When I die, they’re going to be doing the autopsy and find out that the cause of death is a bleeding stomach ulcer that, upon close inspection, actually is text that reads out the commentary directly above my own here.
“which makes sense when you put it in a real world context”
Except how about no, no it doesn’t.
Dr. Caitlin Green has compiled some documentary and archaeological resources specifically showing African populations in Bronze Age, Roman, and Medieval Britain.
A note on the evidence for African migrants in Britain from the Bronze Age to the medieval period
The degree to which pre-modern Britain included people of African origin within its population continues to be a topic of considerable interest and some controversy. Previous posts on this site have discussed a variety of textual, linguistic, archaeological and isotopic evidence for people from the Mediterranean and/or Africa in the British Isles from the Late Bronze Age through to the eleventh century AD. However, the focus in these posts has been on individual sites, events or periods, rather than the question of the potential proportion of people from Africa present in pre-modern Britain per se and how this may have varied over time. The aim of the following post is thus to briefly ponder whether an overview of the increasingly substantial British corpus of oxygen isotope evidence drawn from pre-modern archaeological human teeth has anything interesting to tell us with regard to this question.
[The De Brailes Hours: f. 1r. England (c. 1240)]
13th Century: Ipswich Man, one of nine African people buried in that particular medieval cemetery (covered by BBC in 2010)
[This image, an extract from the 60ft-long Westminster Tournament Roll, shows six trumpeters, one of whom is Black and is almost certainly John Blanke. Westminster Tournament Roll (1511)]
Islamic gold dinars in late eleventh- and twelfth-century England
The following post offers a map and brief discussion of the Islamic gold coins of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries that have been found in England and their context. Whilst clearly rare finds, there are now ten coins of this period known, all but one of which are thought to most probably have their origins in Spain. Moreover, these coins are considered to be the survivals of a potentially substantial body of this material present in England at that time.
Britain, the Byzantine Empire, and the concept of an Anglo-Saxon ‘Heptarchy’: Harun ibn Yahya’s ninth-century Arabic description of Britain
The aim of the following post is to offer a draft look at an interesting Arabic account of early medieval Britain that appears to have its origins in the late ninth century. Despite being rarely mentioned by British historians concerned with this era, this account has a number of points of interest, most especially the fact that it may contain the earliest reference yet encountered to there having been seven kingdoms (the ‘Heptarchy’) in pre-Viking England and the fact that its text implies that Britain was still considered to be somehow under Byzantine lordship at that time.
[Canterbury Cathedral Choir, north aisle, north window (Second Typological Window)The Queen of Sheba Before Solomon. England (1178-1180)]
A great host of captives? A note on Vikings in Morocco and Africans in early medieval Ireland & Britain
The following short note is based on a narrative preserved in the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland that tells of a Viking raid on Morocco in the 860s. This raid is said to have led to the taking of ‘a great host’ of North African captives by the Vikings, who then carried them back to Ireland, where they reportedly remained a distinct group—'the black men'—for some considerable period of time after their arrival.
[3 possible burials of African Women in 9th-11th Century England]
[Sub-Saharan African woman aged 18-24 from Fairford, Gloucestershire]
[Sir Morien, Black Knight of the Round Table]
[The Murthly Hours f. 12r: Magi, or Kings, Before Herod. Scotland/England (c. 1280s) From the National Library of Scotland]
John Moore of York and the Black Freedman of the Tudor Era
Roman Deserters at Hadrian’s Wall
Afro-Scottish Attendant of the Princess of Zanzibar
Elizabeth I and Black British Scapegoats
Edwards, Paul, and James Walvin. “Africans in Britain, 1500-1800.“ The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays. Edited by Martin L. Kilson and Robert I. Rotberg. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976: 173-204.
Dabydeen, David, ed. The Black Presence in English Literature. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.
Africans and Asians: Historiography and the Long View of Global Interaction Maghan Keita. From: Journal of World History Volume 16, Number 1, March 2005
pp. 1-30
The Mabinogion. Translated with an Introduction by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones. London: Dent, 1957.
The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Michael Sullivan, University of California Press, 1997.
Morien. Translated from the Medieval Dutch by Jessie L. Weston. London: Nutt, 1901.
Black Africans in Renaissance Europe. edited by Thomas Foster Earle, K. J. P. Lowe. Cambridge University Press
Africans in Britain. edited by David Killingray. Routledge University, 2012.
Shakespeare and Race. Catherine M.S. Alexander and Stanley Wells. University of Cambridge Press, 2000. (link to sample)
Courtiers and Christians: The First Japanese Emissaries to Europe Judith C. Brown. Renaissance Quarterly Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter, 1994), pp. 872-906 Published by: The University of Chicago Press.
Shakespeare’s Colors: Race and Culture in Elizabethan England. James Schultz. Quest January 2002, Vol 5 Issue 1.
