Image: The Westminster Tournament Roll of John Blanke, a trumpeter in the service of the court of Henry VIII, in a Westminster procession of 1511. Alas, no image exists so far as I can find of the musician active a few years earlier at the court of James IV. This is the nearest equivalent, showing a musician taking a heraldic part in a royal procession, wearing royal (Tudor) livery.
Recent research and indeed performances has drawn fresh attention to the presence of a Black drummer at the court of James IV.
The records of payments from the royal treasury shows that this man received several payments between 1503 and his early death in 1507, although his name (unlike that of a white drummer, Guillaume Porteous) is not given, only his ethnicity. How he came to Scotland, and whether he came willingly or otherwise, is also unknown. However, as these years marked the yearly phase of James’s marriage to Margaret Tudor, sister to Henry VIII, it looks as if James was attempting to bulk up the entertainment culture of his court.
‘More’ in the early modern period was a typical label for someone with Black heritage. European courts had a tendency to ‘collect’ people with attributes or skills which lay outside their national norms, and it appears that having a Black drummer may have been something of a fashion of the day, since references in other European contexts mention African performers; it may also be that ethnic stereotyping that associated Black musicians with rhythm rather than pitch may have been prevalent even in the Renaissance (Earle and Lowe, p.35).
The most accessible source for extracts from the royal accounts dealing with music is the transcript made by William Dauney in an appendix to his 1838 Ancient Scotish [sic] Melodies from A Manuscript of the Reign of King James VI. Dauney in fact noted the references to the ‘More taubroner’ (Dauney, p.358), and his extract spots a payment of 9 Scots pound each to ‘to the More taubroner, Guilliam taubroner, etc, ilk man (Habib, p.29).
However, there were more payments. Virginie Chaverot, who works for Living History Scotland at Stirling Castle, wrote a recent blogpost for Historic Environment Scotland in 2023 which gives more information. From her, you can read that regular payments of 4 pounds 7 shillings and 6 pence were paid each quarter to this person, associated with performances at Linlithgow Palace, Dumfries, and Falkland between 1505 and 1506: clearly, he toured with the court around Scotland. He received additional money in 1505 to repaint his drum. In June 1506, he received payments for medical expenses following some kind of accidental injury, which may have resulted in his early death by 1507, when final payments appear to ‘the Moris wife and child’ (Chaveret). Chaveret credits research by Miranda Kaufman for these details. Not only was this man a drummer: he may have been responsible for planning particular festivities around Shrovetide in 1505.
The drummer was not the only person of colour at the court of James IV. Literary scholars have also long been aware that the court poet William Dunbar wrote a poem ‘Of Ane Blak-Moir’, to a woman. This makes uncomfortable reading for 21st century people, as the racial stereotyping is particularly broad. The recent National Theatre of Scotland play James IV: Queen of the Fight (2022), by Rona Munro put that female character at the centre of her narrative, exploring how the Scottish renaissance court might have looked in 1504 through the eyes of a professional entertainer freshly arrived from Portugal.
Life in Scotland might not have been easy for James IV’s English bride, Margaret Tudor, but it must have been much stranger for these two Black entertainers, however they found their ways north.
One potential barrier for Scottish researchers is that information about this is often found in work otherwise titled ‘English’ – you need to search in the small print. Remember, Scotland was definitely NOT English in 1504! However, some interesting work is ongoing about John Blanke (almost certainly ironic rather than his actual name), a black trumpeter in the court of Henry VII and Henry VIII, who is pictured – unlike James IV’s drummer – in an impressive tapestry roll, the image heading this Soundyngs post. We approach this topic, therefore, sideways on.
Further Reading
- Westminster Tournament Roll, National Portrait Gallery, accessed 05/12/2025
- Virginie Chaveret, ‘The More Taubronar’: An African Drummer at the Court of James IV’, Historic Environment Scotland 23/10/23 blog, accessed 4/12/25.
- William Dauney (ed.), ‘Extracts from Documents Preserved in the General Register House at Edinburgh: 1 Extracts from the accounts of the Lords High Treasurers of Scotland Relative to Music’, in Ancient Scotish Melodies from A Manuscript of the Reign of King James VI (Edinburgh: Maitland Club, 1838) – National Library of Scotland digitised copy
- T F Earle and Kate Lowe (eds.), Black Africans in Renaissance Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008)
- Miranda Kaufman, Black Tudors: The Untold Story (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017)
- Michael I Ohajuru, ‘The John Blanke Project’, in the National Picture Gallery website accessed 05/12/2025
- Rona Munro, James IV: Queen of the Fight, National Theatre of Scotland webpage accessed 05/12/2025