth that England has always been a monoracial, monocultural, monolingual nation. Along with writers such as David Olusoga, Paul Gilroy and Sunny Singh, and institutions such as the University of York, which has launched a project investigating medieval multiculturalism, historians such as Miranda Kaufmann are bringing England to a necessary reckoning with its true history.
A black trumpeter in a detail of a tapestry, 1520
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A black trumpeter in a detail of a tapestry commemorating the Field of Cloth of Gold, 1520. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
Extraordinary lives: some black people in Tudor England
John Blanke, the musician
One of the court trumpeters, he was present in the entourage of Henry VII from at least 1507. He performed at both Henry VII’s funeral and Henry VIII’s coronation in 1509.
Jacques Francis, the salvage diver
An expert swimmer and diver, he was hired to salvage guns from the wreck of the Mary Rose in 1546. When his Venetian master was accused of theft in Southampton, Francis became the first known African to give evidence in an English court of law.
Diego, the circumnavigator
Diego asked to be taken aboard Sir Francis Drake’s ship in Panama in 1572. Diego and Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1577, claiming California for the crown in 1579.
Anne Cobbie, prostitute
Cobbie was one of 10 women cited when the owners of the brothel where she worked were brought before the Westminster sessions court in 1626.
Reasonable Blackman, the silk weaver
He lived in Southwark around 1579-1592 and had probably arrived from the Netherlands. He had at least three children, but lost two to the plague in 1592.
Mary Fillis, servant
The daughter of Fillis of Morisco, a Moroccan basket weaver and shovel-maker, Mary came to London around 1583-4 and became a servant to a merchant. Later she worked for a seamstress from East Smithfield.
Dederi Jaquoah, merchant and prince
Jaquoah was the son of King Caddi-biah, ruler of a kingdom in modern Liberia. He arrived in England in 1610 and was baptised in London on New Year’s Day 1611. He spent two years in England with a leading merchant.
Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Miranda Kaufmann is published by Oneworld (£18.99 rrp). To order a copy for £16.14 with free UK p&p, visit guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.
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The Untold Story
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KIRKUS REVIEW
An intriguing history of Africans in Tudor England.
Kaufmann (Senior Research Fellow/Institute for Commonwealth Studies, Univ. of London) presents the stories of 10 African men and women engaged in a variety of occupations, from trumpeter to trader. The author argues that the common perception that all Africans were enslaved by the British is erroneous and that Renaissance England had many free Africans who were part of the social fabric. “Despite the insatiable appetite for all things Tudor, from raunchy television series to bath ducks modelled as Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn,” she writes, “the existence of the Black Tudors is little known.” Through meticulous archival research, Kaufmann creates compelling portraits of her subjects, including a trumpet player at Henry VIII’s court, a salvage diver, a circumnavigator, a porter, a silk weaver, a Moroccan convert, a prince involved in trade negotiations, a mariner, a woman involved in sex work, and an independent single woman. Since they left few documents behind, Kaufmann pieces together their histories from church records, references in various documents by influential Englishmen, literary works, paintings, and other sources. Each story is anchored in the social and political history of the time. Thus, readers learn much about Henry VIII’s courtiers; West African deep-sea divers, who used no diving equipment but could reach sunken ships to retrieve goods; Francis Drake and his treacherous ways; prostitution in Tudor and Stuart England; and the processes of silk weaving and dairy farming. The narrative is engaging, and the author’s argument about how Africans were generally accepted in Tudor England is persuasive. She provides a wealth of detail and only occasionally gets lost in minutiae, making the book a highly instructive history of an understudied part of Tudor society
An eminently readable book that offers contemporary readers valuable insights into racial relations of centuries past.
Pub Date: Nov. 14th, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-78607-184-2
Page count: 384pp
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11th, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1st, 2017
Book Review – Black Tudors: The Untold Story by Miranda Kaufmann
PUBLISHED ON September 24, 2017
By Nathen Amin
Black Tudors by Dr Miranda Kaufmann is an ambitious book loaded with little-known Tudor trivia that has long been overdue in the study of 16th century England, and fortunately for the future of this little-explored topic, the result is a fascinating production of the utmost quality that takes a close look at ten individuals who could, quite accurately, be considered Black Tudors.
