1 - Identifying the African Population in Early Modern Norfolk and Suffolk

Summary

The first documented African inhabitant of Norfolk and Suffolk was a young ‘boy of the shippe’ called Eylys, who was described as a ‘More’ on his arrival in Yarmouth in 1467. Over the next 400 years, Eylys was followed by a continuous stream of men and women of African heritage into the two counties. This chapter presents the core material identifying this African population and then examines that information to make some general comments about its members. Having done this, it goes on to make some broad suggestions about the drivers that lay behind this migration and an initial set of propositions about that African population in Norfolk and Suffolk. The most significant proportion of these data was drawn from the parish records of Suffolk and Norfolk. The modern Diocese of Norfolk covers 573 parishes, while that of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich (Suffolk) consists of 446 parishes. With a total of 1,019 parishes in the region, it has not been possible to examine all the available parish records over the near four centuries covered by this study. This means that the evidence offered here is not a complete survey. Nonetheless, it is proposed that this material is indicative of both the geographic extent and numbers of the region’s African population.

Norfolk and Suffolk form ‘England’s premier cereal growing province’ and their shared coastline and maritime history has tended to lead to even closer affiliation. Bounded on the north and east by the North Sea, the area’s long coastline stretches from the Wash to Felixstowe, providing easy access to the sea from most of its inland areas. Norfolk is the fourth largest county of England and during the period covered here it was one of the richest and most important areas of the country. It was the most densely populated English county from 1000 until 1600, while its capital city, Norwich, with a population of 29,000 in 1750, was the second city of England from 1350 until the 1720s, when the wealth and commerce engendered by the slave trade allowed Bristol to displace it. In Suffolk, political and economic power was traditionally divided between the towns of Ipswich, with a population of 9,000 in 1700, and Bury St Edmunds, with a population of around 5,000.