1. London

LONDON is a World by it self. We daily discover in it more new Countries and surprizing Singularities, than in all the Universe besides. There are among the Londiners so many Nations differing in Manners, Customs, and Religions, that the Inhabitants themselves don’t know a quarter of them.¹

The dramatic expansion of London took place during the seventeenth century despite significant trauma and dislocation. In January 1642 Charles I fled from London and within six months the English Civil War had begun, a conflict that soon expanded into the Wars of the Three Kingdoms which engulfed the entire British Isles. Seven years later Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in London, heralding a decade of republican government under the direction of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Several years of chaos and conflict followed Cromwell’s death in 1658, paving the way for the restoration of Charles II and the monarchy in 1660.

Despite the two decades of governmental stability resulting from the Restoration, London remained subject to further chaos. A major outbreak of bubonic plague may have killed as many as a quarter of London’s citizens between the spring of 1665 and the summer of 1666. No sooner had the plague receded than the Great Fire of London broke out in September 1666, gutting the heart of the City of London and destroying more than 13,000 buildings. Between 1679 and 1681 the Exclusion Crisis raged as Protestants in parliament sought to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic brother James, then duke of York, from succession to the throne. While this effort failed, it presaged the opposition to James II when he acceded to the throne in 1685, and the new king was deposed three years later in the Glorious Revolution. The succession of James’s Protestant daughter Mary and her husband, William of Orange, finally brought stability to London, although the new political order remained vulnerable to the constant threat of rebellion in Scotland and Ireland and invasion by France in support of James II and his descendants.

Despite all of this chaos, death and destruction, London grew dramatically during the second half of the seventeenth century, becoming Europe’s largest city and the metropolitan hub of England’s fast-developing empire. Between 1600 and 1720 there was ‘a prodigious Increase of the Inhabitants’ from about 200,000 to perhaps more than 600,000, and as many as two thirds of English urban dwellers resided in the capital.² London was the permanent base of the king, parliament and an elite and mercantile class with money, expertise and wealth: situated on a river navigable by ocean-going vessels, the city was uniquely well positioned as a hub for empire and trade.³ Yet it remained a deadly place, and throughout the century more people died than were born in the city. Only a constant influx of new residents from all over the British Isles and beyond made the city’s growth possible.

London was chaotic, loud and vibrant. A cacophony of dozens of church bells, criers selling their wares, craftsmen and women manufacturing and selling goods, horses and carriages navigating the narrow streets, animals and birds being taken to the markets, and tens of thousands of Londoners going about their day: all of these and more overwhelmed the senses of residents and visitors. They smelled fires and all manner of foods baking, cooking or being offered for sale in the streets, the musty odour of the woven fabrics worn by Londoners, the strong stench of pitch and tar from the riverside, and the smell of wood as carpenters and builders constructed and repaired the constantly expanding city.

Demographic expansion was matched by geographic growth (Figure 2). London had two historical centres: the ancient City of London was composed of the square mile or so within and immediately outside the ancient Roman walls; and the area around Westminster, just over a mile west of the City, was the home of the royal court and parliament and of a growing number of expensive houses and shops. Over the course of the seventeenth century each of these areas expanded, with rapid urban growth uniting the City and Westminster, pushing north towards Hampstead and Hackney and south beyond Lambeth and Southwark, while new urban growth related to international trade, shipbuilding and a host of related occupations grew up along the river to the east of the City and south of the river from Southwark to as far as Greenwich. In present-day London much of what remains of the early modern city is obscured and even St Paul’s cathedral, so prominent in Claes Jansz Visscher’s early seventeenth-century rendering of the cityscape (Figure 3), has been overwhelmed by the skyscrapers and monumental structures of modern London captured by Robin Reynolds from the same vantage point as Visscher almost four centuries later.

Figure 2. Joannes de Ram, Londini Angliæ regni metropolis novissima & accuratissima (Amsterdam, 1690), University of Michigan, Clark Library. The mercantile, maritime and shipbuilding communities can be seen spreading out from the Tower of London into the East End along the northern bank of the Thames, and spreading eastward from Southwark towards Greenwich (off the map) south of the river. To the west the previously separate City of London and Westminster are shown to be connected by urban growth.

Figure 3. Claes Jansz Visscher, Londinum florentissima Britanniae urbs (c.1625), Folger Shakespeare Library: Robin Reynolds, Visscher Redrawn (2016). Reproduced by permission of the artist. The two images show the City of London from the same vantage point in the early 17th and the early 21st centuries. The two images were merged by Anthony King.

London’s citizenry

The people who inhabited seventeenth-century London, however, are even more elusive than the city that they inhabited. Kings, courtiers and a few of the city’s more affluent citizens have left us portraits of themselves and their families, and some of the buildings they constructed and the things they owned have survived, allowing us to feel something of the tenor of their lives. Others have left diaries and documentary records or can be traced in court or ecclesiastical records. But, although a few seventeenth-century Londoners speak to us through the archives, most of their contemporaries have left little or even no trace. We can imagine their lives in only the broadest and vaguest terms and usually not as individuals but as members of a group of workers, inhabitants of a neighbourhood or parishioners of a particular church. And enslaved and bound people of colour are among the most invisible of seventeenth-century Londoners.

While the city was a vast and fast-growing physical entity, it was also a lived experience, and myriad residents and visitors faced and understood the city in often dramatically different ways.⁴ London was, like England more broadly, hierarchical and stratified, a society of deep and abiding inequality. The London of a member of the monarch’s household in one of the city’s royal palaces was a world apart from the London of a printer and his family in Cheapside, of a merchant’s family in the heart of the City, of a prostitute and her child across the river near the theatre or of a sailor and his family in Stepney.⁵ Residents and visitors inhabited the city in different ways, some rarely moving beyond the communities in which they lived and worked, others ranging further afield for work or pleasure.⁶ As the city expanded, many of those who could afford larger houses moved west, including courtiers, nobles, gentry, government officials and merchants. Those who lived with and served them experienced quite different lives from the servants living and working in the densely packed medieval heart of the ancient City or in the fast-growing mercantile and shipbuilding centres hugging the northern and southern banks of the Thames to the east.⁷

