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Early parish register entries from Cornwall

Chloe Phillips

PhD Researcher

When looking for evidence of an early Black presence in Britain’s past, historians have often turned to parish registers, which have been discussed in detail by Miranda Kaufmann and Kathleen Chater [1]. Parish registers were kept by individual Church of England churches, and recorded the baptism, marriage and burial services held within. They began in 1537, and there was limited guidance about what information to include: there was no requirement to mention race, ethnicity, heritage or skin colour. However, sometimes vicars or clerks added this information, and these instances provide what Caroline Bressey has called ‘proof of presence’ [2]. This article looks at some of the earliest parish register entries for Cornwall, in the far southwest of Britain. 

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As this article explores the earliest references discovered in Cornwall’s parish registers, it is important to note that they use archaic and offensive terms for Black people, and it is not always possible to know entirely what was meant by the terms. These complexities of language have been discussed in depth by scholars, including Kauffman [4]. While these terms can be challenging to comprehend fully, they provide evidence of a Black presence going back to the Tudor period in Cornwall.  

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The earliest reference in a Cornish parish register is to Alexander ‘the moore’, baptised in Paul parish church, near Penzance, in February 1596 (Figure 2) [5].   He was recorded as a ‘servant to master Chyverton’. The previous July, there had been a terrifying Spanish raid on Paul and the surrounding villages in which three people were killed, and many buildings were damaged. African people were often present aboard Spanish ships, and Jo Esra has speculated that Alexander may have arrived in Cornwall in connection with the raid [6]. He may have been captured and forced into service with Thomas Chiverton, a local gentleman, who reported the raid to authorities. 

Marika Sherwood, who is celebrated in this journal edition, realised the importance of parish register entries as evidence of diversity in Britain’s past. Over 20 years ago, through the Black and Asian Studies Association (BASA), she contacted record offices around the country to ask them to share their parish register findings [3]. Cornwall Record Office (now known as Kresen Kernow [KK]) responded, and the list provided to Marika had been kept safely in a drawer at the office ever since (Figure 1). When I started my PhD research into Black histories of Cornwall, a colleague shared the list with me, and it formed an early part of my database. It is not clear what approach the archivist took, as the list is very incomplete and only includes references from the eighteenth century onwards, perhaps reflecting beliefs about Black British history at the time.  Thus, while the entries discussed in this article do not feature on the original list, they demonstrate how the field has grown since the 1990s, as well as honouring the revolutionary work initiated by Marika, and the importance of local record offices in recovering Black histories.

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Figure 1: Scan of list provided to Marika Sherwood

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Figure 2: Baptism of Alexander, KK, P172/1/1.

​Alexander appears to have married and had children in neighbouring Sancreed parish between 1598 and 1622. Moore is not a local name and, Alexander was uncommon too, so it seems likely that ‘Alexander Moore’ who appears as a husband and father in the register is the same man, with the racial descriptor adopted as his surname. He fathered a child in 1598, then did not appear in the register again until 1613, when he married his wife, Susanna [7]. It is unclear whether Alexander stayed in service to Chiverton throughout this time or was able to establish an independent trade. Alexander and Susanna had at least four children, but the parish register is badly damaged by damp, and many names and details have been lost to the fading parchment [8]. Alexander was not the only African servant in Cornwall in the 1590s. In 1597, the parish register for Manaccan records the burial of John, 'the negro servant to Mr Symon Killigrewe' [9]. The Killigrews were a prominent family in Cornwall, with connections to piracy and privateering, as well as to key individuals in the Tudor court, including Sir Walter Ralegh [9]. However, their history is not well documented, making it even more difficult to research their servants. Symon (or Simon) had official roles in Rome and France, which would have brought him into contact with African people via the more established connections of continental Europe [11]. These might have brought John into Simon’s service, but no information survives to illuminate his life or experiences. Unfortunately, all we can discern about John’s life is that he must have been baptised into the Christian faith at an earlier date to be buried in the parish churchyard. 

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Figure 3: Burial of Maria [Mary], KK, P236/1/1.

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Figure 4: Burial of Sebell ‘the Blackemore’, KK, FET/187

Cornwall’s long maritime history of trading and raiding may have brought these Black people to Cornwall. Due to Cornwall’s strategic position, increased activity in Africa and the Caribbean inevitably resulted in more African people arriving on Cornwall’s shores. Cornish people were involved in some of the earliest Caribbean colonies, including Barbados in the 1630s [18].  By the 1680s, Falmouth was home to the packet ship service and, in 1694, the port was bustling with international activity, with ships calling in en route to India, Newfoundland, Antigua and Barbados [19].  The same year, the vicar recorded an intriguing baptism in Falmouth’s parish register (Figure 5), providing much more detail than we have seen in other entries: ​

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The entry provides information about Bamphora’s family background, although this has been challenging to verify. He was referred to as ‘Indian’ yet was clearly from Africa, showing the challenges of relying on historic racial descriptors.  Unusually, it also reveals how Bamphora chose his new Christian (first) name, after the ship’s master. The article also indicates how religious education was required before baptism, although it does not reveal Bamphora’s motivations. At this time, the Royal African Company [RAC] in West Africa entertained and educated children of important African families to build diplomatic links, so Bamphora’s presence may have been due to this connection [21]. His visit to Falmouth may be an indirect consequence of increased communication between Cornwall and West Africa; in the years directly after this, RAC employee Thomas Corker, who was from Falmouth, brought enslaved African people to Cornwall’s shores.These early parish register entries provide insights into early Black histories of Britain, and indicate the importance of the work done in local record offices to retrieve this history. They reveal the extent of Cornwall’s overseas connections, which intensified in the eighteenth century and resulted in greater numbers of Black people landing on Cornwall’s shores, many of whom were recorded in the parish registers.

