9. Pompey: shackled

RUN away from his Master the 14th instant, Pompey a Black Boy about 15 years of Age, he had on a sad colour’d Frock, a blue Wastcoat and blue Stockings, with a brass Collar about his neck, without Cap or Hat. Whosoever secures him and brings him to his Master Mr. William Stevens a Merchant in East-lane on Rotherheth-Wall; or to Mr. Howard’s the Crown Coffee-House behind the Royal Exchange, shall have Twenty Shillings Reward.

The Daily Courant, 22 May 1703

The bodies of people of colour in and around Restoration London were sometimes constrained as well as marked, and some were forced to wear metal collars and even chains that marked them as enslaved property. During this period transatlantic slave voyages originating in London carried thousands of tons of chains and manacles, most of which had been manufactured in the capital, the hub of English manufacturing (see Figure 22). Between 1651 and 1700 more than 600 slave voyages originated in London which transported more than 190,000 enslaved men, women and children from West Africa to the Americas.¹ The punishment of convicts and prisoners in England included branding, mutilation, whipping and on occasion the use of iron collars, chains and restraints, and so it may have been only the scale of production of these metallic restraints that appeared remarkable. Londoners did not see shiploads of Africans shackled together; virtually all the people fitted with coarse iron collars and chains in Restoration London were White convicts and prisoners.²

The collars forced on enslaved people in London were strikingly different. Individually crafted from silver, brass and sometimes steel, these were intended to complement the smart liveries and clothing of enslaved personal attendants, and to reflect the wealth of those who claimed ownership of them. Fifteen (7 per cent) of Restoration London’s freedom seekers were manacled in this way. On slave ships and in the colonies rough cast-iron restraints were brutally functional and abrasive, darkened and oxidized by sweat and blood. A century later a newly arrived African who escaped in Jamaica was, according to a newspaper advertisement, identifiable by the brand marks on his shoulder and the ‘iron collar around his neck’. He was but one of the millions of West Africans and their descendants in the Caribbean and North America who felt the weight of such restraints on their own bodies.³

Figure 22. Iron shackles, Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from the Liljenquist Family Collection. These coarse iron shackles may well have been used on a transatlantic slave ship, and they are typical of the mass-produced coarse iron restraints made for strength and utility.

In seventeenth-century London collars were less abrasively functional, although they still signalled to all who wore or saw them that those restrained by them were enslaved property. The city’s runaway advertisements often specified the metals from which these collars were fashioned, and five were made of brass, seven of silver and one of steel (see Figure 23). Although steel was cheaper than silver and brass, it was – when freshly forged with a muted shine and a blueish tinge – individually handcrafted, and it would have looked far more attractive and expensive than the coarse iron restraints of the colonies. Only two of these English freedom seekers had iron collars, and one was worn by a boy who had escaped a year earlier wearing a brass collar which he may have had removed and either sold or discarded. Perhaps the master had chosen to replace a lost and quite expensive brass collar with a cheaper one made of iron. Whatever they were made of, these collars were still severe restraints, both psychologically and physically, a constant and unforgettable reminder to the wearer that they were property. But they had a dual function, for not only did these collars constrain the wearers and mark them as property but they also ostentatiously advertised the success, power and wealth of the person who claimed ownership of the collar wearer. This explains why so many of the enslaved attendants portrayed in the portraits of wealthy men and their families were not only dressed in stylish and expensive livery but also sported shiny silver or brass collars.

Figure 23. Steel ankle iron and key, inscribed ‘Deverall Corn street Bristol, 1733’. Reproduced with permission of Bryan Collection, Crab Tree Farm Foundation, Lake Bluff, Ill. Photograph by Jamie Stukenberg, Professional Graphics Inc.⁴