The upper echelons of London society consisted of the monarch and court, titled nobility, knights, esquires and the broad category of ‘gentlemen’. Together with their immediate families, this wealthy and powerful group constituted little more than about 2 per cent of the population. Some of them inhabited apartments in the city’s various royal palaces while others occupied houses in and around London and Westminster. Below them was a broad category of citizens and burgesses, including merchants, business owners and craftsmen, ranging from the very wealthy to the quite impoverished. And below these middling sorts of people was the largest category of Londoners, including workers such as day labourers, sailors and rivermen, artificers, apprentices and servants.⁸

Merchants were at the heart of London’s wealth and growth, and by the mid-1670s they constituted as many as 10 per cent of householders in the City of London. The London Directory in 1677 recorded that 93 per cent of those engaged in overseas trade were based within the City, many of them clustered to the east of St Paul’s, close to the Royal Exchange, the Customs House and the twenty-one Legal Quays between London Bridge and the Tower of London. To prevent smuggling, all dutiable goods had to be landed at these quays, which by the 1680s serviced some 2,000 ships per annum. At times ships were moored three deep, while the larger ships bringing bulkier and heavier goods from the Caribbean, North America and South Asia were too large for the quays and were serviced by lighters. Trade with the plantation colonies grew exponentially: tobacco imports grew in value from £2 million annually to £11 million in 1676 and £22.5 million in 1719, while the value of sugar imports trebled between the 1660s and 1680s alone.⁹

Servants lived and worked in virtually all of London’s households, from those of wealthy elites to the more modest homes of the middling sort: one historian estimates that servants comprised well over one third of all household residents. Elite households often contained a number of domestic servants, some of them dressed in smart liveries to reflect the wealth and prestige of their masters. The larger London homes may have included business working space such as an office, workshop or shop on the ground floor; a kitchen and dining room on the floor above; and two or three floors of bedrooms, including garret rooms for servants. Wealthier households that did not contain business and work spaces could devote the ground-floor rooms to living space in which servants catered to the needs of the householder and his or her family.¹⁰

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries England shifted from a shortage to a surplus of labour, and many young people made their way to London in search of work.¹¹ English authorities required all people to work productively under the direction of a head of household, and most young people between their mid-teens and mid-twenties laboured as servants in husbandry in the countryside or as domestic servants in urban settings, while yet more were employed as apprentices. All told, servants constituted as much as 15 per cent of the nation’s population. Parliament, the courts and local officials sought to ensure that everyone was productively situated within nuclear family households, thereby addressing the needs of the rapidly increasing English population.¹²

Apprenticeship (predominantly male but some female) gave young people a potentially superior status to servants, and after a set period an apprentice might gain the status of a skilled craftsman and a fixed status within a profession and guild. Domestic service was a more malleable and less protected form of work under the authority of heads of household.¹³ Such work varied according to the size and nature of the household, ranging from well-dressed maids, footmen, butlers, pages and other servants attending to the immediate personal needs of London’s wealthiest residents to those who undertook all manner of grinding household work in the homes and businesses of less affluent employers.¹⁴ Using church court depositions, one historian has estimated that between 1660 and 1750 some 43 per cent of London’s domestic servants worked in the households of knights and nobility; 20 per cent in the homes of gentry; 14 per cent in the homes and workplaces of people in the victualling trades; and 5 per cent for army or navy officers and their families. The remaining 18 per cent worked for merchants, professionals, textile and clothes producers and vendors, builders, medics, shopkeepers, transport, widows and various others.¹⁵

Domestic servants in seventeenth-century London were overwhelmingly female; one study of two London parishes in 1695 revealed that 81 per cent of servants were girls and young women.¹⁶ Indeed, most seventeenth-century English women spent several years before marriage as servants.¹⁷ In rural areas girls left their homes to enter service as early as thirteen or fourteen years of age, but those who travelled to London seeking work tended to be in their later teens.¹⁸ For young girls domestic service could function as a kind of paid apprenticeship for marriage, for after several years in service they would have learned a great deal about running a household and saved money for a dowry or to help establish their own household once they were married. Others might have learned something of a particular business, including keeping stores, taverns or inns.¹⁹ Some of them remained servants: when Samuel and Elisabeth Pepys occupied their first London home in 1658 they were accompanied by their fourteen-year-old servant Jane Birch, who continued to work intermittently for Pepys for the remainder of his life.²⁰

Apprenticeship was the path for young boys to learn life skills and each year thousands of boys were apprenticed in London, while many more of those working in London households were simply servants who were earning and saving money rather than gaining the more marketable skills of professional craftsmen.²¹ While women and girls dominated the servant workforce, male servants were rather more common in elite households, and an investigation of the occupations of employers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries found that the servants of the nobility, knights, gentlemen and the like were 42 per cent male. Male servants in elite households might identify themselves by occupational labels such as footman, butler, groom, coachman or page, whereas young females rarely identified themselves in these terms and were more inclined to say that they ‘got their living by going to service’.²²

Well-dressed and expensively liveried male servants advertised the wealth and success of those they served and attended. Such clothing was designed to be seen and these attractively attired boys and young men worked both at home and out and about in the capital.²³ As Pepys became a wealthier and more significant government official, he and his wife employed more servants, and these included White boys such as Wayneman Birch and then Thomas Edwards: each was dressed in Pepys’s livery and accompanied him about the city and ran errands on his behalf.²⁴ The fourteen-year-old unnamed ‘Black Boy’ who escaped from the shipbuilder Jonas Shish in 1683 was dressed not as the shipwrights who worked for Shish but as a liveried personal servant, in a green jacket and trousers, with a silver collar around his neck attesting to his enslaved status and Shish’s wealth and standing.²⁵

John Baker’s diary, although recorded later in the eighteenth century, provides evidence of the kinds of work required of enslaved or bound servants attired in this fashion. When Baker returned to England from the Caribbean, he brought with him Jack Beef, an enslaved man whom he had purchased as a child. During the 1750s and early 1760s Baker’s diary regularly included references to Beef and his work, from collecting and delivering correspondence, goods and horses to attending Baker’s sons at their school and preparing dressed turtle for formal dinners. On one occasion Baker recorded that ‘Mr. Robinson, the taylor, came and took measure of me, and of Jack Beef for a livery’, the uniform that marked him as the personal servant of a wealthy man.²⁶

