The Making of English Slave Iconography: Emerging xenophobia toward black Africans in the coat of arms of Sir John Hawkins (1568) and Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605) by Daniel Jan Evans

This article will investigate the developing representations of black Africans during the Tudor and early Stuart periods. The presence of Africans in England during this time is frequently overlooked as their residence is often only discernible through scant evidence, in the form of church records, literature and material culture. By examining the coat of arms of Sir John Hawkins (Figure 1) and Ben Jonson’s ‘The Masque of Blackness’, this article will demonstrate how, although the transatlantic slave trade was not yet prevalent, visual imagery and material culture representing Africans during the Tudor and Stuart periods were already beginning to reflect an attitude equating blackness with the status of ‘sub-human’, a belief that seemingly defined nearly all later English depictions of Africans, as well as being used to justify the English position on the slave trade.