Case # 17871 1729. Monmouth County. Robert Hunter (late Governor of New Jersey) v. Johannes Smock (Surety for Obadiah Bowne, deceased, late Executor of Captain John Bowne) Rejoinder in Debt on Bond (from 1719) On a £10,000 surety bond for Obadiah Bowne, deceased, late Executor of Captain John Bowne; for money owed Stephen Delancey, Peter Barberie, and John Moore. In a pages-long list of creditors on the estate is Negro Peter, owed £1.8s.0d. For what? It does not say
Case # 41320 September 28, 1734 Page 1 of sworn testimony. Including that of Benjamin Bloomfield, who reports that “he saw the aforesaid Janna Payne Play at Cards with Black Frank Bunn, A Negroe, and Nehemiah Moores”…
“During the period under study, thousands of Turks and Moors visited an traded in English and Welsch ports; hundreds were captured on the high seas and brought to stand trial in English courts;”
Source: Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery By Nabil Matar
“Black” in the study Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500–1677 Imprints of the Invisible IMTIAZ HABIB is thus “Negro,” “Ethiopian,” “Egyptian,” “moor”/“blackamoor,” “barbaree”/“barbaryen,” and “Indian” (including orthographic variations thereof for all of them). The study’s use of the word also includes geographic names by themselves, such as Guyana or Guinea, where for the early modern English they function openly or implicitly as regional identifiers of people of color.
“Anthony Gerard Barthelemy in Black Face, Maligned Race (pp. 1–17), Michael Neill in “‘Mulattoes,’ ‘Blacks,’ and ‘Indian Moors’” (pp. 273–77), and Margo Hendricks in “Surveying Race” (pp. 15–20) all offer useful demonstrations of the propriety of adhering to a taxonomic looseness in tracing sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English constructions of colored people. At the same time, hidden in the vast archives of parish churches within London and without, all through the Tudor and Stuart reigns, are voluminous cryptic citations of “nigro,” “neger,” “neygar,” “blackamore,” “blackamoor,” “moor,” “barbaree,” “barbaryen,” “Ethiopian,” and “Indian.”
“The discussions of the records are organized in five chapters dealing with records of black people in early sixteenth-century Britain, in Elizabethan London, in seventeenth-century London, and elsewhere in England, with the last two chapters examining records of black people in the English provinces, and East Indians and other people of color in London and in the countryside.”
Source: Three principal tribes of Aethiopians, the Hesperi, Garamantes, and Indians and Afer, Indian, and Aethiops as Equivalents of Maurus
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