These ostentatious collars probably had little direct relationship to the cast-iron manacles of the slave trade and the plantations. It is more likely that the shiny collars fitted to enslaved Londoners were inspired by the brass and silver collars that elite English owners traditionally had made for their favourite dogs. Today it is challenging to consider that the collars used for pet animals were the inspiration for the collars made for and locked around the necks of enslaved Londoners, but the similarities between these dog and slave collars are remarkable. Surviving fifteenth-, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English dog collars look almost identical to those around the necks of enslaved people in portraits from this era. Often the name of the dog’s master was engraved on the collar, as in ‘S. Thomas Cave of Stanford’, ‘John Green Farmbury’ or ‘Thomas North Dulcut near Wells’, a practice copied by enslavers who had their own names engraved on the collars worn by the enslaved people they claimed.⁵ Surviving portraits of Queen Anne, and of Charles I’s five children, show dogs with silver and brass collars respectively, as do numerous other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English portraits. Most striking of all are portraits like that of an unnamed young girl created around 1725, which displays her being attended by both an enslaved boy and a dog: both the boy and the dog wear collars and are portrayed gazing admiringly up at their fabulously dressed young mistress (Figure 24). It is hard to imagine a more striking representation of the ways in which elite English families’ attitudes towards highly favoured pets informed their understanding and treatment of enslaved boys as accoutrements and as property.⁶

Elite Londoners placed advertisements for highly prized and favourite dogs that were lost, some of them wearing collars. One of James II’s dogs escaped in 1687, ‘a brown and white Spaniel Dog, the King’s Collar about his Neck, Written, The King’s Dog’, while ‘a little Dog’ lost from the duchess of Richmond’s house wore a collar ‘with the Duke of Buckingham’s name Engraven on it’.⁷ The advertisements for dogs with collars are strikingly similar to those for enslaved young people wearing collars: they often included physical descriptions of dogs’ markings and colourings similar to descriptions of enslaved people’s physical attributes, scars and bodily markings; accounts of where they had been lost; descriptions of the collars and the names engraved upon them; and information about where and to whom they might be returned for a reward. For example:

A Very large white Spaniel Dog with a short Tail, his Cheeks and Ears red, a Star in his Forehead, two red Spots joining on the Nether side, and a small one upon his Rump, with a brass Collar, and John Turner of Richmond in Surrey, Engrav’d thereon, lost on Monday last, between Foster lane and Noble-street. Whosever brings tydings of him first to Mr. Weelys Apothecary at the Union in Fleet Street, shall have Two Guinea’s Reward. (London Gazette, 31 December 1685)

Figure 24. Bartholomew Dandridge, A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog (c.1725), Yale Center for British Art.

Expensive and fashioned by skilled craftsmen, both dog and slave collars were clearly intended to show off the wealth of the men and women who could afford brass and silverware. A half-century later, when jewellers’ newspaper advertisements had become quite common, the Westminster goldsmith Matthew Dyer announced his willingness to make ‘Silver Padlocks for Blacks or Dogs, Collars … &c’.⁸ But however shiny or expensive these brass and silver collars may have been, to the enslaved they remained demeaning physical restraints and emblems of bondage, the markers of animals held as property.

The London enslaved who were restrained in this way tended to be very young. Only one of the collar-wearing freedom seekers was described as an adult man, while the remainder were all aged between ten and seventeen, and 13 were sixteen or younger. Two were female, the remainder male, and three were South Asian. Young and fresh-faced boys and girls made attractive adornments to wealthy Englishmen and women, and a shared aesthetic enhanced these human emblems of success with flashy restraints. On 14 May 1703 fifteen-year-old Pompey eloped wearing ‘a sad colour’d Frock, a blue Wastcoat and blue stockings, with a brass Collar about his neck, without Cap or Hat’.⁹ It is revealing that the collar was described in this advertisement as part of the smart clothing and bodily adornment with which William Stevens had dressed and presented Pompey, all the better to display Stevens’ own wealth and prestige. To Pompey the collar must have felt altogether different.

