Epilogue: Reconsidering the Social History of Africans in Norfolk and Suffolk

Summary

Apart from the documents that are preserved in the region’s archives, there is extraordinarily little physical evidence to remind us of the presence of the Africans who lived in Norfolk and Suffolk between 1467 and 1833. Even the coastline that Eylys saw when he arrived in Yarmouth in the late fifteenth century has been altered irrevocably over the centuries; the ‘Cokle water’ where his fellow ‘pyrattes’ died has been eradicated by time and tide. Baptist resided in a village he knew as Hunstanton, but most people now associate the name with the adjacent holiday resort town of New Hunstanton that was created in the nineteenth century. The hall that ‘ye black boy’ lived in at Holkham was demolished in the eighteenth century to make way for Coke’s magnificent Palladian mansion. Rougham Hall, where Rosanna lived after arriving from Barbados in 1688, burnt down in the 1820s and its successor is a ruin, destroyed by a Luftwaffe bomb in 1940. Garboldisham Old Hall, where Barlow Fielding lived and worked, along with Sam Stanton and his colleagues, was gutted by fire in 1955 and destroyed. The halls that do survive, such as Hockwold Hall – Caesar Hockwold’s home for some portion in the 1700s – do not contain any trace of their previous African inhabitants.

The paintings of Charley and Cotton remain, but the doorway to Charley’s shop stays stubbornly hidden, despite long hours spent searching Norwich’s historic streets. The churches – where so many Africans were baptised, married, or buried – still stand, reminding us of the importance of the parish to our story, but, outside the parish registers which are preserved in the central county archive, those churches contain barely any obvious mention of the Africans who lived in their communities. One churchyard monumental inscription survives, erected at Wroxham in 1781 in memory of Jeremiah Rowland. It reads, ‘a grateful tribute to the memory of Jer. Rowland, a negro born on the island […]’. Even there, the physical record disappears, because the bottom of the monument has fallen away, meaning that the next piece of evidence that might have led us to a greater understanding of Jeremiah Rowland’s life is, tantalisingly, missing.