2. The Black community

The presence of a growing community of people of colour in seventeenth-century London is revealed by their appearance in surviving parish records.¹ More than 700 men, women and children were identified as people of colour in parish records between 1600 and 1710. Usually including a name, a date and a racial label, these records include 417 (59 per cent) baptisms, 40 (6 per cent) marriages and 248 (35 per cent) burials. There were surely many more Black people whose race was not recorded or who did not feature in these records.

Baptism, marriage or burial usually occurred in the parish in which the person resided and, given that many of these people lived in the homes of those for whom they laboured, we see people of colour spread out across London and its suburbs. A significant number were in the new and affluent areas around Westminster, for example, where they worked in well-to-do households. Others who served on ships or who worked in the maritime communities of the East End and south of the Thames were clustered in those areas. At least fifteen of the forty marriages were so-called Fleet marriages, irregular ceremonies that took advantage of a legal loophole to avoid the usual processes and charges by having a clergyman marry a couple on land that was outside of church control, usually a prison. This may suggest that people of colour were less rooted in their home parishes or, more probably, that like many White Londoners they did not have the means to undertake a regular marriage. By the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries perhaps half or more of the city’s weddings were Fleet marriages.²

Figure 12. Map of London area showing approximate locations of baptisms, marriages and burials of Black Londoners, 1600–1710. Map by Anthony King.

Although many of these records of baptism, marriage or burial contain only a few words, they nonetheless hint at more complete life stories. Samuel Cesar (sic) was baptized at St John’s in Wapping on 14 June 1702. White people baptized in the church that month were described in such terms as ‘son of John Clark labourer’, but seventeen-year-old Samuel Cesar appeared in the register as ‘a black born in Ginney [sic]’.³ Jane, ‘an East India black [and] a servant of Mr. Crump’, was christened in St Alfege in Greenwich on 13 August 1694. The words ‘She knows not her name’ were scrawled in the baptismal register, explaining why she was the only person baptized that month with no last name.⁴ In October 1681 an African of unknown age was buried in the churchyard of St Bride’s in Fleet Street. He is unnamed in the parish register and, like so many enslaved and bound people of colour, he was recorded by the name of a White person as ‘Sir William Poole’s Moore’.⁵ It seems probable that this was the Sir William Pool who had briefly captured Tobago from the Dutch in 1672.⁶

When infants were baptized the records sometimes recognized that both parents were people of colour. Josiah Jheronomy, the ‘black-moore sone of Thomas Jheronomy, black-moore, living in the ward’, was baptized at St Botolph, Aldgate, on 1 September 1613. Earlier that year Thomas Jheronomy had married Hellen Millian in the same church, and in the register the couple were described as ‘two black-moores’.⁷ Similarly on 17 September 1695 Peter Daniel, ‘a Mariner’, married Elizabeth Almeda: in the parish register the couple were described as ‘both of Stepney, both blacks’.⁸ Two years later, on 3 March 1697, William Munday and Mary Sanders, ‘Moores Both’, were married at Holy Trinity, Minories.⁹ On other occasions interracial couples brought infants to church for baptism. On 18 November 1706 three different members of one family were baptized at St John’s in Wapping. Elizabeth Grigg and Phoebe Grigg, aged seven months and ten years respectively, were baptized alongside their mother Ann Grigg, a thirty-year-old native of Barbados. Ann was married to Thomas Grigg of Parrott Alley, almost certainly a White man.¹⁰ London was home to both Black and interracial couples who formed families and households whose simple daily lives would have been impossible in the developing plantation colonies.

