Black Tudors: The Untold Story is a nonfiction book about the presence of Black people in England during the Tudor area. The book profiles ten real people, such as John Blanke, trumpeter; Jacques Francis, salvage diver; and Diego, circumnavigator. A wide variety of occupations are listed, and three of the ten people profiled are women.

The author has pulled names from records wherever they might be found – for instance, Jacques Francis was involved in a court case, and a parish clerk described the baptism of Mary Fillis, a servant from Morocco. From these records, the author uses what was happening historically at the time to try to suggest what this person’s life might have been like. There’s speculation, but not wild speculation.

Because the people have such different occupations and social classes, we get a view of many different parts of life in the Tudor era. The catch, of course, is that subjects of the book don’t have full biographies. In the records of the Tudors, they have a mention here, and a mention there, and then they are gone. So the reader ends up knowing a lot about their occupation and how they may have lived, but very little about the actual person. For instance, in the chapter about Anne Cobbie, I learned a lot about terminology and a lot about prostitution but not a lot about Anne Cobbie herself.

The main point the book makes is that Black people could be found all over England, in all walks of life. Their presence was just unusual enough to be remarked upon in record but not so unusual as to be rare or shocking. If there is anyone left who still insists that you can’t have Black people in historical fiction set in Europe, this book quite neatly proves them wrong. Plus there are pictures! This was not the most thrilling or adventurous book I’ve ever read, but it was fun and extremely informative to dip into it a chapter at a time.

– Carrie S

A black porter publicly whips a white English gentleman in a Gloucestershire manor house. A heavily pregnant African woman is abandoned on an Indonesian island by Sir Francis Drake. A Mauritanian diver is despatched to salvage lost treasures from the Mary Rose… Miranda Kaufmann reveals the absorbing stories of some of the Africans who lived free in Tudor England. From long-forgotten records, remarkable characters emerge. They were baptised, married and buried by the Church of England. They were paid wages like any other Tudors.

Their stories, brought viscerally to life by Kaufmann, provide unprecedented insights into how Africans came to be in Tudor England, what they did there and how they were treated. A ground-breaking, seminal work, Black Tudors challenges the accepted narrative that racial slavery was all but inevitable and forces us to re-examine the seventeenth century to determine what caused perceptions to change so radically.