Dan Snow's History Hit - Black Tudors: England's Other Countrymen

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

Our image of the Tudor era remains overwhelmingly white. But the black presence in England was much greater than has previously been recognised, and Tudor conceptions of race were far more complex than we have been led to believe. In this edition of Not Just the Tudors, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Dr. Onyeka Nubia whose original research shows that Tudors from many walks of life regularly interacted with people of African descent, both at home and abroad - findings that cast a new light on the Tudor age and our own attitudes towards race relations in history.  

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It is that joyful time, you will all be celebrating, you'll be dancing in the aisles when you learn that you're about to hear an episode of Not Just the Tudors with Professor Susanna Lipscomb. She's one of the great talents of our generation. She's got a podcast all about, well, the Tudors, but not just the Tudors, what's going on around the world at the time. The glories of 16th century global history is all happening, folks. And in this episode, she talks to Dr. Onyeka Nubia, whose research on people of color in Tudor England is fascinating. There are people of African descent living in Tudor England, as we now know as well,

from the Mary Rose, the fascinating DNA done on some of the people that went down the Mary Rose. But she's also shining light on a really interesting branch of scholarship all about Tudor England's relations with the wider world with the extra European world it's all happening folks you think you live in a globalized era you don't know anything telling you so great to have these two on the podcast discussing that if you want to subscribe to history at tv I just strongly advise you do now it's the best time to do it because you don't need a truck you just do it on the internet. Yeah, see, no supply chain issues here. You get a historyhit.tv, you sign yourself up.

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historyhit.tv and gift it. But in the meantime, everyone, here's Professor Lipscomb and Dr. Nubia talking about black presence in England. Enjoy. Dr Nubia, I am very excited to talk to you again and to have a chance to think together about the African presence in Tudor England, in Stuart England, perhaps a bit as well. Your work has encouraged us towards a more diverse and more inclusive history of England. So what could we say about the African presence in England at this time? There is a idea, and certainly when I used to read on the Tudor period and Stuart period when I was very young, that England was mono-ethnically white

before 1948 and the Empire Windrush. And suddenly the Empire Windrush happened and suddenly multicultural Britain was ushered forth through a great shaft of light. And these people of African Caribbean heritage who had never been part of English society suddenly arrived and modern inter-ethnic, inter-cultural relations were born. Of course course this is completely untrue not to diminish in fact the importance and significance of the empire windrush in terms of the continuity of ethnic diversity because it is important but in an actual and real sense the empire windrush is only a very very later moment in an interconnected and inter-ethnic set of

relations between people of African and African Caribbean descent and this country. The African presence has been here in this country for at least 2,000 years. This is conservative estimates because we're not sure about the windmill people. We're not sure about lots of people. We're not sure about how they classify their ethnic diversity, even though many of them came from Europe, Central, Western, and in some cases, Eastern Europe, we are not sure whether they classify themselves in the way in which we classify themselves and how their complexion and hair texture, how all these people look, we don't know. But if we're looking at the Tudor period, there are some things that

we definitely do know. What we do know is that there were people of African descent present in Tudor society. That we do know. Do we have any idea how many people of African descent were in Tudor society? As I said throughout the 2000 years, there has been an African presence in England. This African presence has been a very diverse presence of very diverse sets of peoples from very different places over different periods of time. There isn't anybody that I know of who can trace their origin back 2000 years and still is visibly a person of colour in this country, as far as I i know there are people who can trace their origin back three or four hundred years and are visible people of color and there are lots and lots of people who don't look like me but look somewhat more like you who do have african

ancestors both in the ancient times medieval times and what have you and you find out when they look at their family tree they got 10 20 30 this so-called inverted commas this dna that relates to parts of the continent of africa so these groups of different sets of people have been part and parcel of an english story for a very very very long time and they've played a part within English society throughout the whole chronology of English history and they were present for example in the early part of the 15th century when Catherine of Aragon came here in 1502 there were people part of her entourage who were from an Iberian Moorish population. Catalina de Motro, for example, the lady of the bedchamber she became.

