“It is wrong, always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence”[1]
Eighteen months ago the London Museum announced[2] that black women of African descent living in London were proportionately more likely to die of medieval plague because of “premodern racism”. Unsurprisingly the research provoked a huge academic backlash and even politicians weighed in with trenchant views on woke bias in universities and museums. In response to these criticisms, the director of the Colonial Countryside project tried to calm things down by reassuring us that research into a 700-year-old plague was unlikely to be noticed by many people.
The Association also referred to a blog by an unidentified historian who had written that
“Historical evidence is typically fragmentary. Historians arrange what they uncover to make innovative, speculative arguments about what happened in the past. It is then left to other historians to agree or disagree, and deliver their own evidence and interpretation to the table. Hopefully, once the dust settles, we all have a more informed view of the past.”[3]
This is simply not good enough. The story wasn’t an intellectual spat between rival academics of little concern to ordinary people since it was deliberately designed to catch the attention of the media – hence the international press release. Nor was it merely an attempt to encourage informed debate because, as the press release boasted, this controversial research will “…inform galleries at the [London] museum’s new home in Smithfield, opening in 2026.”
In other words, the research was intended to be widely publicised and more significantly, consequential. It is therefore worth looking not so much at the nature of the evidence relied upon, but at the underlying methodology by which it was weighed. In that respect, we get some idea of the authors’ “situatedness” (their word, not mine) when they proudly proclaim “Black Lives Matter. Black Methodologies Matter.”
This Black feminist methodology apparently developed out of work done on slavery archives and Black feminist archaeology focused on North American post-1492 sites. The authors then applied it to London’s 14th century cityscape. What they failed to explain is why any analysis of the Atlantic slave trade, which cannot be dated back earlier than the 15th century, has anything useful to say about conditions in London some 150 years before anybody even guessed there was land on the other side of the Atlantic, much less that it was worthwhile trafficking slaves there.
The unnamed historian who insisted that historical fact-finding differed from legal fact-finding, fundamentally misunderstood how evidence ought to be analysed if we are to have an informed view of the past, as do those who parrot the formulation apparently beloved of archaeologists that “absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence”.
It is perfectly true that conclusions drawn from available evidence will change when better quality evidence becomes available – think how finger-printing, DNA analysis, and x-ray microscopy produced fresh insights – but until then, the basis on which we should all work is that “absence of evidence is absence of proof”. What is not appropriate, either for lawyers or historians, is to make assumptions in the absence of any evidence at all, or worse, to assume that absence of evidence proves a pre-determined conclusion, which was how the research paper argued its thesis.
The legal approach to evidence is guided by two fundamental principles – a burden of proof and straightforward common sense. Only criminal cases require a burden of proof “beyond reasonable doubt” but it is telling that in most serious criminal trials, fact-finding is left up to a jury rather than the lawyers, precisely to ensure that the decision remains grounded in common sense. The vast majority of fact-based legal disputes are decided “on a balance of probability” by judges who approach conflicts of evidence by considering the case in the round, looking for corroboration and constantly sense-checking the conclusions.
This would have been useful guidance for the authors of the plague pit research, because they might not have needed to spend any time vexing themselves over why there was no evidence of Muslim burial practices in London’s mid-14th century burial grounds[4], but presumably they were leaving scope for some future academic to write a thesis on say, Tibetan sky-burial practices in medieval London based on the complete absence of vultures in the skies above the city.
How is it even possible to “contextualise (one of the burial sites examined) as part of the archive of slavery” when there is no evidence of widespread black slave ownership in England in 1346? This lack of evidence does not stop the authors from stating as fact ‘ that a percentage of those killed by London plague epidemics were enslaved or formerly enslaved people.” On that basis, “our Black feminist archaeology must first address the archive of slavery (comprising human remains) characterised by… a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property.”
One of the authors of the paper, Dr Dorothy Kim, made the startling claim that “Chaucer’s 14th century medieval London was a Black London”, which suggests a degree of black involvement in city affairs out of all proportion to even the most generous estimates of its non-white population at the time. It is just a shame that as assistant Professor of English at Brandeis University, she did not think to run a red crayon through all the obscure and opaque passages in the report and produce something in plain English that actually made some sense.
It seems that the criticisms made of the research at the time have led to something of a rethink on the part of the Museum of London. The archaeology is now better explained:
“When we looked at how the skeletons were buried at East Smithfield, we found that none of the plague victims with Black African or mixed heritage had been maltreated as you might expect to see in a population group that might have suffered from discrimination. We could see that their bodies were placed in the graves with care and respect…”
This is the precise opposite of the racial discrimination claims made in the research paper.[5]
Nothing to see here then, but more than ever before, we need our museums and universities to be the trusted curators of truth and not mere followers of the fashion for spurious race theory. Great damage has been done to the cause for inter-racial tolerance.
Marcus Rutherford was born in East Africa and is a former International Disputes lawyer working in the City of London (now retired). He is currently writing an account of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition [1887- 1890] sourced from the original diaries, notebooks and letters of the men involved.
[1] William Kingdon Clifford – The Ethics of Belief (1877)
The paper itself can be found here https://journals.upress.ufl.edu/bioarchaeology/article/view/2403.
[4] “Currently, because our sites were Christian burials, they do not yield any evidence for Black Muslims, although their presence may have been erased through being given a Christian burial treatment.” Evidence of their presence was not craftily erased by racist white Englishmen and common sense suggests that Saracens left no trace precisely because there were no communities of Muslims (“Muslims” and “Islam” were not even part of the language) in medieval London. This was, after all, 100 or so years before the fall of Constantinople was to send shock waves through Christendom and during a period when no true Muslim would have risked his life by proclaiming his religion in Christian Europe.