A significant number of men and boys worked in or were connected to the building trades in Restoration London. The rapid growth of London, the rebuilding of the City in the wake of the great fire and the shift from medieval wooden to the new brick and stone buildings of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries all created a great deal of work for those working in or supporting the construction industry. In the aftermath of the fire the medieval guilds lost most of their control over building, and there were tremendous opportunities for skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labourers. While bricklayers, carpenters and stonemasons were particularly important, a huge amount of lesser-skilled labour helped build and rebuild London. Despite the lack of evidence, boys and men of colour were probably also employed in rebuilding London, and the need for such labour may have provided work opportunities for some of those who escaped from enslavement.²⁷

As the commercial hub of England’s fast-growing empire, London was a centre of shipping and home to many sailors and workers in maritime and related occupations, including adolescents and men of colour. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries witnessed a massive increase in England’s merchant marine: in 1629 English merchant ships of more than 100 tons accounted for approximately 115,000 tons of shipping, but by 1702 London’s merchant shipping alone had increased to some 140,000 tons. Over just two decades between 1664 and 1683 the annual number of ships clearing London bound for foreign ports increased from 136 to 423. Furthermore, between 1650 and 1700 the Royal Navy more than doubled in size, and between 1633 and about 1697 the number of Royal Navy sailors increased fourfold from just under 9,500 to about 42,000.²⁸ The rapidly increasing number and size of England’s ocean-going ships created a constant need for sailors, and during this period seafaring became a regularized employment for an ever-growing group of labourers. During the 1660s London’s Atlantic fleet alone accounted for approximately 3,240 seafarers, a number that had almost doubled by the mid-1680s, and many more seafarers worked on the trade routes to South Asia, the Mediterranean, Baltic and Continental Europe.²⁹

These sailors were an important category of London workers, concentrated in the riverside communities of the East End and south of the Thames between Southwark and Greenwich. Seafarers, shipbuilders, dock workers and all the associated trades and communities expanded along the northern and southern banks of the Thames east of the City of London, and it was these boys and men and the ships they sailed that connected London and England with the rest of the world. Many English sailors first went to sea between the ages of about twelve and sixteen as servants or ‘boys’. The Navigation Act of 1660 restricted foreigners to no more than one quarter of the positions aboard ship, an implicit recognition that ocean-going ship crews were often multinational and multiracial, sometimes including enslaved boys and men. In practice these restrictions were relaxed during wartime and when ship crews were reduced by disease in such places as South Asia, West Africa and the Caribbean.³⁰ It was a hard and dangerous profession, especially for those undertaking voyages of two years to South Asia or of a year or longer to West Africa and the Caribbean or to the American colonies, where many of these boys and men succumbed to tropical diseases. Seafarers were immediately recognizable, often walking with the peculiar gait of men who spent years on the rolling decks of ocean-going ships. They wore distinctive clothing well suited to their working conditions: loose and baggy breeches, shirts, heavy jackets and caps. Often their clothing was tarred or oiled to keep the wearer as warm and dry as possible. Seafarers were distinctive, marked by their clothing, their language and their shared experiences of life and work in distant places. They were a multinational group, including a significant number of adolescents and men of colour.³¹

Most of London’s growing population of people of colour worked as the domestic and personal servants of elite men. Mingo was one such servant, and he and others like him knew the capital well. Mingo served Sir William Batten until the latter’s death in 1667. Batten was a former naval officer who served as surveyor of the navy and who sat in the House of Commons.³² Mingo lived with Batten in a house on Seething Lane by the Navy Office building in the eastern part of the City, immediately to the west of the Tower of London and just a few hundred yards north of the Thames. He regularly accompanied Batten to business meetings and social encounters in taverns, coffee houses and private residences across the city and in nearby maritime communities. He often strode out on his own, carrying messages, papers and goods for Batten. When Batten visited Peter Pett’s shipyards, or when he enjoyed a riotous dinner at the Dolphin tavern, Mingo was there; when Batten sent messages or instructions to his associate Samuel Pepys, Mingo carried them. Mingo was walking alone through a maritime community when he was accosted by a group of sailors who stole the expensive cloak he was carrying.³³ If we imagine hundreds of people like Mingo, men, women and children of colour who lived and worked in London, and who were baptized, married and buried in local churches, we can begin to sense the Black presence in Restoration London, people who were not simply present in the city but who inhabited it. While they were a minority, these people were sufficiently common to be unremarkable, making the escape of enslaved people in London a possibility.

London’s public sphere

While Londoners knew their own particular wards, parishes and neighbourhoods, few were familiar with the entirety of the fast-growing metropolis.³⁴ Commentators lauded the city’s expansion as evidence of England’s growing wealth and power, and within the imperial metropolis residents might see and hear people speaking French, Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish, as well as Turkish and a variety of North African, West African, South Asian and even indigenous American languages.³⁵ The city’s imperial and mercantile operations radiated out from a relatively small part of the City of London centred on Cornhill. Within and spreading out from that area, three institutions were of central importance in late seventeenth-century London for business, commerce and the nation’s fast-growing empire: the printed news sheets and newspapers, coffee houses and the Royal Exchange. Figure 4 shows the concentration of key financial and imperial institutions and coffee houses located within an area of little more than 2,000 square yards. Print media, coffee shops and the Royal Exchange functioned as vital nexuses for the transmission of news and commercial information and for the conduct of business in Restoration London, and were of particular significance in the area surrounding the Royal Exchange. Many of those in London who owned enslaved people either worked closely with or were themselves people who worked in and around these institutions, and the area was a vital hub for the business of advertising and recapturing enslaved and bound freedom seekers.