She was with Catherine when she landed in Plymouth in 1502. People like John Blank, we suspect, also came as part of this entourage. Certainly he was present in England from 1507 onwards until at least 1513 and was and is displayed on the Westminster tournament roll twice. Once going to the ceremony where he wears a brown turban and coming from the celebrations wearing a green turban laced with silver. Other people of African descent that I actually feel have more significance in many ways are people such as Henry Anthony Jetto present in Holt in Worcestershire he married a woman called Presidia had six children and one child out of wedlock called John Cuthbert those seven children

went on to have 32 grandchildren and those 32 grandchildren went on to have, I lost count actually, but several, almost into the hundreds numbers of great-grandchildren that are related to Henry Anthony Jetta. And the families of Jetta and Jett and Pluck and Cuthbert are direct descendants of Henry Anthony Jetta. And I've met some of those descendants in modern day Worcestershire, and they are obviously not a part of a visible ethnic minority, but they certainly do and can trace their origins sometimes on both sides of their family tree to Henry Anthony Jetto, the Black Amour, who wrote his own will, actually, and his own will is available. You can go look at it today at Worcestershire archives. And not only did he write his own will, but Presidia, his wife, also wrote her own will. Henry Anthony Jetto

is a fundamentally important person because he had a status within Holt society where he could vote. And we often say that the first person who could vote was Ignatius Sancho in the 18th century, which is untrue because Henry Anthony Jetto in the early part of the 17th century and the end of the 16th century had a position where he could vote, and he had a position where he could sit for jury trials. So this was a person who was prominent within Holt society over 400 years ago. So this African population, we don't know how many, just like we don't know how many people in the country full stop, let alone their ethnic makeup. But what we do know is that these people were visible and present. We know they're visible and present because the Englishmen, and it was men, doing the writing tell us that these people

were present. Where do they tell us? They tell us in the parish records. The parish records are the places that record the baptisms, the marriages, and the burials for people present inside English society at that time. They don't record births, and they don't record deaths. They record baptisms and burials so you could be born or you die and if you don't step into a church then you're not necessarily going to be recorded but the point is that those very limited records reveal Africans were present inside Tudor and Stuart societies and very interestingly they reveal that this presence is all over the country. In as far north as Lanarkshire, as far south as Bristol and Plymouth, Exeter, as far east as Norfolk, as far west as Ireland, all over the parts of the British Isles, we find an African presence.

The largest concentration, it appears from the records that we have, are to be found in the following parishes. St. Butoff without Allgate Parish, where the population was 5% of that parish. It appears from the records that we have are to be found in the following parishes. St. Butoff without Aldgate parish, where the population was 5% of that parish, the Central Parish in Bristol and the Central Parish in Plymouth. The St. Andrews Parish in Plymouth and St. Butoff without Aldgate parish in London are the ones with the two largest concentration, 5% in each. parish in London are the ones with the two largest concentration, 5% in each. Bristol parish is about 4% and then there are other parishes with 3% and 2% and 1%. But throughout the country, there are populations of people of African descent, not just in metropolitan cities, but also in small villages and hamlets, etc. And now, outside of that evidence, which is fantastic evidence, perhaps the place where

people would least expect to find it, outside of that, there is also the records of entries of people making wills who talk about the Africans that are part of their families, the Africans that are part of their entourages, the Africans that are in their service, or Africans that they've met. There are court cases which reveal someone such as Francis Rombello, who appears in English records. And he appears to come from either the Iberian Peninsula or Southern Europe, but be a person of African descent involved in smuggling, perhaps people, but certainly goods between different places,

somewhere in the shady side of politics and trade, as indeed many people were. And he appears in English court chancery records. So some Africans appear in chancery records, but the vast majority are in those baptism burial records. And another set of records that I'm sure you're familiar with, the Memorandum Day Books, which are fantastic documents written by the parish priest or clerk where they elaborate on matters. In one of those day books, for example, Mary Phyllis of Morosco appears and her baptism and conversion is written in copious detail. It's absolutely fascinating to read about Mary Phyllis of Morosco. This is a woman who brought with her father Phyllis of Morosco, probably from somewhere in West Africa.