There is a common-held belief that these British Isles were inhabited by a native, white population before the rise of Slavery, the Industrial Revolution, and the onset of twentieth century globalisation with the voyage of the Empire Windrush from the Caribbean, that people of colour quite simply were unknown to our Tudor-period ancestors. Yet, as Dr Kaufmann shows in this illuminating and extraordinarily in-depth publication, such a view is quite simply nonsense. As the author notes in the blurb, people of colour were christened, married and buried by the church in England, and were paid wages just like any other 16th century person. They formed integral parts of the communities they lived in, and provided services that were often welcomed, and in many cases, essential.
A Black Tudor presence is first explicitly noticed shortly after the arrival of Katherine of Aragon in England for her wedding to Prince Arthur, around the turn of the 16th century. The Spanish princess brought her own servants across the Channel, which included a woman of a Muslim Moorish background named Catalina, whose duty included making the future queen’s bed. Perhaps more famously is the arrival of a trumpeter to the Tudor court who became known, ironically one imagines, as John Blanke, a man who would serve both Henry VII and Henry VIII with distinction, and for which he was handsomely rewarded. Henry VIII even footed the bill for Blanke’s wedding, ordering a gown of violet cloth, a bonnet and a hat as a gift for ‘our trumpeter’
For even the most ardent of Tudor readers and students, there will be much within Black Tudors that you simply didn’t know, and this is where the true value of this work can be found. Dr Kaufmann is not simply covering well-trodden ground, an issue which has often plagued the study of the sixteenth century, but instead is revealing information that most of her audience will be coming across for the first time. The results are astounding.
Who knew, for example, that Africans were the predominant divers of their day, a fact which witnessed the recruitment of an African named Jacques Francis to try and salvage some items from the sunken Mary Rose in 1450s, over four hundred years before the ship was eventually raised from the sea bed. Sir Francis Drake was just one prominent figure of his day who employed a person of colour, in his case Diego, a freed slave from Panama who would go on to circumnavigate much of the globe with his English captain, often working as an interpreter.
Of course, the history isn’t always joyous, as discovered by the tragic tale of Black Maria, a woman aboard one of Drake’s ships who was raped, impregnated and then abandoned on an island when she presumably had outlived her usefulness. We are also treated to the curious tale of a black porter named Edward Swarthye, who in 1596 in rural Gloucestershire was employed to whip a white member of the gentry named John Guye, perhaps an incident unfathomable to our preconceived ideas of enforced black subservience in the past. A particular entry which I thoroughly enjoyed reading involved the wonderfully-named Reasonable Blackman, who was able to take advantage of his freedom in England to become a successful silk weaver in Southwark, counting many wealthy aristocrats and merchants amongst his clientele.
I was also astonished, more through my own ignorance of the subject as it was so poorly documented elsewhere before this book, that although black people existed as slaves in Spain, bought and sold on cathedral steps like inanimate objects, slavery was not recognised in England so that once these men and women arrived in England, they were considered free. For example, when Pero Alvarez, an African man who arrived in England from Portugal during the reign of Henry VII, he was instantly considered a free man, no longer subject to the shackles of slavery. The subject of slavery arose in an English court of law in 1569 when it was comprehensively determined that no man could be subject to slavery upon entering the kingdom, for ‘England has too pure an air for slaves to breath in’. Two decades later, William Harrison noted proudly;
‘as for slaves and bondmen, we have none; nay such is the privilege of our country by the especial grace of God and bounty of our princes, that if any come hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they become as free in condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterly removed from them’
The author is an expert in her field, a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies and an Oxford graduate, where her doctoral thesis was based on the presence of Africans in Britain between 1500 and 1640. The subject couldn’t be in safer hands. Dr Kaufmann’s research is impeccable, and has to be for such a detailed if specific study of those people who for so long have been disregarded by centuries of historians. She treats each of her subjects as individuals in their own right instead of just a community, exploring each life with a delicate warmth and respect that endears those individuals to the reader. We are gripped by their story.
