Introduction

Studies of racial formations in early modern England have always had to deal with an uncertain knowledge of the actual numbers of black people. The stumbling block in the resurgent “moment” of race in Renaissance studies has been, in the absence of information to the contrary, the reluctant acknowledgment that “actual” black people were probably a “tiny” population. ¹ Scholars have been unable to regard historical blacks in the reigns of Elizabeth and her immediate successors as anything more than stray figures in an “anecdotal” landscape, too accidental and solitary to be even a historical statistic. ² Such current assumptions are merely reinforcements of the pronouncements of earlier scholars, who insisted that the Elizabethans did not know black people. ³ Yet, obscure, truncated and largely inaccessible documentary records, which are only now becoming fully available, paint a very different picture about the size, continuity and historical seriousness of the black presence in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, well before English black populations become known through the transatlantic slave trade.