Stevens was a merchant in East Lane in Rotherhithe, a small lane south of the Thames leading to East Stairs surrounded by the docks, trading warehouses homes and businesses of south-east London. Almost eight months later Pompey tried again, but this time Stevens advertised in search of ‘a Black Boy about 16 Years of Age’ wearing ‘a Blue Wastcoat, a pair of light colour’d Cloth Breeches, and Iron Coller about his Neck’.¹⁰ This was the only occasion on which a freedom seeker escaped wearing a collar made of anything other than silver, brass or newly forged steel. Why had Stevens replaced the brass collar with an iron one? Had Pompey succeeded in ridding himself of the hated brass collar during his first escape attempt, discarding the broken restraint so that it could never again torment and demean him? Once Pompey was recaptured, Stevens might well have objected to paying for a craftsman to fashion another brass collar, choosing instead to replace it with a cheaper coarse iron collar fashioned by a local blacksmith rather than a jeweller.

The use of silver collars on enslaved children suggests that they were closely supervised by those who commanded them. These soft metal collars would have been a tempting target for thieves who could easily remove them from a child’s neck and have them melted down by one of the city’s many silversmiths. At the same time, silver collars might become part of an escape attempt, used as currency by the wearer who might exchange a silver collar for refuge, food or clothing. Such collars thus had many potential functions, both for those who had them made and placed on the enslaved and for those who were forced to wear them. Moreover, in addition to reflecting the wealth of those who claimed ownership of enslaved people, silver and brass collars softened slavery in the eyes of Englishmen and women who saw the liveried children of colour with shiny and valuable collars attending and working for those who dressed and presented enslaved servants in a fashion that obscured their legal status. Numerous portraits from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reflect this, showing beautiful and well-dressed enslaved children in the context of sumptuously dressed families in idyllic surroundings. In Catherine Molineux’s memorable phrase, enslaved children became ‘a form of social currency, consumed and displayed in a semiotic system of status’. Enslaved children were often given as gifts, and in portraits their dark skins and beautiful clothing both contrasted with and complemented the pale skin and ornate clothing of those they attended. The display of beautifully dressed enslaved children attending elite Londoners made real both racial slavery and the imperial endeavours on which it was based. But it did so in a way that made slavery appear relatively benign (Figure 25).¹¹

Figure 25. Detail showing unnamed enslaved attendant wearing a locked collar in Elihu Yale; Dudley North; Lord James Cavendish; David Yale; and an Enslaved Servant by an unknown artist (c.1708), oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Andrew Cavendish, 11th duke of Devonshire. The boy is serving those present, and his turban and elaborately braided coat are in contrast to the somewhat more sedate clothing of the men pictured. The lock holding the collar around his neck emphasizes that he was almost certainly enslaved and the property of one of those present, perhaps the duke of Devonshire.

This was slavery as most Londoners saw it, and in an age of incredible poverty and high mortality rates in the capital few Londoners appear to have been distressed by the enslavement of well-dressed Black children sporting silver and brass collars. That enslavers continued using such collars and displaying them in portraits well into the eighteenth century suggests a lack of any sense of such behaviour being unseemly or offensive: it was entirely normative. A snuff or tobacco box made by the London-based Huguenot craftsman Jean Obrisset confirms the point (Figure 26). Skilfully fashioned from pressed horn, the box was an everyday item for a wealthier man, containing the tobacco he consumed that had been produced by enslaved labourers in the colonies. The top of the box features the head of an enslaved African, his stylized nose, lips and hair reflecting English stereotypes. But it is the collar around his neck that marks him as enslaved, visible on an item used, displayed and perhaps shared with other Londoners on a daily basis. In seventeenth-century London an enslaved person wearing a collar, whether a real person or a symbolic representation of one, was an unremarkable motif or emblem of wealth and success.¹²

Figure 26. Snuff-box or tobacco box made by Jean Obrisset, early 1700s. © The Trustees of the British Museum. The African is identified as such by his facial features, his hair and most especially the collar marking him as enslaved. That this image graced a box intended for slave-produced tobacco shows that the owner felt no shame in using slave-produced commodities, and presumably had no problem with slave-ownership.

