ABSTRACT
In much of contemporary Europe, the perception remains that Africans – the most visible target of new immigration policies, the most likely to face discrimination in employment and housing – have no history of which to speak, and to many it therefore seems self-evident they have no history within pre-modern Europe. The imagined history of Britain (a word beneath which always lies the shadow of “England”) is emblematic of these misconceptions. The British or English, the so-called AngloSaxons, have come to epitomize the “whitest of the whites.” Here is the supposed image of unsullied purity: A monolith allegedly unblemished until the recent waves of immigration. This image is untenable. The most basic history of England cannot be told without having that territory intimately related to something larger and more complex. From Roman imperial Britain, through the settlement of Anglo-Saxons and Jutes, Cnut’s northern realms of the early eleventh century, the Angevin dynasty’s agglomeration of the twelfth century, and beyond, the making of England has always been a deeply transnational affair in which immigration and internationalism have been among the most formative elements. True, to envisage an ancient or medieval African presence in England runs counter to powerful and pernicious myths of racial homogeneity. Yet evidence points increasingly, if fragmentarily, to a long history of diversity. One well-publicized recent instance involved archaeologists participating in a BBC television series, History Cold Case, who revealed that a skeleton
excavated from a burial ground in Ipswich was that of a thirteenth-century African man: The first scientifically proven case of an African in medieval England. The archaeological team determined that the man was born in the Maghreb, in the modern territory of Tunisia; he may have been captured during a crusading expedition in North Africa, conceivably passing through Muslim Spain before he was transported to England. There, he converted to Christianity and ultimately received a burial in the local friary.
