Black People in England, 1660-1807

It was through genealogy that I became interested in the subject of black people in England during the period of the British slave trade. In 1998, suspecting that one of my ancestors had been black, I read the handful of books on their history in Britain before the twentieth century.¹ Most historians of black Britons concentrate on the issues of slavery and poverty, and some, particularly Folarin Shyllon, assume black people's experiences in England were similar to those in the North American and Caribbean colonies, especially in the area of prejudice and discrimination.

The picture that emerged from most of these earlier histories was not one I recognised from my genealogical research over some 25 years. During that time I had come across occasional references to black people in various sources. My impression was that they had not been treated any differently from the indigenous population, most of whom, it is important to remember, were also poor. What, I wondered, was life like for the average black person in eighteenth-century England?

I began to collect references to black people, mainly from parish records, but also from other sources: newspapers, coroners' inquests, wills, diaries and letters. Within a few months I had some 600, more than had been previously assembled. This formed the basis for an article for the Genealogists' Magazine, which prompted numerous references from fellow family historians. Systematically working my way through parish registers and other records, I created a database, the first and biggest of its kind, which now contains more than 4,000 entries and the information drawn from it has resulted in a thesis. This enabled me to draw some demographic conclusions about sex, age, places of origin and occupations but a great deal of work remains to be done. I went through every extant parish register in the cities of London and Westminster as well as many others held in the London Metropolitan Archives, the county record office for Greater London. In 2004 London Metropolitan Archives conducted a project to extract every baptism from the parish registers held there and the results were put on the internet, so I was able to use this to supplement my previous work.² Combined, this data gives almost complete coverage of baptisms between 1660 and 1807 in the Greater London area and also of burials in the cities of London and Westminster. This work revealed that the largest concentration of black people in the London area, and probably the whole of England, lived in Westminster among M.P.s and peers attending parliament and among the rich and aristocratic people attached to the court. It is a substantial black presence largely ignored by parliament - and by historians who have concentrated their studies on poor blacks in riverside parishes.

The library of the Society of Genealogists yielded entries from several hundred published parish registers for places outside London and transcripts made by individuals and family history societies. Some county record offices have also put findings from their records on the internet and these have been included. Inevitably, however, the coverage for the rest of the country is far from complete. My research is confined to England and Wales, partly because Scotland had, and still has, a different legal system and partly because Scottish and Irish records are held locally. Although there are occasional isolated references to black people in Scotland and Ireland, their history is as yet largely unexplored.

1

John Hawkins is the first Englishman known to have dealt in slaves. He made three expeditions to Africa during 1562-3. Between Hawkins's third expedition and the founding of the Royal Adventurers into Africa a century later in 1663, there are occasional references in English records to black people. Some may have been acquired by merchants dealing in other goods from Africa. Others may have been enslaved Africans captured from the ships of Spain or other slave trading nations, or brought back from colonies in America or the Caribbean. There is some evidence of English trading in slaves before 1660,³ but 1660 makes a suitable year to mark the beginning of the...