While sailors, planters and merchants who had sailed on slave-trading ships or spent time in the plantation colonies had some experience of just how violent racial slavery could be, those who lived in Restoration London would have known very little of these realities. The small group of Londoners who had the most direct experience of the reality of slave ships and plantation slavery were the enslaved or bound servants brought to the city. For the African- and South Asian-born children who had been ripped from their families and forced to labour in an alien city, the collars some were forced to wear were constant and harsh physical reminders of their situation, affirmations of their lack of individuality expressed in the words often inscribed upon these shackles.

The enslaved who eloped while wearing collars generally belonged to members of the elite in London’s fashionable areas, or to wealthy merchants and craftsmen in or near the city’s maritime communities. One such shackled freedom seeker was a ‘Black Boy of about 14 years of Age’. Wearing ‘a Green Jacket, and Drawers’ and speaking ‘very little English’, this freedom seeker was most noticeable for ‘a Silver Collar about his neck, if not taken off’.¹³ While brass and steel collars were thick and would probably require a blacksmith or other metal worker or a locksmith to remove them, silver collars were thin and might be cut easily or even bitten through by a third party. This particular freedom seeker was the property of Jonas Shish, who like his father was a successful shipbuilder in Rotherhithe. Both father and son specialized in building ships for the Royal Navy, and these ships could have brought back enslaved people from South Asia, West Africa or the American and Caribbean colonies.¹⁴

Also attempting to escape from a London maritime community was an unnamed ‘black Girl, aged about 15 years’, who eloped wearing ‘a black Cloth Gown and Petticoat, with a brass Collar about her Neck, with this Inscription, John Campion at the Ship-Tavern at Ratcliff-Cross, his Negro’.¹⁵ Several of the collars described in these runaway advertisements were inscribed with wording of this kind, and not one of them named the enslaved person wearing this metal band. The writing was outward facing, invisible to a wearer who was probably unable to read the English words they could trace with their fingers but not see. The script was intended to convey information to the White English people who saw the enslaved child wearing the collar. Campion was a successful vintner, wine importer and innkeeper at Ratcliff, a block north of the Thames in the East End. His willingness to have his own name and the words ‘his Negro’ engraved on this collar speaks volumes about his acceptance of racial slavery, and his belief that fellow Londoners in the East End and beyond would see nothing untoward in this girl, her collar and his ownership of her. Yet the words tell us nothing about her, or how she felt with her throat bound by a heavy metal collar that obscured her own identity while proclaiming that of the enslaver who claimed her. While she could not see or read the words, she could feel their meaning: whatever the nature of her work for Campion, this unnamed girl sought liberty from the slavery symbolized by the collar she was wearing when she eloped.

Other collars were similarly engraved with information about the enslavers rather than those who wore them. One was a steel collar worn by an ‘Indian black Boy’ who eloped in Chelsea in 1690 and bore the words ‘Mr. Rob. Goldesborough of Chelsea in the County of Middlesex near London’, and the collar was linked to a steel cuff around his wrist by an iron chain.¹⁶ Toney, a sixteen-year-old ‘Negro boy’, eloped in 1690 with ‘a Brass Collar on, which directs where he lived’, while in 1664 an unnamed ‘little Blackamoor Boy’ escaped despite wearing ‘a Silver Collar about his neck, inscribed Mrs. Manby’s blackamoor in Warwick Lane’.¹⁷ This short road ran northwards past Newgate Market, just north-west of St Paul’s cathedral, but it is unclear whether Mrs Manby was a householder or a businesswoman: either way, the collar clearly identified this boy as her property. Another ‘Black Boy, an Indian, about 13 years old’ eloped wearing a collar inscribed with the words ‘The Lady Bromfield’s Black in Lincolns-Inn Fields’.¹⁸ However privileged his position in this household might have been, especially compared to the poverty and work regimes of bound labourers in South Asia and the Americas, this young boy sought escape from a status that defined him by colour as an object, a status symbolized by the collar that marked his body as property.