She arrives in England with her father. By the time of her baptism, her father has either traveled away or passed away. She's then baptized. But then it is the explanation of the conversion, how she'd been in England for 13 years, Then it is the explanation of the conversion, how she'd been in England for 13 years, but had not yet become a Christian. How now she wished to become a Christian out of her own will. She wasn't being forced. And it's explained in copious detail why she wants to now be a Christian. She wishes to have that thing which she has not had on the course of her birth, but is given to her as a result of her belief. And so it goes on and on.

It's a fantastic set of records written by the parish priest in extraordinary and fantastic detail, where it is emphasised again and again that she is a Blackamoor, that she is a woman of African descent. The phrase is repeated over and over and over again. And the phrase that her father is as well, he was both a basket and shovel maker. These are important traits. And this leads us onto the next idea in that we shouldn't think automatically that this population was slaves.

What you've just said is interesting in terms of the questions it raises about how you identify these people in the records you've mentioned in the parish registers. And I really take your point about the fact that actually, if people aren't professed Christians, we're not going to find them in those records at all anyway, but also finding them in wills. And obviously, there'll be some questions about the terminology used when it comes to identifying people of African descent in the archives. And some of it, in fact, may sound offensive today. So I guess, what are the methodological issues over finding people of African descent? The key thing is this, because terminologies and terms change from age to age, we have to be keeping a pace with those changes. We have to look at the people at the

time and what kind of terms they used. Now, if we start with the medieval period, because it's important in the legacy, the term that was used primarily to describe people that we might now say are people of African descent of various shades, was a term such as Garamanti. Another term in the medieval period was the term Moor by itself, and another term called Niger, N-I-G-E-R. Saracen was a generic term, a term that was wide enough to describe people of North African descent, West African descent, people from Asia Minor and from further afield going into the eastern part of Asia and even to Southeast Asia, they could also colloquially be referred to as Saracen. And often the term Saracen had a reference to religion, i.e. not necessarily that they were Muslim, but that they were not yet Christian. Into the Tudor

period, terminology changes. Again, in the early part of the Tudor period, the dominant term used to refer to people of African descent is blackamore. Although the word more by itself, as we see with Othello, can be used without reference to the terminology black. The second term, which is also a slight borrowing from the medieval period, is the term Ethiopian, a term that was also used to refer to people of African descent, not just those that come from what we now call Ethiopia, but a term that was used to refer to people of African descent from all over. The term Ethiopia is a reference to skin colour, again, because the word Ethiop means black face, and it comes from a Greek legend about the sun god Phoebus and his war chariot,

who apparently in some moment in history burnt the earth. And as a result, the people that lived on the earth at that time were burnt black. So this term of blackness is a term of art, but is a generic term used to refer to people of African descent in antiquity and somewhat moving forward. There are other terms such as Barbary. Barbary can be a generic term used to refer to a region. We talk about the Barbary Corsairs, we talk about the Barbary States. In its origin, it comes from the word barbarian and therefore it is not ethnically specific how it was used by the Romans but by the late Tudor period it tends to have a kind of ethnic specificity tends to I say with caution so where we see the term Barbary is often prefaced with a Barbary more we have a region and also we

have an ethnicity that's attached to it. The word more is a reference to skin shade or a kind of cultural association with shade. Since the word more comes from the Greek and Latin words moros and moro, both of them are references to the color black. It doesn't per se reference religion, although many people in a mistaken way have just assumed that every more is not a christian it doesn't because when we see people baptized in english churches they are often described as being a black and more christian the christianity doesn't stop them from being a more although having said that the christ the Christianity in some theological texts provided an avenue whereupon their blackness may not be emphasised, but their belief in the Christian religion is. Much of your work has focused on the status of those of African descent in Tudor society and challenged perhaps the assumption that Africans in Tudor society

would have been designated as enslaved in the records. Tell us about what you've found. When I came to this research many, many years ago, I, like almost everybody else, had a belief, post-colonial belief, that the people that I was going to be looking at living in England during the age of Shakespeare would be downtrodden, the other, the stranger, the foreigner, interlopers on the edge of English society, automatically enslaved, and that Queen Elizabeth I was some sort of megalomaniac, fundamentally racist person, and that Shakespeare's works gives evidence of scientific racism and all this kind of stuff which is in fact the kind of rhetoric that is taught about ethnicity in the early modern period in a lot of renaissance studies a lot of literary studies and in fact

in a lot of history studies that kind of narrative is what's spoken about without any kind of other inflection or interpolation within it so that was the perspective that I came to this research with that if there were Africans here they would have been the lowest of the low it would have been inferior and would have been treated as such as such so I had that idea in my head I think throughout the 80. I think it only got to 1993, something like that, when I had done so much research by then, I don't understand what their status is. That was my point, 1993. And then it took me another nine years to about 2001. And I remember where I was in 2001. I was on a train going to Manor House train station, Piccadilly line, and I was between

