Africans, Asians and other migrants in early modern England
Africans in Early Modern England
The presence of African people in England long predates the transatlantic slave trade. Tudor-era records, analysed by historians Miranda Kaufmann and Onyeka Nubia, document Black individuals living and working across England from the early sixteenth century. They arrived through several routes: as members of Spanish and Portuguese diplomatic parties, as servants brought by merchants, and as skilled professionals in their own right.
The most vividly documented African Tudor was John Blanke, who served as a royal trumpeter at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. He is depicted in the Westminster Tournament Roll of 1511 — a colourful contemporary illustration that shows him mounted on horseback alongside other royal musicians. Blanke was not enslaved; he received a royal wage and petitioned Henry VIII for a pay rise, which was granted. His story challenges any assumption that Africans in Tudor England were automatically enslaved or marginalised.
Other documented individuals include Reasonable Blackman, a Southwark silk-weaver active in the 1570s to the 1590s, who appears in London parish records as an independent craftsman. Church baptism, marriage and burial records across London, Bristol and Plymouth record dozens of African individuals between 1500 and 1600. Historian Miranda Kaufmann has traced the lives of over 360 Black Tudors in the archives.
In 1596 and again in 1601, Elizabeth I issued proclamations about the presence of “blackamoors” in England — expressing displeasure at their numbers and ordering that some be deported. However, historians note that these proclamations had little practical effect: there is no evidence of organised deportations, and Africans continued to live and work in England. The proclamations tell us about royal attitudes but do not accurately describe what happened to Black people in Tudor England.
Medieval Aliens: Resident Strangers in England
Before the Tudor period, England’s towns had hosted significant communities of foreign merchants and craftspeople throughout the Middle Ages. Alien residents paid special taxes (the “alien subsidy”), faced restrictions on trading independently, and were sometimes required to live with English hosts. Flemish weavers brought advanced textile techniques to East Anglia and Kent. Italian merchants from Florence, Genoa and Venice dominated the luxury trade through London’s Lombard Street. German merchants of the Hanseatic League operated from the Steelyard, a privileged enclave in London, from the thirteenth century until Edward VI’s government revoked their privileges in 1552; Elizabeth I closed the Steelyard in 1598.
These communities created periodic tensions with native English merchants, who complained that alien traders undercut local prices and took trade away from English guilds. But they also drove economic growth, introduced new skills, and helped integrate England into wider European commercial networks.
The East India Company, chartered by Elizabeth I on 31 December 1600, opened sustained commercial connections between England and South Asia. These connections produced an early flow of South Asian people to Britain. Among the first were Lascar seamen — sailors recruited in Bengal and other Indian coastal regions to crew East India Company ships. Because the Company rotated its ships through English ports, Lascars regularly arrived in London, Bristol and other ports. Some were stranded when contracts ended and their ships departed, forming small South Asian communities in port districts.
South Asian servants also arrived in England from the late seventeenth century onwards. Wealthy East India Company officials and merchants brought Indian servants, particularly women employed as nursemaids or “ayahs.” Child servants from India appeared in English household records. These individuals occupied marginal and often vulnerable positions, dependent on their employers and without legal protections. Some were abandoned when their employers returned to India or died.
John Lok brought five Africans to London in 1555 as part of a trading expedition to West Africa. This is one of the earliest documented cases of Africans being brought to England specifically as part of the Atlantic commercial system. Lok intended to teach them English so they could serve as interpreters for future trading voyages — a reminder that the early African presence in England was bound up with commercial expansion, not only with later slavery.
The lives of African and Asian migrants in early modern England were diverse. John Blanke’s story — a salaried royal musician who petitioned for better pay — demonstrates that some Black individuals in Tudor England were skilled professionals with recognised standing. Reasonable Blackman’s presence as an independent craftsman in London shows integration into the artisan economy. At the same time, the later development of chattel slavery in the Atlantic meant that by the late seventeenth century, the position of enslaved Africans brought to England by returning colonists was very different from that of the free Black Tudors.
Historians caution against two oversimplifications: celebrating Tudor diversity anachronistically as if racism did not exist, and assuming that all Africans in early modern England were enslaved. The documentary evidence demands a more nuanced reading. These were individuals with names, occupations, families and, in some cases, the capacity to act as agents in their own lives.