But many of London’s population of people of colour were single, and most were young and separated from their birth families. Yet the surviving records enable us to learn more about enslavers such as Sir William than about Samuel Cesar, Jane or the man identified only as ‘Sir William Poole’s Moore’. We know that these people of colour were present in London, and that the adults who were baptized or married had chosen to engage with the local Christian community. Many of London’s people of colour were in their teens or even adults when they were baptized, and perhaps this suggests that baptism was their own choice rather than something required of enslaved children by their masters and mistresses. Undoubtedly, there were more such people present in London who were not identified by race in the surviving records, or for whom such records no longer survive. Many more are absent because they were not baptized, married or buried while they were in London and so do not feature in these particular records. However, the people of colour who were recorded in parish registers attest to what Daina Ramey Berry compellingly describes as the ‘soul values’ of enslaved people, the determination to resist and reject bondage on the basis of a defiant awareness of their ‘internal, personal, and spiritual valuation of themselves’.¹¹

Even if we know little about members of London’s community of people of colour, we can trace the contours of that community. We know a good deal about gender and a little about the age groups of the people appearing in church records. The gender of 664 of the 705 is clear, and of these 24 per cent were female and 76 per cent male. Precise ages were rarely recorded, but in 353 cases it is apparent whether the person recorded was an adult or a child. Of these just over half (181) were boys, girls or ‘young’, while 172 were aged 19 or older. However, given that these records tended to include only the ages of children, it is probable that most of a further 328 whose age was not recorded were adults. Among those aged 18 or younger, 134 (77 per cent) were male and 41 (23 per cent) female. A total of 172 records clearly indicated that the person being baptized, married or buried was an adult, and of these 45 (26 per cent) were female and 127 (74 per cent) male. It seems clear that males constituted approximately three quarters of London’s community of people of colour.

These records are generally imprecise about the status of the person who was being baptized, married or buried. Some were probably enslaved, others were free, and many more were in a liminal state between these categories, bound to serve a particular person and living much as an employed English servant might live, yet perhaps believing themselves vulnerable to being sent or taken back to a colony where enslaved status might easily be reimposed upon them. Only one was explicitly identified as a ‘slave’, a word used surprisingly rarely to describe people of colour in seventeenth-century London. In November 1662 Emanuell Fernande, buried in the graveyard of St Benet Fink in the City of London’s Broad Street ward, was identified in the parish register as ‘Mr Adams friends slave a blackamore’.¹² Situated on Threadneedle Street perhaps fifty yards north-east of the Royal Exchange, this church was in the heart of the City of London’s mercantile district.

In other instances the parish registers hint at enslaved status, or at least a subservient role that was qualitatively different from that of White servants. Margaret and her daughter Katherine were both baptized on 15 December 1710 in St John’s in Hackney. Only their first names were recorded, and Margaret was described as ‘Madm. Mitchel’s Negro’.¹³ The lack of a surname and the possessive label both suggest that Madame Mitchell may well have regarded Margaret and Katherine as her property, not least because free servants who had children were usually fired by their employers. Similarly, on 7 June 1696 Daniel Locker was baptized at St Paul’s in Shadwell in the heart of the East End shipping districts. Locker was described in the register as being twenty years old and ‘a Black that serves Mr Robert Davies a Shipwright against ye Mast Yard’ in Wapping, which lay adjacent to Shadwell.¹⁴ Two months earlier Phenex Negro was baptized in the same church, and he was described in the register as ‘a Black that Served to Jane Moss Tobacconist’, again in Wapping.¹⁵

For some people of colour, baptism may have served as the prelude or the postscript to escape. Church membership represented integration into a vital institution of English society and recognition of the equality of Black and White parishioners in the eyes of God. Church membership must have dissolved some of what made people of colour appear different and alien, and enabled the creation of friendship and community across racial lines, all of which may have facilitated escape. The baptismal records of the church of St Philip and Jacob in Bristol show that on 16 April 1693 ‘Daniel Poole a black’ was baptized. Four months later an advertisement appeared in the London Gazette for ‘A Negro Boy aged about 20, speaks English very well, his name is Daniel Poole … run away from his Master at Bristol’. Apparently Poole was taken up, for two months later another advertisement in the London Gazette sought out ‘A Negro Boy named Daniel Poole’; the different clothing described in these two advertisements suggests two separate escape attempts rather than one prolonged absence.¹⁶ We cannot know whether or not baptism had encouraged this young man to try repeatedly to escape but it may have given him some sense of membership of a community beyond his master’s household. His determination to be free is clear, and the advertisements in the London Gazette suggest that Poole’s pursuers believed he was headed for or was already in the capital.