Finsbury Park and Manor House. And I had these lists of these people that I'd been by that moment in time already familiar with for more than a decade. I was looking over all their records, looking over their name, Isabel, the African who would teach his art to none, all these different names and all these different people, Francis Rombello, Domingo, Mary Phyllis of Morosco, Henry Anthony Jetta, all these lists of people. And I let out a yelp. People must have thought I was insane because I realized that these people that I had been studying for so long were not slaves. And it came to me almost like a blinding light on the road to Damascus. I just realised and began to see now I'm beginning to see these people. It took me that long that I was able to decode my

post-colonial thinking, my ideas and realise, no, stop applying the principles and traditions of a late 17th, 18th, 19th, early 20th century historiography and start to look at these people for whom they are. Start to look at the time period for what it is. Don't place Victorian ideas on a non-Victorian population. Decolonise your own ideas. Decolonise your own constructions. Decolonise and get rid of your own prejudices, which I had to do. And I began then to see these people for the first time. And when I did that, they became remarkable because I saw them for the first time. And I saw the way that they were interacting with the society in which they were living in. And they were interacting within the local communities that they lived in and how they became part of their communities.

Even ones who were beggars, the very poorest of the poor, seemed to still have been buried in English churches, still seemed to have been recorded with a kind of care and thought about as being human beings. And I now began to see them as human beings too. So what you're saying is that everything that happened from the 17th century onwards, colonisation, the great enslavement of millions of Africans, the extreme racism that accompanied it, and everything that develops thereafter, has so deeply rooted itself in our minds, has so deeply rooted itself in our minds that even to think about a period before that, we immediately assume inferiority on the basis of people of African descent in England, whereas the evidence just does not sustain that.

Absolutely. And even more than that, we have an emotional attachment to those references, irrespective of any evidence that supports that emotional attachment and our emotional attachment is such that we hold on to these ideas even when there isn't a narrative that supports them that's what happens but then that's the same with emotional attachment isn't it emotional attachment isn't necessarily logical because it's emotional and so much of english history is hinged on emotional ideas that don't have an evidential basis to them and that's just one of them how would our approach to the past and indeed to the present look different if we could really grasp what you're saying i hope that it would lead us to a more reflexive

and reflective approach. I hope also it would take us down a road where we would often say, where we're not clear, that we don't know, that we're not sure. Because sometimes it's about saying that because even the people at the time aren't sure what's happening or what's going on and so therefore when we say oh yes we know we're already putting ourselves in a very difficult situation so my problem hitherto has been that many people who have written about this period have said that they know that these people of African descent were automatically enslaved and inferior and blah blah blah there isn't evidence to support that there is evidence to support that people of african descent during the tudor period had a range of different occupations and that their status was varied and diverse from the very

lowest status to going up to the very highest status we've got visiting african dignitaries being baptized in english churches we got visiting African dignitaries being baptized in English churches. We've got Deirdre Duranqua baptized in a London parish in 1610-11. He's an African prince. We've got Nosser Ananaberry's son, Walter Ananaberry, baptized in Tottenham in 1610-11. He is also the son of a prince. That's at one end. And then at the other end, we've got single parent African women who are destitute and poor, who have a child from one man and cannot look after that child. They're in the records for a while and then they disappear. We can presume perhaps the worst, but they're recorded in the records. So we have people with a range of different occupations,

