ABSTRACT
Black history from 1603 to 1676 does not follow the mainstream narratives of that century, which is the main reason for its invisibility. Analogously, the records of black people in seventeenth-century London can for the most part be said to be a continuation of those of the Elizabethan period. Overall, the black identities of these Blackman records, which recur in the century's later decades, may be of a barely detectable quality, but their unencumbered social appearance, even if of comparably faint visibility, introduces one aspect of the distinction of the early seventeenth-century black records. The innocuously free-floating condition of black people is predominant in the records of the city's east side as well, otherwise the second largest group in the first of the two subsets that make up the records of black people up till 1654. Whereas the other black marriage records of central London are of weaker ethnic identity, they too describe the spread of anomalous black social development.
