Note 234b — HISTORY OF LYNN, PART II.

They are mentioned in Domesday, and by many of our topographical writers, without attempting to account for their origin. Their condition seemed as abject as that of our modern West India Negroes. We seldom hear of them after the bloody contest between the rival houses of York and Lancaster, which proved to them, it seems, a most beneficial contest, as it occasioned their emancipation, in order the more easily to recruit the contending armies. As the lust of Henry VIII. proved favourable to the success of the reformation, so the ambition of those rival houses, proved, it seems, no less so to the manumission of these poor slaves.