The Royal Exchange

The Royal Exchange first opened in 1571 and continued in operation until it was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. A second building was rapidly erected on the same site, opening in 1669 and continuing to operate there until well into the nineteenth century: only St Paul’s cathedral cost more to rebuild, a clear indication of the importance of the exchange (Figure 5).³⁶ The Royal Exchange was the single most significant venue for merchants and members of the business and trading communities, and it was a vital base for the colonization, trade and empire that was transforming England from a minor European to a major global power.³⁷ At the turn of the eighteenth century one observer described the exchange and what occurred there as follows:

Shops and businesses filled the building’s two floors, but much of what made it significant occurred in the courtyard and public places where one would think all the World was converted into News-Mongers and Intelligencers; for that’s the first Salutation among all Mankind that frequent that Place: What news from Scandaroon and Aleppo? Says the Turkey Marchant. What Price bears Currants at Zant? Apes at Tunis? … What News of such a Ship? Say’s the Insurer.³⁸

Figure 4. Institutions around the Royal Exchange shown in detail from London &c. Actually Surveyed, by Wm. Morgan (London, 1682), Library of Congress (additions by the author). The East India Company was at EIC from 1638 onwards; the Royal African Company was at RAC1 between the 1660s and 1677, and at RAC2 from 1677 onwards; and the Bank of England was at BANK from 1694. Key coffee houses around the Royal Exchange were Jamaica (J1); Garraway’s (G1); Jonathan’s (J2); Lloyd’s (L); Maryland (M1); Virginia (V1); Carolina (C1); Bowman’s (B1); Cole’s (C2); Elford’s (E); Batson’s (B2); Marine (M2); Royal (R); Garter (G2); Vernon’s (V2). There were many other coffee houses.

Figure 5. Robert White, ‘The Royall Exchange of London’ (London, 1671), Folger Shakespeare Library.

Figure 6. Detail from Wenceslaus Hollar, ‘Byrsa Londinensis vulgo the Royal Exchange’ (1644?), Folger Shakespeare Library. A female hawker selling newspapers is visible on the left at the front of the crowd. The illustrations of freedom seekers by Triona Lawrence are based on newspaper advertisement descriptions of freedom seekers used in this book and have been inserted by the author to give an impression of such people trailing their enslavers in this environment.

Different areas of the Royal Exchange were associated with particular trade goods or trading regions, as illustrated by a January 1690 advertisement in the London Gazette for ‘a Sugar House, ready fitted with three Pans, and all Utensils’ and available for rent in Southwark. The advertisement enjoined interested parties to make enquiries ‘at Exchange time on the Barbadoes Walk’ of the Royal Exchange.³⁹ A 1677 directory of the names and addresses of London’s bankers and merchants included some who went so far as to give the various ‘walks’ on the exchange as their place of business, as in the case of John Gold, Thomas Gurden and George Ravenscroft on the Turkey Walk, and Sir Matthew Halworthy, Thomas Hardwick and Sir Stephen White on the Spanish Walk.⁴⁰ The New England, Carolina, Virginia, Jamaica and Barbados walks were clustered together in the south-western corner of the exchange.

Coffee Houses

As adjuncts to the Royal Exchange, a large number of coffee houses provided key meeting places for the exchange of news. Pepys went regularly ‘to the Exchange, and a Coffee House’, and on one such occasion he went ‘to the Exchange, and meeting [Captain John] Shales, he and I to the Coffee-house, and there talked of our victualling matters’.⁴¹ Such meetings and interactions were commonplace, and between 1650 and the early 1700s coffee houses spread rapidly in London, providing sociable spaces for Londoners engaged in trade, commerce, government and politics. After little more than a decade London had eighty-two coffee houses, and by the turn of the eighteenth century there were several hundred in the capital.⁴² Avoiding the intoxication and revelry of inns and taverns and serving the colonial staples of coffee and chocolate along with all of the latest news sheets and newspapers, coffee houses were highly significant sites of socialization and business. Brian Cowan has illustrated their significance by exploring the diaries and journals of Londoners to assess how often late seventeenth-century men of business frequented these institutions. Pepys recorded visiting them at least ninety-nine times during the 1660s as they were taking root in the capital. Between 1672 and 1680 Robert Hook made at least sixty-four coffee house visits, and by the turn of the eighteenth century they were so ubiquitous that James Brydges made some 280 coffee house visits over five years between 1697 and 1702. These diarists probably made many more coffee house visits than they recorded in their sometimes perfunctory diary entries. Together they demonstrate that London’s coffee houses were leading venues for accessing printed news and oral rumour, for discussing business deals and professional matters, for ruminating on the arts and sciences, and for more idle social chatter and gossip (Figure 7). News was as integral to coffee houses as the coffee and chocolate they served, and Pepys was typical in going ‘to the Coffee-house to hear newes’.⁴³ Upon arrival, customers greeted their fellow patrons with the question ‘What news?’, and newspapers and newsbooks were placed on tables for customers to read and discuss. The informal gossip and exchange of information was as important as the printed news and, even though he was well connected through his work for the government, Pepys often found coffee houses a faster and more accurate conduit for fresh news.⁴⁴

Figure 7. Interior of a London coffee house, drawing by unknown artist (c.1690–1700). © The Trustees of the British Museum. The illustration conveys how these establishments were simultaneously places of business and of sociability; the newspapers and paperwork shown, and the more open discussions and conversations and the smaller group meetings they allowed, all illustrate how Pepys and his contemporaries used these establishments.

By the end of the seventeenth century Garraway’s, Jonathan’s and Lloyd’s had emerged as particularly important coffee houses, each of which was within a few yards of the exchange and not much further from the offices of the East India and Royal African companies and the Bank of England. Edward Lloyd established his coffee shop on Tower Street in 1686, and Lloyd’s soon became a meeting place for ship owners and captains, the merchants whose goods they transported, and the consortia that provided insurance for these voyages. Lloyd’s moved to Lombard Street in 1691, and within a year had begun publishing lists of shipping. Early in the eighteenth century the group of marine insurance underwriters came together in Lloyd’s rented rooms at the Royal Exchange.⁴⁵ Garraway’s, Jonathan’s and Lloyd’s probably hosted negotiations for the sale and purchase of enslaved people, both those labouring in the colonies and those brought to London.

The small area in which these coffee houses were concentrated is revealed in Morden and Lea’s somewhat impressionistic view of London stretching northwards from the banks of the Thames just west of the northern entrance onto London Bridge (which appears in the south-eastern corner of Figure 8). Much of this area had been destroyed by the Great Fire in 1666, and the monumental column marking the place where the fire started lies just above the bridge. Church towers and spires provided the landmarks that enabled Londoners to situate themselves in the densely built and populated City of London, and they reveal the contours of the financial area in and around Cornhill. The Royal Exchange (marked on the map by the number 71) was one of the few civic buildings as tall as churches, and the central tower atop the main entrance on Cornhill dwarfed the nearby church of St Bartholomew Exchange (number 70). Fewer than 250 feet south of the exchange lay St Edmonds Church (number 76) on Lombard Street. The couple of hundred square yards between the exchange and St Edmonds contained London’s greatest concentration of coffee houses: together with the exchange, these formed the nexus for much of the City’s commercial and colonial business, and they played a pivotal role in newspaper advertisements for the recovery of enslaved freedom seekers.

