#kaufmann tag

[ednyfedfychan]

"[in] a letter written to Mary of Guise from Marion, Lady Hume on 28 March 1549, [...] she is complaining about the villainy of the English who ‘dystrow all this cuntre’. Strangely it seems the Spaniards, and ‘the Mour’ behave better, ‘lyk noble men’. [...] There was clearly at least one Moor in Berwickshire in 1549: if it was not Pedro Negro, then who was it? If not Pedro Negro, then perhaps Jacques Granado, another mercenary, knighted by Somerset a week after Negro on 1 October 1547, at Newcastle, whose name suggests he was from Grenada, and whose arms include ‘a Blackamoor’s head couped Sable, wreathed argent’.

There is concrete evidence of a man of African descent serving in the Tudor army twenty-seven years earlier in Exeter, where a Military Survey of 1522 lists in the Parish of St Petrock, as one of the ‘Billmen able for the war’: ‘Peter Blackmore, a moren borne…worth in goods nil’. The evidence I am drawing together for my thesis shows a considerable black presence (of around 300 individuals) in Britain in the period 1500–1640. That only fifteen of these are present in the period 1500–60 is perhaps a reflection of the fact that Parish Registers (the dominant source) only began in 1538, and often do not survive from that early. At the very least Lady Hume’s letter means that we cannot yet entirely dismiss the idea of a mercenary soldier of African descent serving in the Anglo Scottish wars of the mid-sixteenth century."

— Miranda Kaufmann, Sir Pedro Negro: What Colour Was His Skin?

[ednyfedfychan]

"[Ungerer] argues that Negro was more likely to belong to a Genoese family of that name that had settled in Spain and Portugal in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This contradicts those who have taken this Spanish mercenary, knighted by Protector Somerset in 1548, as evidence that it was possible for a black man to gain prestige and honour in sixteenth-century Britain. The chief protagonist of Negro’s blackness is literary critic Imtiaz Habib, who draws a parallel between Negro and Othello: ‘Shakespeare’s Othello should be considered […] in the context of black military service in Tudor armies and generally, of the unacknowledged blacks of sixteenth century England’. This is not a straightforward academic disagreement. Habib’s rhetoric is infused with the underlying accusation that evidence of black mercenaries serving in the Tudor army has been suppressed by white imperialists: ‘This [black] presence is the site of suppressive inscription that is the modality of empire building’. He has recently remarked: ‘Its also interesting that whenever any claim of historical significance is made for a Black person in early modern Europe, the blackness of the person has to be immediately challenged. It would appear that even though oppressed, and denigrated in life a Black person has to prove her/his blackness for European history to even acknowledge her/his existence, whereas a White person is White by default and all significance is hers/his automatically.’ While this polemic approach is unhelpful, Ungerer’s proof by omission is not sufficient to disprove Negro’s blackness. Contemporary chroniclers may have seen the name Negro as indication enough that the soldier was black."

— Miranda Kaufmann, Sir Pedro Negro: What Colour Was His Skin?