London: The Biography

The Notting Hill Carnival, of Trinidadian origin, takes place in mid to late August, exactly as the old Bartholomew Fair at Smithfield did. It is an odd coincidence which emphasises the equally curious continuities of London life, but it throws into relief one of the strangest stories of urban immigration when black and white confronted the mystery of each other’s identity within the context of the city. In sixteenth-century drama “the Moor,” the black, tends to be lascivious, prone to irrational feeling, and dangerous. His appearance upon the stage is of course a consequence of his entry into London, where colour became the most visible and most significant token of difference. There were Africans during the long existence of Roman London, and no doubt their successors by intermarriage continued to live in the city during its Saxon and Danish occupations. But sixteenth-century trade with Africa, and the arrival of the first black slaves in London in 1555, mark their irruption into the city’s consciousness. If they were heathen, did they possess souls? Or were they somehow less than human, their skin the mark of a profound abyss which set them apart? That is why they became the object of fear and curiosity. Although relatively few in number, most of them watched and controlled as domestic slaves or indentured servants, they were already a source of anxiety. In 1596 Elizabeth I despatched a letter to the civic authorities complaining that “there are of late diverse blackamoores brought into these realms, of which kinde there are already here too manie,” and a few months later the queen reiterated her sentiment “that these kinde of people may be well spared in this realme, being so populous.” Five years later a royal proclamation was announced, in which “the great number of begars and Blackamoores which are crept into this realm” were ordered to leave.

Yet, like all such proclamations touching upon London and London’s population, it had little effect. The imperatives of trade, particularly with the islands of the Caribbean, were more powerful. Africans arrived as the slaves of plantation owners, or as sailors free and unfree, or as “presents” for affluent Londoners. In addition the increase of traffic with Africa itself afforded open access to the ports of London where many black crews found temporary homes in the eastern suburbs. Black servants also became popular, and fashionable, in the households of the nobility. So the population grew and, by the mid-seventeenth century, blacks had become unremarkable if still unfamiliar members of the urban community. Most of them were still indentured or enslaved and, according to James Walvin’s The Black Presence, “consigned to the status of sub-human property”; the evidence of their existence in London is thereby confined to “decaying headstones, crude statistics in crumbling parish registers, cryptic advertisements.” This of course is also the destiny of most Londoners, and it might be said that these black immigrants-seen, as it were, by a reverse image-represent in emblematic form the inflictions of London itself.