Endnotes:

  1. Miranda Kaufmann, 'Africans in Britain, 1500-1640' (PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2011), pp. 24-27; Kathleen Chater, Untold Histories: Black People in England and Wales During the Period of the British Slave Trade, C 1660-1807 (Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 136-144.

  2. Caroline Bressey, 'Cultural Archaeology and Historical Geographies of the Black Presence in Rural England', Journal of Rural Studies, 25, no.4 (2009), pp. 386–395 (p. 391).

  3. Bressey, 'Cultural Archaeology’, p. 391.

  4. Kaufmann, ‘Africans in Britain’, pp. 56-70.Kresen Kernow [KK], P172/1/1, ‘Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, Paul Parish Church, 1595-1694’, baptism, 28 February 1595.

  5. Jo Ann Esra, 'The Shaping of 'West Barbary': The Re/construction of Identity and West Country Barbary Captivity' (unpublished PhD, University of Exeter, 2013), p. 23.

  6. KK, P205/1/1, ‘Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, Sancreed Parish Church, 1559-1743’, baptised February 1597/98, buried April 1598, marriage, October 1613.

  7. KK P205/1/1 references in 1615, 1616, 1618, 1619, 1622.

  8. KK, P135/1/1, ‘Typescript copy of bishops' transcripts, Manaccan Parish Church, 1597-1673’, burial, 9 May 1597.

  9. Susan Gay, Old Falmouth (Headley Brothers, 1903), p. 12; R.N. Worth, 'The Family of Killigrew', Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, 3, no.12 (1870), pp. 269-283 (p. 281).

  10. 'Queen Elizabeth – Volume 242: May 1592', in Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Elizabeth, 1591-94, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London, 1867), pp. 217-229; The National Archives, Kew, SP 78/29/17, ‘State Papers Foreign, folio 50, Simon Killigrew to’, 16 August 1592.

  11. Kaufmann, Black Tudors: the untold story (Simon and Schuster, 2017), p. 125.

  12. Kaufmann, ‘Africans’, p. 208.

  13. KK, P236/1/1, ‘Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, St Mary's Parish Church, Truro, 1597-1696’, marriage, 6 April 1611; burial 17 August 1611; baptism 1 October 1612.

  14. KK, P236/1/1, marriage, 1 July 1626.

  15. KK, FET/39, ‘Fiche copy of Bishop’s Transcripts for Constantine’, burial 16 April 1601; FET/187, ‘Fiche copy of Bishop’s Transcripts for Philleigh’, burial 7 December 1613; P143/1/1, ‘Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, St Mellion Parish Church, 1558-1751’, 1 September 1675; P133/1/1, ‘Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, Madron Parish Church, 1577-1707’, 25 June 1676.

  16. Kaufmann, Black Tudors, p. 247

  17. Sue Appleby, The Cornish in the Caribbean: From the 17th to the 19th Centuries (Troubador Publishing Ltd, 2019), p. xvi.

  18. The National Archives, Kew, ADM 104/449/7, 24, 31, ‘Letters from Daniel Gwynn, July-August 1694.

  19. KK, P63/1/1, ‘Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, King Charles the Martyr Parish Church, Falmouth, 1663-1735’, baptism 13 August 1694.

  20. Nigel Tattersfield, The Forgotten Trade, 1698-1725 (Jonathan Cape, 1991), p. 296.

Not all Black people in Cornwall were servants. Emmanuel ‘the Moore’ (or ‘Emanueli Maurus’ in the original Latin) seems to have been living independently. Like Alexander, he married and had children, but there is no evidence that he was tied to a prominent local person [12]. In some records, he was referred to as ‘Maurus Anglice’, or the English Moor, suggesting he may have been born in England rather than Africa [13]. In 1611, Emmanuel married Margaret Coppledick, and they had at least two children: Mary (buried in 1611, Figure 3) and Richard, baptised in 1612 [14]. Emmanuel was buried in 1623, and a ‘Margaret Moore’ remarried in Truro three years later, suggesting there was no stigma attached to her previous marriage [15]. Emmanuel and Alexander’s lives demonstrate that people of African heritage could settle and build families and lives in early seventeenth-century Cornwall. 

 

Several burials of Black people feature in Cornwall’s parish registers throughout the seventeenth century. Although these records reveal little about their lives, the fact that they were named and buried in the churchyard suggests that they were part of these rural communities. Thomas was buried in Constantine in 1601, Sebell in Philleigh in 1613 (Figure 4), Simon Christian in St Mellion in 1675, and Marten in Madron in 1676 [16]. They were all identified in the parish registers by the racial descriptor ‘Blackamoore’ (spelled in numerous ways) and all have the prefix ‘ye’ meaning the, indicating they were likely to be the only Black person in that village; the scattered locations suggest that Black people settled across Cornwall [17]. 

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Figure 5: Baptism of Bamphora, KK P63/1/1​

 

Bamphora (wch signify in ye Indian Language ye Prince) being ye Son of an Indian Kgi whose Kingdom in ye s[ai]d Language is called Warranow on ye Guinea Coast & reaches from R. Sierra Lionna to Cape Mount & Liveth in a town called Chez in ye Same Language; being yn ye Harbour of Falmouth on board ye ship Pearl of London Robert Ford Master & well instructed in ye Christian faith & desirous to be baptized thereinto was examined & further instructed therein, & afterword, baptized Edward Richardson chirurgeon of ye s[ai]d ship & Thomas Miller Boatswain so being his chosen witnesses & with them Frances Daughter of Mr Henry Emet of Falmouth dated August 13th 1694 &was then dedicated by ye name of Robert which he chosen with respect to the master of the ship… [20]

 

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