In 1524–5, a witness statement was made by a sixty-eight-year-old man called William Pigott, who came from the village of Corton, near Great Yarmouth. The statement was part of the evidence in a dispute between Yarmouth and the neighbouring town of Caister about the extent of the borough boundaries. Pigott recalled the construction, fifty years earlier, of a ‘peyer of gallouse’ on the sands ‘south of Cokle water’, where, he said, ‘were put to execucon dyvers pyrattys, rovers upon the sea’. Pigott then added an extra detail, ‘that one Eylys a More, beyng one of the same compeny, and then within age, callyd a boy of the shippe, for that he was then within age, was not put to execucon, but levyd many yeerys after.’

The date of this mass-hanging of the ‘pyrattes’ can be determined with some accuracy. Pigott suggested the events had happened half a century before, and comparison with the other witness statements from the case suggests that the hanging took place between 1467 and 1469. This would place Eylys in England before the mention of two men from ‘Indea’ in the Subsidy Rolls of 1483–4, and forty years before the mention of John Blanke ‘the blacke Trumpet’ at the court of Henry VII in 1507. The term used by Pigott to describe Eylys was ‘a More’. The OED shows the breadth of meaning that was given to this word in the early modern period:

The OED definition here is extremely useful, since it argues that the word was ‘Originally without depreciatory force’ and avoids any association between its use and anti-African negativity. The focus is, instead, on the minimum understanding of the term that can be derived from the sources that make mention of the noun.