Regardless of their status, Africans and South Asians were a conspicuous part of the workforce in the maritime communities that served ships going to and returning from West Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean and North American colonies. Boys and men of colour served on these ships, sometimes as the enslaved property of ship captains and officers and at other times as free men, and they too appear in these parish records. A scant ten words describes the death and burial of one such unnamed man at St John’s in Wapping. The man’s cause of death, his racial identity, and where he had worked were recorded simply as ‘fever d[ied] black man from on bord of a ship’, and his age, status and identity are lost forever.¹⁷

Peter Black, who was recorded as ‘Mr Lowman’s Blackmore’, was buried in the churchyard of St George the Martyr in Southwark in November 1692.¹⁸ In Greenwich, the fast-growing hub of Royal Naval and commercial shipping (Figure 13), Zephania was identified as ‘an Indian belonging to Mrs Elizabeth Johnson’ when she was baptized in February 1687.¹⁹ Elizabeth Johnson’s father-in-law had inherited a large shipbuilding yard in Blackwall, close to Greenwich, and her uncle had served in Bengal in the East India Company before becoming involved with the West African trade. He was eventually appointed governor of the British forts in West Africa, dying in 1719 in Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast.²⁰ Also in Greenwich ‘Captain Robinsons black-boy’ William Christian was baptized on 5 February 1662, one of a number of boys of colour in these parish records who were identified with ship captains.²¹ Twenty years later Theophilus Foy, ‘a blackamore belonging to Capt John Castle’, was baptized in the same parish.²² Other boys and men of colour were identified with ships as well as captains, as in the case of William Newport who was baptized at St Dunstan and All Saints Church in Stepney in 1694, and was recorded in the parish register as ‘a Negro belonging to Capt Lucas the Ship Elizabeth’.²³

Figure 13. Jan Griffier, A View of Greenwich from the River with Many Boats, 1700–10, Yale Center for British Art.

On occasion it is possible to speculate beyond the few words of these parish records. For example, we cannot know – but it seems probable – that the unnamed ‘Black servant to Captn Beasley’ who was buried at St Dunstan and All Saints in Stepney on 12 August 1704 was the property of Edward Beasley, captain of the London-based slave ship Betty.²⁴ The ship had transported 190 West Africans to Jamaica two years earlier.²⁵ One of the two owners of that ship was Benjamin Quelch, from whom an unnamed sixteen-year-old ‘Negro Maid’ had escaped in December 1702, not long after the Betty had returned to London.²⁶ Almost a month later she remained at liberty and a second advertisement named her as Bess: both of these notices promised a guinea reward to anybody who would bring her or information about her to Lloyd’s coffee house.²⁷ Thus the evidence suggests that it is possible that both Bess and the unfortunate boy buried in the East End two years later had suffered on the slave-trading voyage of the Betty and then been brought back to London as the personal property of the ship’s captain and owner.

Elizabeth was described as ‘Eliz: Capt: Swans black’ in the record of her burial in the churchyard of St Nicholas Deptford in December 1683. She may well have sailed on the London-based slave-trading ship Carlisle which, under the command of Captain Charles Swan, had brought over 400 enslaved people from Cabinda on the Angola coast to Jamaica. Having arrived in Jamaica in September 1681, the Carlisle would have been back in London later that year or in early 1682.²⁸ Maria Moore, her race furnishing her with an imposed last name for the register, was baptized at St Dunstan and All Saints in Stepney on 24 January 1694. She was identified in the parish register as ‘Maria Moore a black Servant to Capt: James Brusser of Ratcliffe 19 years old’.²⁹ This was probably James Brusser, who captained several slave-trading voyages. Thus Maria Moore may well have been on Brusser’s ship the Blossom, no more than sixteen years old when the ship reached Jamaica in October 1689, before she arrived with him in London in the early summer of 1690.³⁰

