Black Tudors: The Untold Story

"It’s a very interesting book. The author, Miranda Kaufmann, found evidence, in the National Archives in London, of the presence of 360 black people, in the period 1500 to 1540, who lived in England. She chooses ten of these individuals and writes biographies of them. They’re ten very diverse individuals, and she writes about their lives in a very interesting way. The anecdotes are quite startling at times. She writes the biography of a Moroccan woman, who gets baptised as a Christian in a London church. There’s a story about a black porter who is asked, in a posh Englishman’s manor house, to whip a white Englishman. How that came about is rather extraordinary. The book really does uncover a previously neglected area of English history. When we think of black people in Britain historically, we automatically think of slaves. This preconception has to be slightly modified, I think. Yes. That’s what she’s arguing, certainly. They’re quite interesting people. One of them is a servant. One of them is a prostitute. She’s chosen 10 very different types of jobs for the people selected. She says that it was just part of life in Elizabethan times, with all the navigation that went on. One of them had sailed with Francis Drake. It was just part and parcel of life—at least that’s the impression I got."