Black Tudors is essentially a fascinating and concise microhistory of a small but important community in 16th century living their everyday lives amidst the much greater socio-political matters occurring around them, from the Great Matter and Reformation of Henry VIII to the threat posed by Spain against Elizabeth I. This book has no filler, and is wholly focused on its objective, a heavily-researched, well-referenced and pioneering, production. At 34-pages, her bibliography is possibly the most exhaustive I have seen. Kaufmann succeeds in her project, and succeeds well.
In her introduction, Dr Kaufmann notes ‘the misconceptions surrounding the status of Black Tudors are part of a wider impression that any African living outside Africa before the mid-fifteenth century, be it in Europe of the Americas must have been enslaved’, further pointing out in her conclusion that Africans were seen and heard across England, from Hull to Truro. This book will hopefully go some way to dispelling this misguided belief that many of us hold. Kaufmann also states confidently “for all those who thought they knew the Tudors, it is time to think again”. She’s right.
________________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Miranda Kaufmann is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, part of the School of Advanced Study, University of London. She read History at Christ Church, Oxford, where she completed her doctoral thesis on ‘Africans in Britain, 1500-1640’ in 2011. As a freelance historian and journalist, she has worked for The Sunday Times, the BBC, the National Trust, English Heritage, the Oxford Companion series, Quercus publishing and the Rugby Football Foundation. She is a popular speaker at conferences, seminars and schools from Hull to Jamaica and has published articles in academic journals and elsewhere (including the Times Literary Supplement, The Times, The Guardian, History Today, BBC History Magazine and Periscope Post). She enjoys engaging in debate at the intersection of past and present and has been interviewed by the BBC, Sky News, Al Jazeera USA and the Observer.
Wednesday, August 16, 2017
Book Review: 'Black Tudors' by Miranda Kaufmann
Once upon a time, before there was racism...
Well beyond being a nation of shopkeepers, the British are a nation of event recorders. There are registers, court records and all kinds of documents official and informal that detail the lives of Britons going back a thousand years. So it should be no great surprise that the stories of blacks in Britain can be broadly reconstructed. The good news is they were not slaves, but full-fledged citizens. The country did not allow slavery on its soil in the Tudor era, and anti-miscegenation laws didn’t begin until the 1660s. Black Tudors focuses on ten black men and women there during the reigns of Henry VII and VIII, Elizabeth I and James I. Records allow Miranda Kaufmann to trace life events and moves, and infer wealth and success.
Along with black history, comes British history, the roles they played in it and how they were affected by it. One black man escaped Spanish slavery and worked for Sir Francis Drake, pillaging the world. Another, named Edward Swarthey, is famous for publicly beating a white man, unopposed, at the behest of his employer. There was a London silk weaver in the time of plague, and a deep diving salvager who recovered expensive ornaments from sunken royal vessels. They came in contact with royalty: one was one Henry VIII’s trumpeters, who is even portrayed – wearing a turban – at the Westminster Tournament celebrating the birth of Henry’s heir.
This link to history is both strength and weakness in Black Tudors. While it gives context and perspective to all their lives, it also looms too large over them. There are far too many pages of politics and detail – which ships were seized for what debts in what ports and how their owners finagled their release, gypping each other along the way. Really nothing to do with the shipwright, other than in one case he had to go to court for back wages. There is way too much family treeing, having essentially nothing to do with the subjects.
Henry VIII seems to have looked upon blacks as evidence of his own worldliness, and the global import of his little kingdom. At the time, the empire did not yet exist, and most of the wars he waged were simply across the channel. But blacks, given royal acceptance, were also accepted in general society. They were named in wills, testified at trials, and buried in churchyards. They were few in number, and so were notable they were noted every time they dealt with authority. It’s likely why Shakespeare was able to have black characters and references to blacks in his plays.
It wasn’t until the mid 1600s that Britain really caught the slave trade bug, made blacks inferior, and joined with their American colonies in pushing blacks out of society. So, Kaufmann says, it doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not natural, inevitable or obvious.
Editor's note: This review has been published with the permission of David Wineberg. Like what you read? Subscribe to the SFRB's free daily email notice so you can be up-to-date on our latest articles. Scroll up this page to the sign-up field on your right.