a range of different positions. They don't have one status. This is very important because the idea of the science of race backed up by law that we associate with the 18th, 19th century in the United States of America, but also in parts of the British colonial empire. That kind of biological determinism isn't there. That kind of law which would justify enslavement, justify an automatically inferior position, isn't there in Tudor society. Now I know some people are going to say, what about the Aliens Acts? The Aliens Acts are not necessarily ethnic specific. They are related to being alien. The alien acts are primarily about not being liege. In other words, not being a servant of the king or the servant of the queen. When you become liege, when you become part of the nation and you accept the monarch as yours and you get baptized in an English church,

then you start moving away from being a stranger, a term also used, and you become a member of a parish. And being a member of a parish means that you belong to that parish, that community, you are part of it. The baptism is the entrance into that parish. And we see many, many people of African descent who have made that transition. Either they're born into it or they come and they are baptized and they become members of their parishes. I didn't expect to find that when I started my research because I believed wrongly that these people automatically were inferior. I was wrong. I had to overcome my own prejudices to see these people for whom they are and to begin to see this part of English history for what it is.

It doesn't lessen in any way the horrors of the Ma'afa and the enslavement and everything else, but it does contextualize it. I know some people may not like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. contextualize it. I know some people may not like this, but I'm going to say it anyway. England hasn't always had a racialized perspective that has been anti-African and anti-Black. In the Tudor period, there are ideas about Blackness and Africans that are positive, and there are ideas about Blackness and Africans that are negative. The positive and the negative ideas jostle with each other in a field of ideas. We are used to looking only at the negative ideas and then trying to associate them with a later period of time to

make sense of them. We need to contextualize the negative and the positive ideas with each other and find out what did English people at the time actually think. And that's something quite different from what they thought later on with colonialism, imperialism, etc. This is the Dancer's History. We've got Susanna Lipscomb talking about Black Tudor England. Fascinating. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions.

And crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So this is so important. What we need to think about is a perspective that is nuanced and complex in terms of status and nuanced and complex in terms of people's thinking about ethnicity. What you've made very clear, though, is that racism is not systematic. It's not institutionalized in the 16th century. So that's a key difference from a later point. And I wonder if actually your point about size or the numbers involved and how difficult a question that is comes back to the fact that just like anybody who didn't have significance in this period of time is lost to the archives, there could be great numbers of people of African descent who would disappear to posterity because we only know about ordinary people when they have a moment

of encounter with the powerful, whether that is for good or ill. Absolutely, yes. And that was my second Yelp in 2001, that if their ethnicity was not so significant or not as significant as we have hitherto postulated, it is possible that there may be people who are never referenced by their ethnicity, but we might now call people of African descent. Because they are so integrated and assimilated within society, there hasn't been a need to reference their ethnicity. We know this because we have people whose ethnicity is both visible and invisible within record, that it appears and it disappears. We have, for example, someone like John Okomi. His last name is spelt in six different ways. We know Elizabethan spelling is always up and down. And first of all, you think, why is this man, you know, it's the same person because the

way he's being described, but why is his name being spelled in different ways? Sometimes John Okami, John Okomi, or with a Y, sometimes with an EI and what have you. There is no reference to his ethnicity when he's baptized as an adult at the age of the late 20s, but he is baptised as an adult. So that's another little thing. So he's baptised as an adult and he has this name that's spelled in different ways. He gets married to a local woman in Hertfordshire and he has two children. Still no reference to ethnicity. then his first son is apprenticed off. Okay, great. His daughter, he doesn't apprentice. His wife dies and he's living alone with his daughter. The local worthies of the parish don't like it for whatever reason. We don't know what the reason is. And they write

to him saying, look, your daughter must now be apprenticed the first reference to ethnicity comes then in the letters then occur between the two and then in the memorandum day book it says John Okomi a moor and then it references that he's a black moor so he's called a moor and a black moor in that record and then we realize that this John Okomi that's being referred to from the parish records the baptism all the way up to this entry by the church wardens is the same John Okami and he is someone of African descent and then we can speculate that the reason why his name is being spelt in different ways is a reaction to his pronunciation of his name probably John Okami West African sounding name with a hard a sound. And these English