The immediate environs of the Royal Exchange had the greatest concentration of coffee houses, especially in and around Exchange Alley and Birchin Lane, across Cornhill from the exchange’s southern entrance. Exchange Alley was filled with ‘divers eminent Coffee Houses, as Garraways, Jonathans, Barkers, Elmers, chiefly frequented by Brokers, Stockjobbers, Frenchmen, Jews, as well as other Merchants and Gentlemen’.⁴⁶ Like other financial and imperial institutions such as the Royal Exchange, the Bank of England and the offices of the East India and Royal African companies, coffee houses were male environments, although on occasion women ran or worked in them.

Figure 8. Detail from Rob. Morden and Phil. Lea, ‘A Prospect of London and Westminster’, in London &c. Actually Surveyed, by Wm. Morgan (London, 1682), Library of Congress.

Figure 9. Marcellus Laroon, ‘London Gazette here’ (woman selling newspapers), in The Cryes of the City of London Drawne after the Life (London, 1711), plate 56. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Newspapers

As Jürgen Habermas and others have argued, spaces such as the Royal Exchange and the numerous surrounding coffee shops combined with the printed newspapers that circulated within and beyond such spaces to create a new public sphere.⁴⁷ Printers, particularly those producing newsletters, newspapers and all manner of ephemeral notices and advertisements, fed a steady diet of news and information to readers in their homes and places of work, in taverns and within coffee houses and the Royal Exchange. Printed communication linked the East India Company, the Royal African Company and other operations such as the companies colonizing Virginia and the Carolinas with merchants and investors in the City. Printers were vital in translating the flow of information for consumption by those with interests in commerce as well as for more general audiences. There were a good number of stationers and printers within or relatively close to the exchange and hawkers, many of them female, patrolled the area selling pamphlets and newspapers (Figure 9). ‘For a penny’, enthused Henry Peacham in 1669, ‘you may have all the news in England, and other Countries.’⁴⁸

Readers could find all manner of information on the columns or walls of the exchange. At the end of the seventeenth century one observer noted that within the exchange ‘Advertisements hang as thick round the Pillars of each Walk, as Bells about the Legs of a Morrice-Dancer’.⁴⁹ Brown described the varied subject matter of these printed notices:

Why first here is a Ship to be sold, with all her Tackle and Lading. There are virtuous Maidens that are willing to be transported with William Penn into Maryland, for the Propagation of Quakerism. In another is a Tutor to be hir’d, to instruct any Gentleman’s Children in their own Families … In another Column in a Gilded Frame was a Chamber-Maid that wanted a Service; and over her an old Batchelor that wanted a Housekeeper. On the Sides of these were two less Papers, one containing an Advertisement of a Red-headed Monkey, lost from a Seed Shop in the Strand, with two Guineas Reward to him or her that shall bring him home again with his Tail and Collar on.⁵⁰

In the early eighteenth century the Gresham Committee, which supervised the exchange, charged customers 2 shillings and 6 pence for the display of a notice or an advertisement that had been created by the printers who plied their trade in and near to the exchange.⁵¹ This was a significant amount, more than an unskilled male labourer in the mid seventeenth century might have earned for two days of work.⁵²

Few of these ephemeral printed notices have survived but the advent of newsbooks and newspapers made it possible for printed notices and advertisements to reach far larger audiences beyond the immediate environs of the Royal Exchange. By no means all of these early publications were printed, however, and manuscript newsletters dominated the early to mid seventeenth century and continued well into the period of newspaper publication during the Restoration era. Scribally produced and reproduced newsletters communicated both domestic and international news but did not contain advertisements. However, the notices and advertisements published in the printed newspapers that succeeded newsletters echoed the wealth of information that might have appeared on the printed sheets affixed to walls and columns in the exchange and in coffee houses and taverns throughout London. In March 1681, for example, the master of a ship ‘bound for Ashley River in Carolina’ advertised in a newspaper printed on Cornhill, a stone’s throw from the exchange, for anyone ‘minded to transport themselves, Servants, or Goods’ to contact him ‘at the Jamaica Coffee-House in Miles Ally, and on the Exchange all Exchange time’.⁵³ Any person who found a pocket book with a ‘Silver Pen, and several Writings in it’, whose owner had lost it ‘betwixt the New Exchange and London Bridge’, could return it to the office of a printer in Lombard Street.⁵⁴ A single issue of the City Mercury in January 1675 listed other items lost, numerous houses and commercial properties for sale, a ketch to be auctioned at ‘Mr. Hain’s Coffee-house in Birchin Lane’, and sought out ‘a very good Ship … fit for the Virginia Trade’, inviting anyone with such a vessel to bring details to the City Mercury printing office at the exchange.⁵⁵ Similarly, a single issue of the London Gazette includes notices announcing the departure of ‘about 20 Sail of Merchant Ships’ from the Thames, the recent arrival in Bristol of a ship that had sailed from Antigua, the availability of ‘several Shops proper for all forms of Trades’, bankruptcy proceedings against Seymor Wood and the availability for purchase of ‘several Hundred choice Canary Birds’.⁵⁶ During the second half of the seventeenth century newspapers played an increasingly significant role in the transmission of information, especially in London, and those who did not subscribe could read them in coffee houses or purchase them from female hawkers at the exchange and elsewhere in central London.