Similarly, in 1685 a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old ‘Taunymore with short bushy Hair, very well shaped, in a gray Livery lined with yellow’ eloped. The freedom seeker was identified in the runaway advertisement only by the ‘Directions’ engraved upon ‘a Silver Collar about his Neck’. These ‘directions’ consisted of the words ‘Captain George Hasting’s Boy, Brigadier in the King’s Horse Guards’. The wearer of this silver collar was thus rendered a non-person in the eyes of White people, while the power of the person who claimed ownership of this enslaved boy was flamboyantly affirmed in the recitation of his name and rank in an elite military unit.¹⁹ Likewise, when a fifteen-year-old ‘Black Boy’ named John White eloped from Colonel Percy Kirke in March 1686, his clothes were undistinguished but he could be identified by ‘a Silver Collar about his Neck, upon which is the Colonel’s Coat of Arms and Cipher’: on this occasion it was not even a slave-holder’s name but his crest that marked this boy as the property of an elite White man.²⁰

A collar fashioned out of a valuable metal and engraved with words that celebrated the rank and power of an enslaver simultaneously celebrated an enslaving master while objectifying the wearer. Few other items so perfectly epitomize the loss of identity inherent in what Orlando Patterson termed the ‘social death’ of the enslaved, in which the enslaved were isolated from fellow Africans and from the ‘social heritage’ of their communities. Historians have suggested the attempts by enslavers to deny the enslaved these comforts were less successful than Patterson imagined, but in Restoration London a young person torn from Africa and marked by a collar must surely have felt extremely isolated.²¹ Even today such collars continue to accomplish what slave-holders intended more than three centuries ago: we know the names and can learn about the people who owned both the collars and the people forced to wear them, while the identities of the enslaved remain invisible. More than 350 years later, the violence against these enslaved children is reimagined and symbolically re-enacted every time we read an advertisement and the engraved wording inscribed upon each collar, and even more so when we see surviving collars and restraints.

The desperation of young people torn from home, enslaved and then manacled in this way comes alive in the actions of Edward Francis. Restrained by a silver collar, he failed in his attempt to free himself and appears to have attempted a more desperate and violent bid for freedom. In December 1687 Francis had attempted to ‘Run away from Mr. Thomas Dymock at the Lyon Office in the Tower’ of London. Dymock was ‘Keeper of His Majesties Lyons in the Tower’, a sinecure that allowed Dymock a home in the Tower and the income from displaying the exotic animals in his care, including lions, tigers, leopards and other creatures. Just under twenty years later John Strype recorded that this royal menagerie included six lions, two tigers, three eagles, two mountain lions, a jackal and numerous other wild beasts. Dymock regularly used London’s newspapers to advertise a ‘convenient place’ for viewing these exotic animals and to warn others that he alone enjoyed the royal licence to publicly show and profit from such exhibitions. Caring for these animals was both difficult and dangerous, and just a year before Francis eloped Mary Jenkinson – a member of the household of ‘the Person who keeps the Lyons in the Tower’ – was fatally mauled by the largest lion.²²

It was not only the wild animals that were restrained by collars and chains, for the sixteen-year-old ‘black Boy’ who eloped from Dymock – unnamed in this advertisement – wore ‘a Silver Collar about his Neck, Engraven, Thomas Dimock at the Lyon Office’. Wearing three coats and grey stockings, this sixteen-year-old appears to have been clothed to work outside in December, perhaps to help feed, clean and care for the animals. If so, how might this collar have felt to a young adult made to work with caged, chained and manacled animals in the Lion Tower? He was probably African born for he ‘speaks but bad English’ and had ‘holes in both his Ears’ that were perhaps his last physical connection to an African childhood.²³