scribes are trying to record the vernacular, the sound, and that's why they're writing it in different ways. So his ethnicity is visible, it disappears, and then it's visible again. And that's so much like many of these people of African descent. They are sometimes visible by their ethnicity and sometimes they are not. And sometimes they're referred to by an ethnic descriptor and sometimes they are not. So the evidence that leads us that way. So it's perfectly possible to hypothesize that the number of people who have the tag that indicates their ethnicity that appear in the parish registers or wherever it is that gives us an idea about the five percent in St. Bothoff without Aldgate

actually at the tip of the iceberg and we have no idea actually how many people are just not being referred to by their ethnicity you might have a scribe who just never writes it down certainly against any notion of political correctness on my part or trying to push a political agenda without evidence, I have been extraordinarily conservative in my approach and only spoken about those people where there is substantial evidence. With others, there is substantial evidence, but those I've kept out to most of what I write about. There's another whole big collection of people that requires a lot more research on them to determine their ethnicity, even if it's possible

to do so, because in some cases we may not be able to do so. So I have been extraordinarily conservative. And most of the people that write about this population are also very, very conservative. So it may come as a shock to some people that were thinking that we're being expansive. We're actually not. There may be a bigger picture that we cannot yet understand. Perhaps we never will. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were.

By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. but the first, and that some historians have used as evidence of an attempt to expel Africans from England and therefore as evidence of racism. So there are three documents of important note, two letters and a draft proclamation. The two letters are claimed to be in the hand of Queen Elizabeth, one written on the 11th of July, 1596, Elizabeth. One written on the 11th of July, 1596. The second one written on the 18th of July, 1596. And then a draft proclamation written in 1601. The 11th of July letter and the 18th of July letter are different.

The first letter talks about people of African descent being present in England. It refers primarily to 10 Africans brought to England by Sir Thomas Baskerville. It's about those 10. It then makes speculative statements about a wider African population, but it's actually quite a limited document and says that those 10 brought by Sir Thomas Baskerville should be taken out of the country and sent elsewhere. That's the first letter. The second letter written on the 18th of July then includes a person called Caspar van Senden, a Dutch slave trader working from Lubeck, perhaps part of the Hanseatic League. And it claims that Caspar van Senden has transported a number of English prisoners as a result of the

Anglo-Spanish war and he wants to be compensated and the best way to compensate him was to expel a large number or a small number of Africans. It mentions the 10 but then it goes wider to talk about a wider population being part of English society and that they should be removed and their removal should then be used to compensate Caspar van Senden. The draft proclamation extends this matter slightly further and talks about Africans being settled in England, talks about them being powered in England, talks about this population being fostered in England and talks about Africans population being fostered in England, and talks about Africans being of great numbers. And it also says that this population has been here much longer than 1596, when these epistles were written. Now, these three documents are often interpreted as examples of

Elizabethan racism, because they use certain pejorative terms to refer to people of African descent and they talk about expelling those Africans and historians sometimes say that these documents provide evidence of a immigration system that could be used to expel Africans but the reason why people say this is because they haven't researched these three documents sufficiently. These three documents need to be contextualized with nine petitions related to these three documents and there's a further 20 other petitions to provide light on the nine and on the three documents in hand. The nine petitions reveal who the writer of these documents is. And it's not Queen Elizabeth I.

It's someone called Thomas Shirley Jr. And he's writing these letters on behalf of Caspar Van Senden. He's writing these letters because he is a man living in poverty. We know this because of the nine petitions which tell us so. He's also a man on the margins of English society and he cooks up this plot to try and make money surreptitiously. He also complains in the nine petitions that he is unable to obtain a single African person, not a single vagabond or a vagrant who is unemployed and unemployable, not even someone who is destitute, not one single

person is able to obtain, which is why we have the series of documents. Then in 1601, Thomas Shirley writes that he is looking for Robert Cecil to help him. And then he writes that this action has lost the note of Her Majesty's pleasure therein. This process, this base plot. In other words, Queen Elizabeth, even if she was at one moment listening or sympathetic to these activities, has stopped being sympathetic. sympathetic. And Robert Cecil, who at one point may have provided some assistance with these activities, has stopped providing assistance. And we know that Thomas Shirley is unable to obtain a single person of African descent. There is no evidence. So these three documents that are often stated to be statements of Elizabethan racism are in fact something else altogether. They are indications, first of all, that the people of African descent, according to the writers of the nine petitions, are so ingrained in English society, it's very difficult to extricate

