Black History Month: Reclaiming Narratives
The Stories of the Black Tudors

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This October marks the celebration of Black History Month around the world. 2024’s theme is ‘Reclaiming Narratives’, bringing a recognition of the untold stories of Black history and culture, and commitment to showing the complexity of Black heritage.

To celebrate, we want to share a project from this year’s Spitalfields Music Festival – Rommi Smith & Roderick Williams’ ‘The Blacke Songs’.

The Blacke Songs

In our 2024 festival, we presented the premiere performance of a new work by poet Rommi Smith and composer Roderick Williams, ‘The Blacke Songs’.

The name of this song cycle derives from the word ‘Blacke’, one of the words that Black people living in Tudor England were described as.

We commissioned Rommi Smith to research the lives of Black Tudors, with the assistance of Professor Jerry Brotton of QMUL, and write poetry that would form the lyrics of a new work, with music by Roderick Williams, which was premiered in the Tower of London.

The project shone a spotlight on three individuals who were written about at the time: Lucy Baynham, John ‘Blanke’, and an individual known as ‘Reasonable Blackman’.

Lucy Baynham

Lucy Baynham is the name of a woman who lived in Tudor times; she was what was known as an abbess – a Tudor colloquialism for a brothel madam.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 127

She is sometimes assumed to be the influence behind Shakespeare’s ‘Dark Lady’ sonnets, where he describes a lady with black wiry hair, and dark “dun”-coloured skin. Though she is the topic of much scholarly debate, as well as theory disparaging, the question of the identity of the ‘Dark Lady’ remains unanswered.

In choosing to highlight Lucy Baynham’s story, Rommi Smith relished in the idea of the tension between her and the most famous playwright in history. Rommi’s poem Lucy Baynham: Queen of Turnmill Street addresses Shakespeare himself, using a snippet of his own prose:

‘Give me the quill and ink, then “all the world will be in love with night” and you won’t keep those words for fair-skinned Juliet”

Reasonable Blackman

‘Reasonable Blackman’, also known as John Reason, was a silk weaver living in Southwark in the late 1500s. A record of him can be found in the records of St. Saviour’s church (Southwark Cathedral).

Reasonable Blackman – Silk Weaver of Southwark: A Ballad considers how he came to be known as ‘Reasonable’, and why this adjective came to be his name. Rommi uses Shakespeare’s Othello in juxtaposition, as a character who embodied the racist fears about Black men in that time. She compares these two imposed views in this line:

‘Reasonable Blackman makes silk for white ladies… Unreasonable Blackman – the silk handkerchief that undoes Othello – the hinge of a maybe where reason is virtue that brings no relief’

John Blanke

John Blanke, one of the few Black Tudors for whom we have an identifiable image, was a royal trumpeter in the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. His name is likely to come from either the word ‘black’, or possibly is a joke on the word ‘blanc’ meaning white.

Little is known about his life, but records that survive from his time show a payment of 20 shillings to ‘John Blanke the Blacke Trumpet’.

Rommi explained how his poem in The Blacke Songs explores how John Blanke (like many other Black people in the Tudor period) had his skin colour recorded on records, whereas, by contract, his patrons did not.

Though “blankness” be thy history’s sometime state,
no absence in my presence – do I have.
Bianco. Blanco. Branco. Beyaz. Blanc.
What price to pay when fair men cast the joke? 


A huge thank you to Rommi Smith, Roderick Williams, Nardus Williams, Elizabeth Kenny, and Professor Jerry Brotton. for their work on this project, and to the Tower of London for hosting us for its premiere performance.

Rommi Smith, Elizabeth Kenny, and Nardus Williams at the premiere performance of 'The Blacke Songs'

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