Here’s a screencap from the episode “The Woman Who Lived”.
I counted 35 faces in the wide shot of the villagers in the scene (gathered for a hanging), and of those, 8 not Saxon/Norman. Is this a reasonable ethnic mix for a random village in England 500 years ago?
This stems from my comment in the Doctor Who Season 9 thread, which was:
Am I wrong on that assessment? This almost seems like GQ actually, but because it stems from the TV show I’m putting it here.
If it were in London the black faces would have been not so odd, though the proportion is pretty high. There were already black slave-servants in the city by the mid-16th century and it was quite in vogue by the 18th. I see at least a couple Indian-looking faces, which would have been vastly more unlikely in that year, though not impossible.
Most unbelievable were the happy smiling faces of black women chatting with white neighbors. Kinda unlikely given social mores - it would be more realistic is the black faces were all back in the fringe of the crowd and looking somber.
Of course if we’re talking small town England - not a chance in hell, certainly not in 1651.
It was Tyburn Gallows, which in the mid 17th Century was a village but on the outskirts of London; now it would be located in Marble Arch. Public hangings there attracted huge crowds from the metropolis, which at the time had an appreciable black population. The program was perfectly correct in having a black spectators at a hanging.
And if you’d like a further cite that 17th Century London had a black population, I’m going to have to refer you to Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography, specifically Chapter 73, page 711:
“…by the mid seventeenth century, blacks had become unremarkable if still unfamiliar members of the urban community.”
And the quote continues
which doesn’t square terribly well with the scene in question. The non-whites looked to be free peasants, not servants.
And again, I never requested proof “17th Century London had a black population”, rather the question was about the percentage in the crowd. Unstated was the social classes looked off.
(I don’t expect perfect historical accuracy in my ‘time traveler in a box’ stories, so it wasn’t big deal, just an aside.)
Pehaps you’d like to address your claim that medievalpoc is “crazy”, then. It’s links are fascinating, and its aims seem quite reasonable to me:
This isn’t the first time this question has come up; when The Shakespeare Code aired a lot of people were quite scathing at seeing black Elizabethans depicted, when obviously everyone knew Londoners were all white. If this blog and a few BBC scriptwriters set about to redress that historical misconception, a little dramatic license in numbers isn’t a mortal sin.
Nor am I claiming “dramatic license in numbers” is a mortal sin. Did you read the last sentence of my post?
Of course it’s not representative of an English village around the time of the Civil War, however …
It seems a little jarring that in an episode about an immortal Viking woman who cross-dresses as a highwayman in order to steal an amulet that, with the aid of a human sacrifice, will enable her fire-breathing alien lion-man accomplice to open a portal to another dimension so that the immortal woman can escape Earth, your concerns were that the black extras were too numerous and too happy.
So you didn’t read it. Sigh. Oh well.
Maybe not a mortal sin but doesn’t making it look like the non-whites in the crowd are happy equals sanitize the actual historical situation? I have noticed from time to time in NuWho that they stretch poetic license in order to be color blind quite often. It’s an entertaining TV show not a history lecture so it doesn’t matter at all except when it pulls you out of the story.
Although when talking about Doctor Who the worse mortal sin has always been the atrocious American accents used in various episodes.
It’s not necessarily evidence of the presence of dark-skinned people in early modern Britain, but Shakespeare was able to make one a general of the Venetian army. Presumably he found “Moors” exotic but not completely unfamiliar, and expected his audience would as well.
As for the other people of color in the screenshot, I read them as Hispanic. Possibly Sephardic Jews from Spain, descended from those expelled by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.
Of course, the really unrealistic part is the people of color socializing with whites as equals. But given that this scene is taking place in London, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to me.
True to a point, but to depict the actual historical situation would mean that there would be a lot fewer eyes, noses and limbs, and a lot more carbuncles, boils and weeping sores in the crowd. I doubt the life of a beggar or indentured servant during the Protectorate would be a bundle of laughs, either, black or white
What the hell are “People of color” (colour is spelled wrong as well)?
I did; I’m not sure what your point was. You asked whether an England of the time would have been that ethnically diverse, it was pointed out that yes, there was a significant African population, and cites and sources were given. You then started talking about percentages and raised another issue of whether or not the population was free. To quote you from this thread:
A random village in England in the mid 17th Century, probably not, no. A representative London population - whose European members would be more than just descendants of Normans and Saxons, but everyone from Scandinavians to Turks, let’s not forget - present at at popular hanging at Tyburn? It’s not a bad stab at showing that yes, there was more diversity than is often thought.
It’s an Americanism, hence the spelling ;).
Hmmm…I’ll split the difference with you. I think there would have been few non-slave blacks in 17th century London and very, very few Indians of any standing. Britain didn’t even gain a foothold in India until 1608 and it remained small and precarious for the first few decades. London was indeed increasingly cosmopolitan, but not so much that non-European traders would have been tremendously common in the 1650’s - it was pretty far afield as an entrepôt for even Levantine traders. Most of that trade ( like the increasingly lucrative coffee trade, imported via the Ottomans ) was controlled by English traders going out, not Arabs and Turks coming in.
And the social exclusion would really have little to do with skin color and everything to do with class. I really don’t think slaves would have been in the habit of cheerily chatting it up with free people ( even peasants ) at a hanging.
And why “Saxon/Norman” anyway? It’s set in 1651, not 1151, and that distinction had largely vanished by the 1300s. For a program set in a mid 17th century England on the verge of the Restoration, a cultural and linguistic distinction outdated by 300 years is far more anachronistic than the presence of a few African faces. You might as well call them American/Australian and be at least as accurate.
Are you new to the English language? You see, there have been numerous divergences in accepted standardized spellings of words between American and British dialects. Almost undoubtedly and by far the most often pointed out is the word color specifically, and other -or words like flavor, labor, etc. which no self-respecting American would be caught dead spelling with a “u”. I find it impossibly hard to believe you weren’t already aware of this.
also, he spelt “Spelled” wrong.
Th ethnic mix of the crowd is exactly the same ethnic mix of any crowd in Doctor Who - it can be ancient Rome, modern-day Liverpool or New New York in the year fifteen billion, you’ll see exactly the same faces, namely, those of the same random people who’d show up at a casting agency in Cardiff.