Black Tudors
The so -skinned prostitute Men were willing to pay four times the going rate “to lie” with Anne Cobbie
Anne Cobbie was a prostitute who worked in the bawdy house of Mr John and Mrs Jane Bankes in the parish of St Clement Danes, Westminster in the 1620s (by which point England’s Tudor dynasty had been replaced by the Stuarts). It was said that men would rather give her a “piece” – a gold coin worth 22 shillings – “to lie with her” than another woman five shillings “because of her soft skin”. Mary Hall, another prostitute from the Bankes’ establishment, described Anne as a “tawny moore”. This suggests she had relatively light skin, and so perhaps was from one of the ‘Barbary States’ of north Africa, or even, given her English surname, the mixed-race child of a black Tudor a nd a n Eng l i shma n or woman.
Cobbie’s activities were illicit, since Henry VIII had closed down the last legal brothels in 1546, and she duly found herself in Westminster Sessions Court – one of 10 women cited when the Bankes were charged in 1626 with “keeping a common brothel house”. The action was brought by one Clement Edwards, a former rector of Witherley in Leicestershire, whose wife had left him to work in the Bankes’ establishment. Although the Bankes were briefly incarcerated in the Gatehouse Prison, close to Westminster Abbey, Anne Cobbie evaded punishment (which could include carting, flogging, a fine, banishment from the city or imprisonment in Bridewell prison, where inmates were forced to beat hemp and spin flax).
Cobbie’s story is unusual, in that there is actually more evidence of African men visiting English prostitutes than vice versa at this time. In December 1577, “Jane Thompson a harlot’” was whipped because “she had consented to commit whoredom with one Anthony a blackamore”, and they were caught in bed together “the door locked to them”.
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A single woman in rural England Cattelena of Almondsbury sold butter and milk from her most prized possession, a cow
Cattelena was an independent, unmarried “singlewoman” who lived in the small Gloucestershire village of Almondsbury, not far from Bristol, until her death in 1625. Her Hispanic-sounding name suggests that, like many others, she had arrived in England via the Spanish or Portuguese-speaking worlds. She may have originally come to Almondsbury via Bristol or as a servant to one of the local gentry families, such as the Chester family of nearby Knole Park.
Cattelena was one of a number of Africans living in rural England. Parish registers record the baptisms and burials of Africans, or the children of Africans, in villages in Cornwall, Cambridgeshire, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Kent, Northamptonshire, Somerset, Suffolk and Wiltshire. The earliest of these is the burial of “Thomas Bull, niger” in Eydon, Northamptonshire in 1545.
An inventory survives of the goods Cattelena owned. These included bedding, pots and pans, a pewter candlestick, a tin bottle, a dozen spoons, clothing and a coffer. Her most valuable possession was a cow, which not only supplied her with milk and butter but allowed her to profit from selling these products to her neighbours. No furniture is listed, which suggests she may have shared her home, perhaps with Helen Ford, the widow who administered her estate.
Cattelena’s possessions – from her cooking utensils to her table cloth – each tell us something of her life. But the fact that she had them at all tells us even more. Africans in England were not owned, but themselves possessed property.
Miranda Kaufmann is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, and author of BlackTudors:TheUntoldStory (Oneworld Publications, 2017)
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EVENT E Miranda Kaufmann is discussing black Tudors at BBC History Magazine’s History Weekend in York. historyweekend.com
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Miranda Kaufmann discusses Africans’ role in Tudor voyages of discovery on our podcast E historyextra.com/podcast/ african-history-special
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