Dymock offered two guineas reward to any person who would apprehend and return the young African. We can assume the freedom seeker was recaptured because, just over four years later, Edward Francis, now an adult and described in court records as a ‘blackamoor serv[an]t’ in Dymock’s household, once again acted to free himself.²⁴ This time, however, Francis did more than simply escape, for in February 1692 he was arrested and interrogated on suspicion of having attempted the murder of his master’s family. Dymock testified that a year earlier he and his first wife had become very ill, and ‘after some time Languishing’ the latter had died. Following his own recovery Dymock remarried, taking Rebecca Way as his second wife in October 1691. Dymock and his new wife later testified that on Sunday 10 January 1692 he had ‘Bid his Servant the Black to warme him Some Ale’, but after drinking the ale he became very ill. Rebecca, her stepdaughter Ann and the maid Johanna Lickfield then ate some watery gruel intended for Thomas and also became seriously ill; after eating the remains of the gruel, the family’s cat died. Rebecca ordered remedies from an apothecary but these were of little benefit to Lickfield, who vomited up everything she ingested, and several weeks later sadly concluded that ‘I shall never be well now as I was Before’. Lickfield believed that the gruel had made her sick and on first tasting it she had asked Francis if it contained pepper, for the dish ‘seemed to be Hott and Burning in my Mouth’.²⁵

His suspicions raised, Dymock became convinced that Francis was responsible for poisoning the Dymock household. With his wife Rebecca present, Dymock summoned Francis and berated him for past offences but then softened his tone and told Francis that because of his past practice of ‘Confessing the Truth he [Francis] had noe punishment’. Having made it clear that honesty was the best policy, Dymock urged Francis to once again ‘Confesse the Truth’ and admit to attempting to poison the family. According to Dymock, ‘The Blacke then told his Master it was Ratts Bane that he did put in and that he bought two pippeing worths of that Ratt Killer which his master had Formerly Imployed to kill the Ratts’. After further questioning Francis admitted to his master that he was also responsible for the poisoning of Dymock and his first wife a year earlier. Clearly taken aback, Dymock asked if Francis had placed ‘the poison into his Victualls to kill him’, to which Francis replied in the affirmative. With no apparent sense of irony, Dymock asked ‘what hurt have I don to you that you should be soe bloody to me to kill me’, and for the first time Francis did not respond to a question the answer to which – to him at least – may have appeared self-evident. Then Francis’s motivation dawned on Dymock who asked him the most important question of all – did ‘you thinke to geet your Liberty by Killing me’ – to which ‘The Black said yes’.²⁶

Dymock ‘sent For a Constable’ and had Francis taken before Robert Lucas, the third Baron Lucas of Shenfield and constable of the Tower of London. Thomas and Rebecca Dymock, their servant Johanna Lickfield and Edward Francis himself were each interrogated by Baron Lucas, and it is his records of their testimony that survive. Francis confirmed that he was indeed responsible for the two separate instances of poisoning members of the Dymock household. He testified that he had secured rat poison after learning from ‘another Black called Tom living at the Corner of Mincing Lane … [that it] would make people sick & vomit’. Throughout the court record Francis was referred to by witnesses as Dymock’s ‘Servant the Black’, ‘blackamoor servt’ or simply ‘the Black’. If he had been a free man and an employee of Dymock, Edward Francis could have left his employment with little or no risk and there would have been no need for him to kill to secure his liberty. It thus appears highly likely that Francis remained enslaved, and that he was probably the same person who, as a sixteen-year-old enslaved boy four years earlier, had been forced to wear a collar while working for his master. If so, he appears to have reached the conclusion that he could not be free while his master was alive.²⁷

Four months after his arrest Francis was released, and perhaps there was more to this case than the surviving records suggest. Whatever the truth of this case, the testimony of Edward Francis himself and of Thomas and Rebecca Dymock and their maid Johanna Lickfield all make clear that it was readily conceivable to seventeenth-century White Londoners that enslaved Black servants who could not achieve freedom by escaping might resort to violence to free themselves. Self-liberation through escape was only one of the means of resistance by which the enslaved might make themselves free and, while violent resistance was unusual in the metropolis, it was just as possible as it was in the colonies. More than anything else, this case illustrates how real slavery must have felt to those who endured it in seventeenth-century London. The collars worn by some of the enslaved, which probably originated in the collars elite English people commissioned for their prized dogs, must have reinforced a feeling among the enslaved that they were chattel and akin to the animals owned by their masters. Little wonder, then, that when his attempt to escape failed, Edward Francis resorted to violence, for he could imagine no other way to become free.²⁸