The earliest newspaper advertisements appeared in the 1640s within early printed newsbooks.⁵⁷ By the early 1650s, for example, an issue of The Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings of and in relation to the Armies in England, Ireland, and Scotland (London) ended with a half page of advertisements, all for books and pamphlets published and sold by six different London printers.⁵⁸ However, given that many newsbooks were relatively short-lived and with small circulations, advertising in their pages was not necessarily a useful strategy. Of 117 English newsbook titles published between 1649 and 1660, only twenty-nine contained advertisements.⁵⁹ Longer-lasting newspapers such as Mercurius Politicus contained more advertisements, and one issue in June 1659 included numerous notices for books and pamphlets; an advertisement for a nursery supplying fruit trees, plants and flowers; a notice seeking a lost horse; and a runaway advertisement for a servant named Richard Smith. While many servants and apprentices eloped, their employers tended not to advertise for them unless they had committed a crime. In this case Smith had left his employer, a goldsmith in Cheapside, taking with him ‘Pearls and Jewels, and Rings with Diamonds, and much gold to a great value’.⁶⁰ An analysis of advertisements in English newsbooks suggests that well over half were for books; almost 20 per cent for goods and services; about 15 per cent for ‘physicians’ and cures; just under 5 per cent for lost, found or stolen goods; and just under 2.5 per cent for runaways.⁶¹

On Wednesday, 22 November 1665, Pepys recorded in his diary the publication of the first issue of the Oxford Gazette, noting that the newspaper was ‘very pretty, full of newes, and no folly in it’.⁶² When London’s outbreak of plague had diminished sufficiently, the Gazette relocated to the capital, where, as the London Gazette (Figure 10), it would serve as a vital conduit of information for many within and beyond the city. Pepys regularly referred to this newspaper in his diary, sometimes relating how he shared its contents with others or arranged for notices to be published in it.⁶³ At his death Pepys owned an almost complete run for the years between 1665 and 1703, as well as long runs of other London newspapers such as Mercurius Publicus, the Intelligencer and the Newes.⁶⁴ His dependence on this and other newspapers appears to have been typical among political, governmental and commercial figures.

Figure 10. Front page of the four-page London Gazette, 22 August 1687 (<https://www.thegazette.co.uk>).

The London Gazette was England’s first broadsheet newspaper, and during the second half of the seventeenth century its significantly higher print runs and circulation increased the effectiveness of the paid advertisements that appeared regularly on the third and fourth pages. Uniquely, the London Gazette was both a private, commercially produced publication and a state-sanctioned and officially authorized publication run with the authority of the secretary of state. The king and his ministers disapproved of a free press and the Licensing Act of 1662 meant that by the end of 1666 the London Gazette was the nation’s only legal newspaper. The chaos of the Exclusion Crisis resulted in parliament failing to renew the Licensing Act, and between 1679 and 1682 almost forty newspapers exploded onto the scene, but apart from this brief period the London Gazette was London’s and England’s sole legal newspaper between August 1666 and February 1688. Following the accession of James II, the Licensing Act was renewed until the freedom to publish newspapers was restored in 1695, although what printers produced remained carefully monitored.⁶⁵

The publishers of the London Gazette were licensed and paid by the government to produce officially sanctioned news, and according to its colophon they intended the newspaper ‘for the use of some Merchants and Gentlemen’. The periodical press in London was heavily restricted in its reporting of domestic political news and events, advertising was a freer space for publishers and readers, and advertisements rapidly became an integral feature of the newspaper. The printed advertisements displayed in such venues as the Royal Exchange were ephemeral and are largely lost to us, but the advertisements in newsbooks and newspapers have survived. Their potentially huge circulations made the London Gazette and the newspapers that would follow attractive to potential advertisers. Estimates vary widely, from print runs of between 13,000 and 15,000 for each issue of the London Gazette in October 1666 to between 4,000 and 7,000 per issue during the third quarter of 1678. The detailed printers’ accounts for May 1695 to February 1697 and for November 1705 to November 1707 reveal that sales averaged nearly 10,000 copies per issue. This included almost 1,000 issues given away to government officials who were the source of some of the news and information within its pages and who received their copies gratis in return for this service. Other copies were supplied to subscribers, both individuals and institutions such as coffee houses and taverns, while hawkers sold them in and around the exchange and other public venues.⁶⁶

Figure 11. Back page of the four-page London Gazette, 22 August 1687. The advertisements include one for a nine-year-old ‘Negro Boy’ who had eloped and another for two White servants who had eloped, as well as for several lost horses (<https://www.thegazette.co.uk>).

Over the course of the second half of the seventeenth century the volume of newspaper advertising increased steadily, and by 1705 Daniel Defoe observed that ‘the principal support of all the public papers now on foot depends on advertisements’.⁶⁷ Advertisements had rapidly expanded from notices for books to include medical cures and treatments, lost or stolen property including animals, lotteries, houses for sale or rent, auctions, bankruptcy proceedings, various goods for sale, and notices advertising for the apprehension of people who were lost or who had run away, including soldiers, apprentices, servants and bound or enslaved people of colour.⁶⁸ It was in the newspapers of Restoration London that the English Atlantic world’s first runaway slave advertisements appeared, with well over 200 notices for lost or freedom-seeking people of colour, all published before the advent of the very first North American and Caribbean newspapers. Newspapers were destined to play a vital role in the pursuit of escaped enslaved people in colonial North America and the Caribbean, but the practice had been invented, developed and honed for more than half a century in London before its adoption in the first newspapers to appear in England’s New World colonies (Figure 11).⁶⁹

Advertisements for animals that had strayed or been stolen were rather more common than notices for runaway servants. Apart from advertisements for books and other publications, notices concerning missing animals such as horses and dogs were perhaps the most common paid announcements during the first half-century of English newspapers. Sometimes two or three appeared in a single issue, as when three advertisements for a total of seven horses appeared in the 28 August 1656 issue of the Mercurius Politicus. These advertisements rapidly assumed a fairly standard format, including a description of the missing animal and information about where and when they disappeared, to whom and where they could be returned, and the amount of any reward. In June 1656, for example, an advertisement appeared in the Mercurius Politicus for an ‘Iron grey Gelding about fourteen handful high, six years old, with a long Tail, much inclined to white, and a white Face’, believed to have ‘strayed’ from Lockington in Leicester two weeks earlier; anyone returning the horse there or to an address in Cripplegate, London, was promised a reward of twenty shillings. Even Charles II advertised in the newspapers when his ‘black Dog, between a Greyhound and a Spaniell’ was supposed stolen, for the animal ‘would never forsake his Master’.⁷⁰ And, just a few weeks before her wedding to William III of Orange, Charles’s niece Mary lost her much-loved ‘little Spaniel’ named Pert, prompting her own advertisement and detailed description and the promise of a substantial two-guinea reward for the animal’s safe return.⁷¹