them. That's what Thomas Shirley complains about, that he can't get any person. It also illustrates that there are some pejorative ideas about Africans, President of the English Society, or that some people had those ideas. But it shows that those ideas were in a field of notions in which the more positive notions about people of African descent probably had the upper hand. And the evidence of the failure of these documents is an illustration that the more positive notions probably had the upper hand, at least until the end of the 17th century, when we know that the Royal Africa Company, etc., Senegal Company, Guinea Company, and these other activities become stronger. But it is, of course, undeniably true. John Hawkins, Martin Locke, Martin Frobisher, Raleigh, Drake were involved

in people smuggling, and that people smuggling involved Europeans, Africans, and in some cases, Native Americans, and people of Asian descent, without a shadow of a doubt. John Hawkins in particular was involved, but we sometimes get hung doubt. John Hawkins in particular was involved but we sometimes get hung up on John Hawkins when in fact William Hawkins his father was the one that pushed John Hawkins forward. Undoubtedly that's true but their method and their principles of activities were not entirely focused on Africans but on any people smuggling that they could get involved with and get on with without being caught and arrested for and that any people smuggling that they could get involved with and get on with without being caught and arrested for and that would involve smuggling and selling Europeans, Native

Americans, Africans and Asians. The system of enslavement practiced by people in this country didn't become racialized in the way in which we think it did until the middle part of the 17th century and the end of the 17th century where laws were created to specifically focus on people of African descent and even then people of African descent who were transported to the Americas had a status similar to their white counterparts and had to be separated from their white counterparts by specific black laws, black codes, etc. following the Code Noir from France in 1690. Much of your work has explored what we know of the origins of people of African descent in England. What could you tell us about that? Great question, because hitherto, most people

who have speculated on such a population had tended to look at the people of African descent as blank sheets of paper that only existed from the moment that they interacted with English society. That is a way of the observer taking a stance which nullifies their past. Now, the records may not provide extensive elaborations of someone's past, but they provide indication, especially in the names. So we have someone such as Ugunbaye, Ugunbaye, but written in the English vernacular, O-N-G-U-N-B-I-Y-E-Y-E. O-N-G-U-N-B-I-Y-E-Y-E. Ugunbayi, who gets baptized in London in the 16th century,

obviously with his Ugun name, comes from the Yoruba tradition in what is now modern day Nigeria. And when he gets baptized, he's very smart. He takes on a last name, but he keeps Ugbaye in fact Ogunbaye is a double barreled name which means the god of iron succeeds or lives which is probably a combination of his last name and his first name put together but he's told the priest it's just my first name and so he gets his other name but he's kept his own animist name of the God of Iron. So this man's name provides a key that illustrates that this person is probably West African extraction, probably from Oyo, the kingdom that existed in what is now modern day

Nigeria. So sometimes the names lead us to a place. Deirdre Joankwa, who I mentioned before, that rendering of his name, how it's written in the English record, is an indication of his West African heritage. Someone such as Nossa Ananaberry, who then becomes Walter Ananaberry. The Nossa is a West African name, nominative, that references high status. The advisor to the king is a noble person so that NOSSA provides us an indication through etymology to the origins of some of these people so the names like John Okami their names relate to groups of people on the continent of Africa however there are a large collection whose names end with words such as Valencia, Lisbon and names such as that.

This is because either they come from Lisbon or Valencia or they have passed through Lisbon and Valencia on their way to England and have been named accordingly. Some of these people certainly appear to be part of a Moorish Iberian population who were located within the Iberian Peninsula for more than 700 years. And that's why they carry those names like Domingo, etc. One person I will just say who provides an indication of that, but ironically isn't named at all. This person is a African man living in Cheapside in 1553 through to 1558. We know this because William Harrison refers to him. Edmund Howells refers to him.

And they refer to him as the African who would not teach his art to any. That's the phrase that's used. So he has this art in making steel needles and he wouldn't teach his art to any. So this African is described as coming from Spain and he brought this art of making Spanish steel needles to England and he is recorded as being the first person to make these steel needles in England. So in this case, we have someone without a name, but nevertheless, very, very significant. And we also know something about his origin because the recorders record it. But not in all cases are we so lucky.