As Maria shows, not all the people revealed in London parish records as having been enslaved by or bound to ship captains were young males. An unnamed ‘Negro Girl of Capt Listock of Limehouse’ was laid to rest in the church yard of St Dunstan and All Saints in Stepney in late March 1690.³¹ Three other people were buried on the same day, all of whom were graced with a name. Girls and women of colour may have served as domestic servants to ship captains, especially if these men had wives and families. However, these unfortunate people may very well have been sexual victims: young women enslaved or held in bound service to men were even more vulnerable to rape than White servants were. We may glimpse some of the suffering endured by one woman of colour who chose to end her own life. Perhaps the pastor of the church of St George the Martyr in Southwark recognized this when he laid to rest in consecrated ground the body of ‘Sarah Goulding a blackamore [who had] hang[ed] herself’. Normally anyone who committed the mortal sin of suicide was denied a Christian burial.³²

Most of the younger Black people who served Londoners were male, however, and many of these attended elite members of society. On 6 December 1691 ‘Daniel Mingoe an Indian boy servant to Lady Ann Godwin’ was baptized in the church of St Katherine Cree in Aldgate ward of the City of London.³³ Sinoben, identified as ‘the Earl of Dorsetts Blackamoor’, was buried on 30 January 1664 at St Bride’s Fleet Street on the western edge of the City of London, while in 1697 fifteen-year-old Thomas Williams was baptized in St Alfege in Greenwich as ‘A Negro belonging to Sir Richard Reynes’.³⁴ On 12 November 1684 mother and daughter Margaret and Frances were baptized at St Pancras, Euston Road. They were described in the register as ‘Two Blacks of my Ld Baltimore’s’, and a few months later on 12 March 1685 ‘Thomas a black child of Lord Baltimore’ was buried in the church yard of St Giles in the Fields.³⁵ Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, had returned from Maryland to London in 1684, presumably bringing these enslaved servants with him. The Lords Baltimore had endeavoured to bring as many enslaved Africans to Maryland as possible to support the colony’s rapidly growing tobacco plantations. Lord Baltimore’s proprietorial control of the colony founded by his grandfather would end with the Glorious Revolution a few years later, but he and his family’s control of enslaved people like Thomas would last far longer.³⁶

Even though the racial descriptors recorded by London clerics in these parish records were often quite imprecise, we can still detect some patterns. Sixty-eight people were identifiably South Asian, and these people were usually described as Indian or East Indian. One of these was also described as mulatto, while thirteen South Asians were labelled as Black and two described as ‘negro’. In general, however, the term ‘negro’ appears to have been reserved for Africans and their descendants, and 175 people were recorded in London’s parish registers with this term appended to their names or records. Even more Africans were described in some way as ‘moor’, including 157 as ‘blackamoor’, thirty-eight as moor, and three as ‘tawnymoor’. Twenty-five were identified as African born, often with references to specific locations such as Guinea or Madagascar, while others were labelled more generically as Ethiopian or Barbary. The largest single racial descriptor was ‘black’, which was used as a single-word racial descriptor in 225 records, as well as in some records as a secondary label, as in the case of ‘Negro black’ or ‘Indian black’, evidence that the term was applied to both Africans and South Asians.³⁷

During these early days of England’s empire only a handful of people were identified as having originated in the American and Caribbean colonies; probably more came from these areas, but this was not mentioned in church records. Isaac Sandy was baptized on 15 March 1702 in the church of St Mary in Stratford-le-Bow in the East End, and described in the register as ‘a Black about 18 yeares of age. Born at Barbados’. Also baptized in the church on this day was fourteen-year-old Thomas Adams, also born in Barbados, and following these records appear the words ‘these 2 boys Belongs to Mr Barwick Marchant’.³⁸ Anthony Black, who was baptized at St Nicholas in Deptford on 28 January 1704, appears in the parish register as ‘an Indian born at Maddras’, one of a number of people identified as coming from a specific part of South Asia.³⁹

These church records identify Black people across Greater London from Greenwich to Putney and from St Pancras to Lambeth, and more than anything else they suggest the ubiquity of Africans and South Asians in early modern London. However, almost half (45 per cent) of the baptisms, marriages and burials were recorded in the registers of parishes within the City of London itself, an area of little more than one square mile. This was where many of the merchants and investors in colonial ventures lived and worked, as did those who worked for them in their homes and businesses. The shipping and mercantile areas of the East End accounted for a further 23 per cent, while 13 per cent came from the communities hugging the southern banks of the Thames from London Bridge eastward to Greenwich. The remainder were from the areas to the immediate west, north and south of the City of London, with 16 per cent in and around Westminster and 3 per cent in London’s other suburbs.