The first advertisements for servants who had eloped began appearing in London’s newspapers in the mid-1650s. Many of London’s households included one or more servants but, despite their having contracted to work for one year and to receive wages, these young people and those who employed them did not think of domestic service as simply and solely employment per se, for they were subsumed into the families and households in which they worked. When a man, or less commonly a woman, spoke of his or her household or family they were usually referring to live-in servants as well as family members. Law and custom dictated that servants owed obedience to their employers, and they were subject to the same authority and even physical punishment that a head of household might apply to his children and even his wife.⁷² Despite this patriarchal relationship and the contract between employer and servant, it was not unusual for servants to leave before the end of their service, perhaps to escape punishment, to seek a better situation or a different kind of work, or for any of a wide range of reasons.⁷³

In this labour-rich environment there is little evidence that employers were unduly concerned about contracted servants who eloped from their service. Pepys’s diary records a high rate of turnover among servants in his London household, with some being discharged, others leaving of their own volition and yet more departing on mutual agreement. Over a ten-year period six remained in his service for between a year and eighteen months, seven for between six months and a year, five for between three and six months, and eight for less than three months, including a servant girl who ran away on her second day of work ‘and we heard no more of her’. High turnover among servants was normal, and as newspaper advertisements developed in London during the second half of the seventeenth century only a very small proportion of employers made use of print media in pursuit of servants who had eloped.⁷⁴

However, when servants stole property and took it with them employers were more inclined to publish runaway advertisements, and these notices were aimed at recovery of property and the apprehension and punishment of a thief as much as the return of a contracted servant. One of the earliest advertisements for a runaway servant appeared in the Mercurius Politicus on 11 September 1656, seeking out ‘The Apprentice of John Portman, Goldsmith, at the Unicorn in Lombard-Street’, who ‘is run away, having taken a considerable summe of money with him in Spanish Pistolets and English Gold’. This advertisement described the ‘bold confident’ nineteen-year-old and offered a sizeable reward of £10 and expenses for his capture. Two notices placed together advertised for Daniel Midleton, ‘a servant to Sir Matth. Thomlinson’ in Westminster who had run ‘away from him with certain goods of his’, and for Daniel Neech who had ‘run from his Master with several sums of money’ and was ‘supposed to be about the City’. Thus runaway servants were commonly advertised for as thieves who had stolen money, clothing, horses and other items of value. Employers did not hesitate to advertise for and pursue, for example, a servant who stole a gold picture frame set with rubies and diamonds. When an absconding maid named Nan stole from her mistress many items of fine clothing made of satin, silk and lace, a newspaper advertisement used twenty words to describe Nan but eighty words to detail the items she had stolen. Theft on this scale was a serious crime, potentially punishable by execution: the inconvenient absence of a fairly easily replaced servant was of far less concern.⁷⁵

Given that servants who had escaped with stolen property might hope to disappear into London’s large population of servants and working people, employers used advertisements to provide details that might help identify the runaways in the large urban crowd. As runaway advertisements became more common, they emerged as some of the most developed descriptions of personal appearance that appeared in newspapers, often including depictions of bodily characteristics and apparel. News articles and other newspaper content, both foreign and domestic, seldom featured such bodily descriptions, but advertisers sought to describe individuals in ways that would resonate among readers and render identification more probable. These notices might indicate age, height, body type, complexion, hairstyle and clothing, as well as including descriptions of how individuals held and conducted themselves. But the lexicon of servitude and of skin tone and colour was not as yet fully racialized, and a binary Black and White identification system had not yet crystallized. The terms used to describe the bodily appearance of White runaways reflected contemporary understandings of aptitude, ability and character while also reflecting beliefs about the effects of body humours and weather on colouring and demeanour. A runaway servant might be ‘of a bold confident behaviour’ or be less self-possessed and display ‘a down look, black hollow eyed … [with] a little stooping as [to] shoulders’.⁷⁶ Employers who had invested in good clothing for their servants might be all the more inclined to describe it in detail, as in the case of twenty-one-year-old Robert Bateman who eloped wearing ‘a black hat on, with a small silver Band, his Breeches, Doublet and Cassock of a middle gray’.⁷⁷ ‘A Black haired Maid, of a middle stature thick set, with big breasts’ eloped from the Pall Mall house of her mistress, taking with her an abundance of expensive clothing that did not belong to her, and wearing ‘a greyish Cloth Wastcoat turned, and a Pink-coloured Paragon upper Petticoat, with a green Tammy under one’.⁷⁸

These advertisements featured a wide range of terms to describe the appearance of runaway English children and adults, and terms such as ‘fresh’, ‘pale’, ‘swarthy’, ‘ruddy’, ‘brown’ and ‘dark’ were used by advertisers to describe the skin tone of White men and women who had eloped. Twenty-two-year-old Walter Finch was ‘flaxen haired, whitely faced’ and Evan Jones was ‘a lusty Man, and whitely coloured’.⁷⁹ Others were identified along similar lines as having notably light complexions: Charles Billingsly had ‘a sallow complexion’, Edward Chiffins was ‘a fair Complexioned Youth’, and William Harman had a ‘pretty fresh complexion, a round visage, full of pockholes, grey eyes and a down look’.⁸⁰

There were a range of terms to describe the colouring of those who did not have such pale countenances. Eighteen-year-old John Bingham had ‘a fresh ruddy Complexion, [and] lank flaxen Hair’, and John Jackson was similarly described as having ‘a ruddy Complexion and lank whitish hair’.⁸¹ Samuel Greenwood had a ‘Redish-face’, while William Hincham was described as having ‘a fresh colour, but his complexion a little tann’d with the Weather’.⁸² Edmund Fowler had a ‘swarthy Complexion, short black Hair, [and] stammers in his Speech’, while Jonathan Paine had ‘a swarthy yellow Face’.⁸³ Others had noticeably darker complexions as in the case of Thomas Lewes and fourteen year-old Charles Russell, both of whom had a ‘Brown Complexion’.⁸⁴ Some had particularly dark countenances, as in the case of John Plat who was ‘of a darkish Complexion, with short thin black Hair’, or Thomas Blackborn who had both ‘a down look’ and ‘a black complexion’.⁸⁵