And I love the fact that what we know of him is he's very closely guarding his artistic secret there. So my last question for you, Dr. Nubia, is this. Why has it taken so long for this reality of African presence in Tudor history to be known? This idea about how truly diverse Englishness was even in the 16th century. I think it is difficult when people have an emotional attachment to an idea, even if the idea has no evidence to support it, to give it up. People are told, for example, and many people believe that the Anglo-Saxons were a mono-ethnic race of blonde-haired and blue-eyed individuals who populated the English shores and are the only ethnic group who are the indigenous

people without really examining, you know, the notions that come from that. But people are attached to that idea and they say, I'm an Anglo-Saxon, you know, that's my identity. And they hold onto it because it's an emotional attachment. It's not because they've traced their origin to Howard Halford or Howard Godwinson or someone or the earls of Essex it's because they want to believe that they are some people say no I'm a viking perhaps because they've watched the tv series few people want to admit to being Huguenots even though depending on how you read it between 40 and 120 000 people of Huguenot descent have peopled these isles, you're more likely to be a descendant of a Huguenot from France than you are to be a descendant of the Danes or the Vikings, who were

very small in numbers when they came to this country, even as warriors, even as rulers, very small as a percentage of the whole population. But to have an ancestor, we take on the notion or the idea, and like most people do, there are acceptable ancestors and there are unacceptable ancestors. The acceptable ancestors are the ones steeped in romanticism, that we have an emotional attachment to, the Angles, the Saxons, the Vikings. Saxons, the Vikings, the unacceptable ancestors, maybe the Lascars, people of Asian heritage, you've been coming to this country and settling in this country for hundreds of years. The various different sets of people of African descent who've come and peopled these isles for thousands of years. The many different sets of people of Asian descent who've peopled these isles for hundreds of years. These people are the unacceptable ancestors, but they are still the ancestors of the people of this country. They are still interconnected and interwoven into the history of this country, and they cannot be extricated from

the history of this country because it's part of it. But like in any family, you will want to emphasize those people who you find or you think are honorable. And that's what this country does. It emphasizes specific ancestors because people want to be associated with that. But the family of this country is actually much wider, much bigger than merely having acceptable ancestors. The family tree is diverse.

And we know it is because the people of this country wrote about that diversity. And the beautiful thing you've just said is that these people who say, I'm Anglo-Saxon, did their research, they might well discover that they are descended from Henry Anthony Jetto or another person of African descent living in England in the 16th century. And that's why this is so important, because this is not about being politically correct or being woke. This is about our, in the broadest term of Britishness, history. This history is everybody's history. And it shows how, if I want to understand my history, I have to go bigger. I have to reach outwards to bring inwards to understand myself. And this is a fundamental thing that we need to do.

History is not a place where you hide your prejudices in. It's a place where the evidence leads you to an understanding of something you hope. History isn't about facts. It's about evidence. The evidence shows that this country has been ethnically diverse since at least the last 2,000 years. And part of that ethnic diversity is that there have been people of color and there have been people of African descent who've been part and parcel of the different narratives of this country at every epoch of this country's history, from the ivory bangle lady in Roman Britain,

all the way up to Henry Anthony Jetto and Mary Phyllis of Morosco in the 16th century, all the way up to the black prince of Penrithshire, Julep Singh from the Punjab in India in the 19th century. The diversity is part and parcel of English history. And this is undeniably where the evidence shows. That's great. Thank you so much for sharing your research on this, which is just so important.

And it completely shifts our paradigms and must call on us to change how we even conceptualize our past and indeed the present. So thank you very much indeed. Thank you ever so much for inviting me. I feel we're having a history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks for listening everyone. That was an episode of Not Just the Tudors on my feed.

Professor Susanna Lipscomb is a complete legend. She's one of my greatest friends and colleagues in the world of history. If you enjoyed it, please head over to Not Just the Tudors wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe and rate and review and all that kind of thing. Share it with friends. It just makes a really big difference to us. And we're really, really grateful for you guys doing that. Thank you very much.