Blackamoors in England

African mercenaries had served with the Roman army at the beginning of the Christian era, and as late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, black mercenaries were serving in Scotland and England along with African court musicians, entertainers, and domestic servants. The moor was familiar enough as a cultural code to inhabit the imaginary and nightmares of Elizabethan men and women (Robinson 9). Around the middle of the sixteenth century, too, the number of black Africans trafficked to England increased significantly, creating a new rhetoric of racial difference around the categories of ‘moor’ and ‘blackamoor’ (Ormrod 193). The black presence that historians have been able to document in the sixteenth century was almost entirely the result of a single, new phenomenon: England’s participation in the emerging slave trade out of West Africa. Those who progressed to de facto freedom and to successful careers tended to do so only in quite prescribed ways. It is no accident, for example, that John Blanke was a trumpeter: African musicians and dancers were already a relatively common and visible presence in many southern European courts during the fifteenth century. (Ormrod 191-192). As William Harrison put it, in his Description of England some 20 years later: “As for slaves and bondmen, we have none; nay such is the privilege of our country by the especial grace of God and bounty of our princes, that if any come hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they become as free in condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterly removed from them.” Although this was designed to show England in the best possible light, there is a ring of truth to it. Besides agreeing with what was rumored abroad, it is echoed in the experiences of Africans in England. In the early years of Henry VII’s reign, the king set free Pero Alvarez, an African man who had come to England from Portugal (Kaufmann 18-19).

Africans were paid wages for their labor. John Blanke, the court musician who played for Henry VII and Henry VIII, was paid eight pence a day in 1507. This doubled in the early years of Henry VIII’s reign, after Blanke successfully petitioned for a pay rise. John Anthony, a sailor based in Dover, was paid £30 wages plus interest in 1620 for his work aboard the Silver Falcon. ‘James the Blackamoor’, cook to the Earl of Bath in Tawstock, Devon, was paid wages of £1 a quarter, or £4 a year. Wages were not the only way in which servants of all ethnicities were paid. Harry Domingo, a ‘moir’ employed by the Burgh of Aberdeen in the early 17th century, was paid for specific tasks, such as ‘sounding the trumpet at the proclaiming’ of letters ‘from the council’, rather than receiving a regular wage. Some worked only for board and lodging, with clothing often being provided at the household’s expense (Kaufmann 20). Elizabeth I, whose reign endured from 1558 to 1603, was nevertheless an ambiguous figure in the matter of the black presence in England. She and her father, Henry VIII, had brought blacks into court for entertainment and service, and as a supporter of the English slave trade, she was more directly responsible for the too numerous blacks “firmly ensconced in Britain’s houses, streets and ports and portrayed on its stages” during her reign, as Gretchen Gerzina sardonically puts it. Further evidence of her ambivalence towards the black presence in her realm is provided by Peter Fryer, who instances a painted panel, Queen Elizabeth and Her Court at Kenilworth Castle, by Marcus Gheeraerts in 1575, where the queen “was shown with a group of [seven] black musicians and [three] dancers” (Robinson 10-11).