The evidence for African migrants in Britain from the Bronze Age to the Medieval Period
It looks like someone finally put some very solid research together in regards to the whole demographics question, which people have been asking me for at least three years now. Dr. Caitlin Green has compiled some documentary and archaeological resources specifically showing African populations in Bronze Age, Roman, and Medieval Britain. Some of these I already knew about, others are original research and pretty darn cool. Also of note: the isotope method only counts first-generation immigrants and not their descendants, since the method of identification used has to do with childhood drinking water’s geographical origins.
The degree to which pre-modern Britain included people of African origin within its population continues to be a topic of considerable interest and some controversy. Previous posts on this site have discussed a variety of textual, linguistic, archaeological and isotopic evidence for people from the Mediterranean and/or Africa in the British Isles from the Late Bronze Age through to the eleventh century AD. However, the focus in these posts has been on individual sites, events or periods, rather than the question of the potential proportion of people from Africa present in pre-modern Britain per se and how this may have varied over time. The aim of the following post is thus to briefly ponder whether an overview of the increasingly substantial British corpus of oxygen isotope evidence drawn from pre-modern archaeological human teeth has anything interesting to tell us with regard to this question.
The following post offers a map and brief discussion of the Islamic gold coins of the later eleventh and twelfth centuries that have been found in England and their context. Whilst clearly rare finds, there are now ten coins of this period known, all but one of which are thought to most probably have their origins in Spain. Moreover, these coins are considered to be the survivals of a potentially substantial body of this material present in England at that time.
The aim of the following post is to offer a draft look at an interesting Arabic account of early medieval Britain that appears to have its origins in the late ninth century. Despite being rarely mentioned by British historians concerned with this era, this account has a number of points of interest, most especially the fact that it may contain the earliest reference yet encountered to there having been seven kingdoms (the 'Heptarchy’) in pre-Viking England and the fact that its text implies that Britain was still considered to be somehow under Byzantine lordship at that time.
The following short note is based on a narrative preserved in the eleventh-century Fragmentary Annals of Ireland that tells of a Viking raid on Morocco in the 860s. This raid is said to have led to the taking of 'a great host’ of North African captives by the Vikings, who then carried them back to Ireland, where they reportedly remained a distinct group—'the black men'—for some considerable period of time after their arrival.
So, this is just what was included in that particular Twitter thread. I’m going to work on OCR for some of those images and transcribe what I can, as I can. if anyone would like to help make this post more accessible feel free to do so and/or drop a link in my inbox.
