James Long (d.1773) and Charles Morson (d.1776):
St Mary’s Church, Church Road, Almondsbury BS32 4DT
Documents from Gloucestershire Records Office show that James Long (d. 17 March 1773) and Charles Morson (d. 16 Feb 1776) were both interred at St Mary’s Church in Almondsbury, close to Bristol. The inscription was recorded as: “They were natives of Africa and servants to Sir James Laroche at Over, who caused this stone to be erected.”
The two men were owned by one of Bristol’s most important slave-traders, Sir James Laroche (1734-1804). At some point in the mid-1700s, he purchased Over Court, a large Elizabethan mansion in Almondsbury, where the two men worked.
A recent visit to St Mary’s illustrated the problems of locating such graves. Not only were many of the older headstones very damaged, but a visit to the vicarage revealed that there were no surviving burial plans either. Perhaps the memorial to those two “natives of Africa” will never be identified.
