Introduction: A Social History of Africans in Early Modern Norfolk and Suffolk

Summary

This is an history of a group of working-class English people. It begins in 1467 with a ‘boy of the shippe’ named Eylys, who sailed into the Norfolk port of Great Yarmouth as a member of a crew of ‘pyrattes’. The story continues, just over a century later, in 1599, when a young man named Baptist was baptised in the village of Hunstanton, in north Norfolk. Moving forward nearly ninety years, to 1688, the narrative resumes in Rougham, Suffolk, with another baptism, this time of a young woman named Rosanna. Nearly a century later, in 1781, a man named Jeremiah Rowland was buried in Wroxham, Norfolk. In 1799, an eighteen-year-old woman named Rachel Fitshoe was ‘publickly baptised’ in the Norfolk market town of Diss. Our story reaches a conclusion, of sorts, with the baptism of Charles Fortunatus Freeman in Norwich in 1813. Births, baptisms, and burials, the basic threads from which the everyday existence of rich and poor alike was woven in early modern England. Eylys, Baptist, Rosanna, Jeremiah, Rachel, and Charles were, moreover, connected by other threads. They were all poor. They were all working people. They all lived in the English counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. And they were all linked by the way they were described in the documents that recorded them. Eylys was described as ‘a More’, Baptist as an ‘Aethiopian’, Rosanna as a ‘blackamore’, Jeremiah as ‘a negro’, Rachel as ‘a black’, and Charles as ‘African’.

By these varying descriptors, the writers of the historical records indicated that Eylys, Baptist, Rosanna, Jeremiah, Rachel, and Charles were all Africans, which is the term used in this book to describe someone who was born on the continent of Africa, or someone who was descended from forebears who had been born there. This African heritage provides the hub around which this book revolves, but the argument presented here is that the other descriptors already mentioned, like ‘class’ and ‘locality’, along with yet more, such as ‘baptised’ and ‘Christian’, are equally important in understanding the lives of the hundreds of Africans who lived in the region. This study seeks to come to an understanding of the lives of the Africans who lived in Norfolk and Suffolk between 1467 and 1833 that reflects the complexity of their historical experience.