What did Free Soil mean for Black Lives in Tudor England?

Contemporary accounts from the Tudor period make references to England as a land of ‘free soil’. We also see references to the idea of the ‘pure air’ of freedom. What can we learn from accounts which refer to free soil from the Tudor period? What did the ideal of the ‘free soil’ of England mean for the lives of Black Tudors?

How were these accounts understood at the time, and how were they referred to later on in the 17th and 18th centuries?

Contemporary Accounts of Freedom on English Soil

There are several accounts from the 16th century and later periods which refer to Tudor England as a land of freedom without slavery:

For example, we have the account of a conversation by English sailor William Collins with an enslaved West African he encountered in a Mexican silver mine:

“(England) must be a good country as there were no slaves there… it was true, that there they were all freemen.”

• 1569 Court Ruling ‘England has too pure an air for slaves’
• No English legislation on slavery and the status of enslaved people
• Contrast with Portuguese, Dutch and French legal codes on slavery

“….and it was resolved that England was too pure an Air for Slaves to breath in…” John Rushworth, 18th Century reference to court ruling from 1569

“As for slaves and bondmen, we have none; nay such is the privilege of our country by the especial grace of God and bounty of our princes, that if any come hither from other realms, so soon as they set foot on land they become as free in condition as their masters, whereby all note of servile bondage is utterly removed from them.” William Harrison, Description of England, later account from the 17th century

‘no remedie…by the course of the Common Law of this realme… to compell’ an “Ethiopian” who “utterly refuseth to tarry and serve” him “to serve him duringe his life.”

• Could slavery still exist in England even if not legal?
• How do we know that Africans who set foot on English soil were free?
• What other evidence do we have for the freedom of Africans in England in the period?

• Wages and other payments
• Baptism, marriage and burial in the Church of England
• Testifying in Courts of Law

• Contrasts with English Villeins and Serfs who could not testify in court
• Contrasts with Africans in Europe and in European colonies

“The custom is such that not only the French, but foreigners arriving in French ports and crying ‘France et liberté!’ are beyond the power of those that possess them; [their owners] lose the price of the sale and the service of the slave, if the slave refuses to serve them.”

Similar principles held in the Netherlands, for example in 1596 Dutch Pirate Pieter van der Hagen landed in the province of Zeeland with 130 enslaved Africans captured from a Portuguese ship. The local authorities decreed that they could not be kept or enslaved, and freed them.

Reflection

Read Miranda Kaufmann’s article The Air of Freedom in History Today Magazine.