Warning: this blog post includes images of eighteenth century documents which sometimes use words that we find offensive today.
Parish registers are the most frequently used documents in most county archives. Anyone who has done their family history and attempts to extend their tree beyond 1837* will dip into parish registers. If you have been lucky enough to trace your ancestors back before the nineteenth century, you will know that the information in the baptism, marriage and burial entries thins out the further back you go.** But, every so often, the parish priest added something extra to the record which can shine a little extra light on the lives of his parishioners.
Some vicars noted down when the people that they were baptising, marrying or burying were of African descent. A lot of research has been done on the Black Presence in London and other cities, such as Bristol, but little has been done on Northumberland. It would be easy to assume that Northumberland (with its current borders) would not have had any Black presence in the past. It is a vast, mainly rural county with no major city as an economic draw; even today, it is one of the least ethnically diverse parts of the country. But Northumberland’s parish registers tell a different story.
Without having done any sort of systematic trawl of the registers,*** we know of nine entries that document people of colour in Northumberland in the eighteenth century. The earliest is the baptism entry of George Sylla on 4 March 1767 in Carham. The parish priest noted that George was African and the servant of Ralph Foster, a merchant of Berwick.
Three of the other entries record that the man being baptised worked as a servant. Blackett Shaftoe (1 February 1778 in Ovingham) was the servant of William Shaftoe of Kingston, Jamaica. Later that year (17 April), Charles Reed son of Francis Reed of Virginia and servant to Captain Charles Ogle was baptised in Eglingham. A decade later (12 October 1788) William Mungo, “a black adult from the coast of Guinea in Africa” was baptised at Woodhorn. The register shows that he worked as a servant for S. Watson.
None of the entries mention that these men had been enslaved, but it would seem likely. Virginia and Jamaica were both plantation economies that relied on enslaved labour to cultivate luxury crops such as tobacco, sugar and coffee for expanding eighteenth-century markets. During this period, ships sailed from London, Bristol and Liverpool laden with finished goods which they exchanged for people on the Guinea Coast of west Africa. The enslaved people were shipped across the Atlantic on the infamous “Middle Passage” to the West Indies and America. Blackett Shaftoe and Charles Reed might have been born in Jamaica and Virginia to Africans, but William Mungo seems to have been born in Africa – on the Guinea Coast.
It is possible that the men that George, Blackett, Charles and William served had purchased them and brought them to Northumberland. Men who lived worked or fought (Captain Ogle?) in British colonies often returned to England and brought their favourite slaves to serve them. Having a Black servant was even seen as a fashion accessory in eighteenth-century England.
Once the enslaved men (they were mostly men, as can be seen from our very small and unscientific sample) set foot in England, their enslaved status was unclear, especially once they had been baptised. Many felt that slavery was not English and that it was not possible to enslave a Christian.
The Yorke-Talbot opinion was an attempt to clarify these questions – a handwritten copy can be found in our collection (ZMD/114/261). It stated that baptism did not free an enslaved person and that bringing a slave to England did not change their status. However, this was an opinion that was sought for and given to a group of West Indian plantation owners after they had wined and dined Yorke and Talbot at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London.
It seems likely that the belief that an enslaved person could be freed by baptism persisted, in spite of Yorke and Talbot’s “opinion”. So, the baptism of these men represented something more than acceptance into the Church of England; some believed that this act emancipated them.
Not all the men that appear in the parish registers are described as servants. Peter and Samuel Blyth were baptised on the same day, 21 January 1798, in Earsdon parish. The baptism register records that they are of “riper years” indicating that they are not infants, as would usually be the case for baptism. It is unclear if these two men were related, although they both share the same surname. The fact that their surname is the same as a village (now town) within the parish might suggest that Peter and Samuel adopted a new name according to their new surroundings. It might even have been that they were runaways and were adopting a new name to hide from their former owners. Georgian newspapers often contained small ads for runaway slaves, generally offering rewards. (University of Glasgow project website: https://www.runaways.gla.ac.uk/)
Unusually, Malcolm Patterson does not appear in a baptism register, but in the burial register for Earsdon, the same parish as Peter and Samuel Blyth. His wife, Mary, was buried on 8 May 1780. It is noted that Malcolm was a labourer at Hartley Pans (now Seaton Sluice). It is almost impossible to trace Malcolm’s background – he might have been a freed slave, a runaway, or a free African, some of whom worked as sailors and may well have sailed into Newcastle (or North/South Shields). What does seem very likely is that he was attracted to the area by the economic opportunity that it offered. This might also explain why three men of African descent can be found in the registers for this area.
During the eighteenth century Blyth and Seaton Sluice developed as an economic centre in the county, due in large part to the investment and business acumen of the Delaval family. The production of salt was of long standing, but coal mining and shipping, glass production and shipbuilding all prospered in the 1700s.
As has been pointed out by David Olusoga, escaped slaves or men of African descent who rejected domestic service were likely to have found it difficult to make a living in eighteenth-century Britain. Most trades relied on the apprenticeship system and were therefore effectively a closed shop. New industries might have offered men like Malcolm, Peter and Samuel good opportunities with their mix of skilled and unskilled labour, coupled with new systems of employment.
The remaining two entries that have been found in the parish registers are baptisms; two that occurred on the same day (9 November 1784). John English and Robert Mouto were from Madras (now Chennai) in India, according to their baptism entry in the Bamburgh parish register. Both are defined as “a black or Mulatto boy” and their parents are said to be “unknown”.
It is possible to speculate that John and Robert were orphans with some link to the British East India Company (BEIC), which had ruled Chennai since 1774. It may have been that they were brought over as servants by a BEIC functionary or a soldier, like the men of African descent who have been discussed above. Or perhaps they managed to work their passage aboard a ship.
The term “Mulatto” that the vicar of Bamburgh applied to these two boys was used in the eighteenth century to mean a person who has one white and one black parent. It is possible that these two boys had an English parent who then brought them back to Northumberland with them (although they have two different surnames). It seems more likely that the vicar made the assumption that their brown, rather than black, skin was the result of a mixed-race union. He fitted them into a category that he was familiar with, rather than one that necessarily described John and Robert’s background accurately.
We know a little about these nine men who came from Africa, America, India and the West Indies because they were recorded by vicars and uncovered by researchers. There may well have been other men and women of African or Indian descent living in Northumberland who are not obvious to us because they were not recorded in the registers. We hope that there are more to find. By digging deeper and looking more closely we can write a more rounded history of Northumberland, its people and its links to the wider world.
*Civil registration introduced for births, marriages and deaths.
**Printed registers for baptism and burial in 1812 and for marriages in 1754 meant that information became more uniform across the county. See https://northumberlandarchives.com/docs/ANGLICAN%20PARISH%20REGISTERS%20-%20reviewed%20November%202017.pdf for more…
*** We are looking into the possibility of doing this.
Sources
J. Ken Brown, Out of the Ordinary: A Cornucopia of Unusual Northumberland Parish Register Entries, Tyne and Wear, 1999
Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, London, 2018 edition (original 1984)
David Olusoga, Black and British, London, 2016
Northumberland Archives website, page for Blyth Communities exhibition: https://communities.northumberland.gov.uk/Blyth.htm
Northumberland Archives, page for Seaton Sluice Communities exhibition: https://communities.northumberland.gov.uk/Seaton%20Sluice.htm