Thus, well before racial slavery became a feature within English society, gradations of whiteness functioned as markers of status and modesty, particularly for women. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Thomas Campion had sung the praises of the ‘country maid’ Amaryllis, affectionately describing her as a ‘Nutbrowne lasse’. This reference to Amaryllis’s skin colouring was Campion’s only description of her physical attributes, and it presented her in stark contrast to the women who displayed their class and modesty through natural or cosmetically produced white skin of the type seen in portraits of Elizabeth I and other elite women of the Tudor and Stuart eras.⁸⁶ Throughout the seventeenth century, newspaper advertisements seeking out White servants, soldiers and apprentices continued to describe their wide range of skin colourings and appearance, and many were described as having darker skin. In contrast, people of colour who eloped and were advertised for in London newspapers during the second half of the seventeenth century were generally described in simple and rudimentary terms as ‘Black’, ‘Blackamoor’ or ‘Indian’, suggesting that these words denoted race rather than skin colouring. The only exceptions were those with lighter skin tones who were referred to as ‘mulatto’ or as ‘tawny’.

Yet, as England’s trading outposts in South Asia and West Africa and colonies in the Caribbean and North America developed, and as the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery took root, runaway advertisements for people of colour represent one clear instance of the ways in which Londoners and English people began constructing themselves more generally as different from people of colour. Using late Elizabethan and early Stuart theatre, Gary Taylor has argued that the ‘ideology of whiteness … originated in London, as a self-consciously symbolic fiction’.⁸⁷ Runaway advertisements for both Black and White people contributed to this process. It was in the newspapers of seventeenth-century London that the printed trope of the ‘runaway slave’ was developed, and later advertisements in the Caribbean and North America built upon the formulas Londoners had used to describe both escaped Whites and people of colour. Caribbean and North American runaway slave advertisements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would deploy a range of terms to describe the physical appearance of enslaved freedom seekers. In slave societies filled with many thousands of people of similar appearance, subtle differences were vital for the correct identification of runaways who might otherwise melt away into the larger population of free and enslaved people of colour.⁸⁸ But these runaway slave advertisements had first appeared in the London press where notices seeking out people of colour did not need such detailed descriptions, and it was in advertisements for White servants that employers had developed the most detailed descriptions of skin tone and appearance.

The differences are readily apparent in advertisements that appeared in the London Gazette on 8 September 1684, including one for a freedom-seeking person of colour and another for a White servant who had eloped. The former was described in an advertisement that did not refer to skin colour, where the freedom seeker is described as ‘A Negro of a middle stature about 21 years of age, [who] hath a low voice, speaks broken English’ and who was wearing ‘a black Hatt and Gold colour Ribbon, and a Frize Sute sad Cloth Colour’. The description of the runaway servant was rather more detailed about his appearance and skin colouring: ‘THomas Parker Apprentice to Mr. Thomas Moody … being about 15 years of age, and of small stature, with Pockholes in his Face, short hair, a lively Countenance, a black Hatt, and a loose sad coloured Serge Coat with Loops upon it’.⁸⁹ There were thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands, of boys like Thomas Parker in London, and if Thomas Moody was to have any chance of regaining his apprentice the description he published needed sufficient detail to enable people to recognize the runaway boy. However, although there was a significant population of enslaved and free people of colour in the capital, their numbers were small enough to render detailed physical descriptions less necessary. Moody thought that by identifying this runaway as a twenty-one-year-old ‘Negro’ of middle stature, who spoke English in a deep voice, he had provided sufficient information to enable others to identify the unnamed freedom seeker. Despite English advertisements often being less detailed than those later published in the Caribbean and North America, the process of advertising and recording observable details about freedom seekers nonetheless made use of a lexicon of terms about skin tone, body type and mannerisms that served to commodify those who dared elope.⁹⁰

The metropole

By the dawn of the eighteenth century, London had become one of the largest capital cities in Europe and the metropolitan heart of a rapidly growing and ever more lucrative empire. Each year the hundreds of ships that travelled between London and England’s colonies and trading posts testified to the city’s imperial power: a directory of London merchants in 1677 listed almost 2,000 involved in overseas trade.⁹¹ By 1700 England had colonies from Jamaica to Barbados to Bermuda in the Caribbean and the Atlantic, and from New Hampshire to South Carolina in North America; a string of fortified trading posts along almost 3,000 miles of the West African coast between the Gambia River and Angola; and an even larger number of trading posts in South Asia including major outposts in Surat, Bombay, Bengal and Madras. Colonization of North America and the Caribbean, the trade with West Africa and the fast-growing transatlantic slave trade, and the lucrative trade with South Asia were intimately linked and interdependent. Indeed, merchants, investors and others were simultaneously engaged in all of these areas, as in the case of Thomas Smythe, who led the East India Company between 1603 and 1621, during which time he secured a second royal charter for the Virginia Company and served as this organization’s treasurer. In 1615, as the leader of the Somers Isles Company, he took control of the colony of Bermuda, and in the years that followed the island became involved in the trafficking of enslaved Africans.⁹²

Slavery was an increasingly significant foundation of England’s rising empire. Between 1651 and 1675 English ships carried an estimated 25,731 enslaved people to the Americas, but between 1676 and 1700 that number increased more than tenfold to 272,200.⁹³ As fast as England’s slave trade grew, so too did the trade in the goods produced by enslaved labourers in the colonies. Annual tobacco imports rose from 1.8 million pounds in the 1630s to 22 million pounds in 1700, while sugar imports grew from an estimated 3,750 tons in 1651 to roughly 23,500 tons by 1700.⁹⁴ Both the transatlantic slave trade and the trade in the commodities grown and processed by enslaved labour in the colonies were vital foundations of English imperial power and wealth.

Yet slavery was not an abstract and distant institution for enslaved people brought to London in the later seventeenth century. Londoners who claimed ownership of these people were themselves part of the vast imperial project, and their dedication to the expansion and preservation of the slave trade and slavery included the development of a system for the recapture of any enslaved or bound person of colour who dared reject their subordination by attempting escape. It was in London that enslavers developed and perfected the runaway slave advertisement, making use of the new medium of newspapers to assert their control of those who sought freedom.