Certain parishes and wards were particularly prominent, especially in the areas to the south and east of the City adjacent to the Thames. Sixty-eight of the records came from Stepney, thirty-four from Whitechapel, and twenty-five from Wapping, while south of the river twenty-five came from Southwark, and nineteen each from Deptford and Greenwich. While baptisms, marriages and burials of people of colour took place all over the London area, there was a noticeable concentration of such ceremonies to the west of the city near Westminster. A remarkable fifty-three took place at St Martin in the Fields and a further thirty-seven at St Giles in the Fields, two thirds of them baptisms and the remainder all burials. Although some affluent areas were developing around this part of London, the ‘Rookery’ was a particularly poor area: perhaps the label ‘St Giles blackbirds’ applied to residents of this area may have signalled the presence of a noticeable population of colour.⁴⁰ Whatever the reason, the churches of St Martin in the Fields and St Giles in the Fields were clearly popular among members of London’s Black population.

The marriages of Black adults and the christening of Black children all suggest that some people of colour were free and independent, but many more who appear in London’s parish records were enslaved or bound in service and many lived in a liminal state between these two extremes. In most cases the precise status of people of colour recorded in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century church records for the London area is far from clear, but taken together the records clearly indicate the existence of a small yet significant community of Africans and Asians in the capital. The City of London and the maritime communities of the East End and south of the Thames were still relatively small, occupying no more than a few square miles in total, and so, although London’s Black population was heavily outnumbered by White people, it would not have been unusual to see men, women and children of colour living and working in the capital.

The apparent otherness of these men, women and children may encourage historians to see them as outsiders and strangers with limited agency, within yet apart from London society.⁴¹ Many of Restoration London’s Black people were what Ira Berlin described as ‘Atlantic Creoles’, people who ‘might bear the features of Africa, Europe or the Americas in whole or in part’ but whose new cosmopolitan identities transcended their origins.⁴² While parish records, and most especially the newspaper advertisements at the heart of this book, provide evidence of the subordination of bound people of colour, they simultaneously suggest agency within and degrees of membership in London society. On the one hand, in the heart of London enslavers and their allies were working to consolidate the institution of racial slavery, an effort designed to confirm the subordinate status of many people of colour. On the other hand, the very existence of these parish records and newspaper advertisements serve as evidence that Black people, many of them children, sought a degree of agency, whether through baptism, marriage or resistance to their bondage by escaping. Even in death their burial in London’s churchyards marked these people as Londoners – men, women and children who were accorded the same Christian rituals as any White person. Thus ‘John Cooke, a Blackamoor’ was baptized at St Peter, Cornhill, on 7 November 1683; fourteen years later ‘John Cooke a man a black from off Salt Peter bank’ was buried at St Mary Whitechapel.⁴³ Saltpetre Bank was a small area of southern Whitechapel, close to Wapping, and it lay less than one mile east of St Peter, Cornhill. It would be extremely unlikely that two men named John Cooke would be identified as Black in adjacent London parishes some fourteen years apart, and thus these records provide evidence of the relatively long period of life and work of this one late seventeenth-century Black Londoner.

Escape was the means by which many Black Londoners grasped at the possibility of independence. Freedom seekers hoped to improve their situations by asserting control over the conditions of their life and employment – and over their own bodies. They did so in London, and, while some sought to escape the city, many others appear to have anticipated a life of freedom living and working as free Black Londoners in the heart of a nation that was rapidly expanding involvement in and profit from the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery.