Immigrant England, 1300–1550

W. Mark Ormrod, Bart Lambert, Jonathan Mackman

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526109156
• eBook ISBN: 9781526109163
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This book provides a vivid and accessible history of first-generation immigrants to England in the later Middle Ages. Accounting for upwards of two percent of the population and coming from all parts of Europe and beyond, immigrants spread out over the kingdom, settling in the countryside as well as in towns, taking work as agricultural labourers, skilled craftspeople and professionals. Often encouraged and welcomed, sometimes vilified and victimised, immigrants were always on the social and political agenda. Immigrant England is the first book to address a phenomenon and issue of vital concern to English people at the time, to their descendants living in the United Kingdom today and to all those interested in the historical dimensions of immigration policy, attitudes to ethnicity and race and concepts of Englishness and Britishness.

1

Introduction: immigrant England

Between 1300 and 1550, England was a temporary or permanent home to hundreds of thousands of people of foreign birth. These immigrants – male and female, adults and children – came from other parts of the British Isles, from more or less all the regions of continental Europe, and (especially at the end of the period) from the wider world of Africa and Asia. They settled not just in the major cities and towns but also in rural communities, having a documented presence in every county of England. They numbered in their ranks aristocrats, professional people such as scholars, doctors and clergy, prosperous traders and skilled craftspeople, and numerous semi- and unskilled workers involved in commerce, manufacturing and agriculture. Some came as refugees escaping economic, political or religious turmoil in their homelands, and a few may have come as forced labour. Most, though, arrived as a result of self-determination, facilitated by the general openness of borders and encouraged by the perceived opportunities that migration might bring. Their host communities in England occasionally remarked on their difference in terms of language, custom and dress, and gave them identities that either reinforced connections to the homeland (John the Frenchman, Joan Scot) or effectively eradicated it by using occupational surnames (Henry Brewer, William Goldsmith, Alice Spinner). Some were allowed to become subjects of the king and to acquire the status of denizen, equivalent to that of people born in England. Others were subject to severe limitations on their legal rights and ability to work. During periods of national emergency, these incomers could fall under suspicion as infiltrators and spies, and be subjected to head counts, restrictions on movement and repatriation. At other moments of high tension, they could be easy scapegoats for the frustrations both of the elite and of ordinary folk. But they were also acknowledged for their contribution to the economy, to education, culture and religion, to the defence of the realm and to public service. If immigrants were sometimes seen as a potentially disruptive presence, they were also understood to be a natural and permanent part of the social order.

This book sets out to explore and understand the lives and experiences of these people, and thus to address a notable problem in existing understandings of English history. Conventional histories of immigration to Britain sweep briefly across the Middle Ages, noting the waves of conquerors and settlers from the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons to the Vikings and the Normans. Thereafter, virtually nothing is said until the mid-sixteenth century, with the first arrivals of religious refugees in the form of the French Huguenots and ‘Dutch’ Protestant dissenters.¹ General political and cultural histories have reinforced this notion by treating England as comparatively isolated from the continent of Europe after the loss of Normandy by King John in 1204 and noting its development over the later medieval period as a sovereign state with a keener, more exclusive sense of nationhood.² Only London, supposedly, was an exception: as the national centre both for government and for trade, it continued, in every generation, to attract people from all over Europe and beyond.³ Otherwise, England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is generally perceived as a ‘closed’ society whose contacts with the outside world were founded not on the presence of immigrants but on a passing acquaintance with foreign envoys, merchants and pilgrims.

Migration involves both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors: people moved around in medieval Europe because of poor conditions in their natal lands and the perception or reality of better opportunities elsewhere. At first sight, the appalling natural and man-made disasters that hit England during the period look like disincentives to immigration. The onset of a severe famine in 1315–22 and the advent of the Black Death in 1348 took a terrible toll in the fourteenth century, reducing the population from between 4 and 6 million in 1300 to only about 2.75 million in the late 1370s. Plague and other diseases became endemic, so that the population remained virtually static, at around 2 to 2.5 million, until the end of the fifteenth century.⁴ From the 1370s, the balance of trade went into long-term deficit, and foreigners coming into England were subjected to higher and higher customs duties and restrictions on their commercial activities and personal movements. In the 1440s, England went into a deep and prolonged economic recession, with a collapse of imports and exports, a major contraction in internal markets and a serious shortage of ready coin; signs of recovery did not become evident until the 1470s.⁵

For much of the period under consideration, furthermore, England was at war. Hostilities with Scotland began in the 1290s as a result of Edward I’s attempts to take over the independent northern kingdom as an adjunct of England; although such aims were abandoned under Edward III, war with the Scots continued intermittently into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. War with France also began in the 1290s and continued into the early Tudor period: although historians use the term ‘Hundred Years War’ specifically to refer to the phases of hostility between 1337 and 1453, these were really part of a more prolonged series of conflicts lasting intermittently from the reign of Edward I to that of Henry VIII. Such wars, and disputes with other continental powers, created further significant strains on the economy. They pushed up levels of taxation such as to precipitate regular discontent and occasional open defiance, as in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the resistance to the ironically labelled Amicable Grant in 1525. Endemic warfare intensified suspicions of enemy aliens and led to occasional demands for their expulsion. On a local level at least, there were also occasional threats to social order as a result of noble rebellions and civil war, especially in the so-called Wars of the Roses of the later fifteenth century.⁶

Finally, the later Middle Ages witnessed the introduction in England, as in other parts of Europe, of exclusionary policies designed severely to limit racial and religious diversity.⁷ Edward I’s decision to expel all Jews from England in 1290, and the official upholding of this ordinance until the seventeenth century, meant that England was marked by deep cultural and institutional discrimination against racial minorities. Muslims from southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East – usually referred to as ‘Saracens’ in medieval Christendom – were not subject to an official ban, but the presumption was that they, like the Jews, were only officially acknowledged in England if they accepted conversion to Christianity. Historians have long remarked how, in the sixteenth century, the Tudor state bowed to political concerns over the presence of observable ethnic and racial minorities and began an intermittent programme of minority persecution, first against gypsies and later supposedly against people of colour. Such actions sent the very firm message that minorities were not just unwelcome but also effectively outlawed. Under this combination of environmental, economic, institutional and cultural factors, it is easy to suppose why historians have assumed for so long that there were few ‘pull’ factors encouraging foreign immigrants into late medieval England.

Such a negative picture is significantly modified, however, when we understand the ‘push’ factors that induced people to move, and the better conditions and positive attractions that were still available, and understood to prevail, in England.⁸ Significant numbers of people from other parts of the British Isles, whether the Plantagenet dominions of Ireland and Wales or the enemy state of Scotland, clearly found that the relatively highly urbanised and commercialised economy of England provided opportunities for advancement that were not available at home. The situation was different for people from southern Europe: for the inhabitants of the kingdom of Castile, for example, which recovered rapidly from the Black Death and whose stable agricultural and commercial economy was buoyed up by the exploration and colonisation of the Atlantic and the Indies, England offered palpably few incentives, at least until Jewish converts to Christianity began fleeing religious persecution in Iberia in the sixteenth century.⁹ In many parts of north-west Europe, however, an even greater intensity of natural disasters and political turmoil made England seem, in comparison, a relatively stable and conducive destination.¹⁰ The drop in the rural and urban workforce meant that wages and purchasing capacity in England were attractively high, and certainly higher in real terms than in many parts of the continent: the so-called ‘golden age of the English labourer’ in the fifteenth century, when goods were cheap and wages were high, provided a strong inducement to the movement of labour over both short and long distances.¹¹ For all the suspicion that immigrants could arouse, moreover, the English state continued at least until the first half of the fifteenth century to offer them a widening range of fiscal and legal incentives. Laws were passed to make it easier for aliens involved in trade to maintain their commercial interests in England; special measures were taken to draw in people with particular skills; and exemptions were readily granted from the periodic threats to expel enemy aliens during times of war.¹² Facilitating all of this was the fact that England’s borders generally remained open, at least to those who were not active enemies of the state. The great majority of people who crossed to England were not required to produce and keep identification papers, and often found it relatively easy to disappear into their new host communities.

The absence of, or lack of access to, detailed records about immigrants in the Middle Ages meant the development of various unsupported traditions and myths in post-medieval popular culture. Particularly powerful in the public imagination was (and to some extent still is) the story of the Flemish weavers. There is good documentary evidence, long available, that Edward III encouraged skilled cloth makers from Flanders into England to help develop what was then still a nascent textile industry.¹³ Many of the historic centres of woollen cloth production in East Anglia and Kent have therefore long claimed that Flemish weavers moved there in the fourteenth century, conveniently ignoring the fact that in many cases the real influx came with the much larger numbers of ‘Dutch’ weavers who arrived among the Protestant refugees reaching England from the 1560s onwards.¹⁴ Not surprisingly given the nineteenth century’s interest in all things medieval, the great textile-producing cities of the North that grew to greatness after the Industrial Revolution also began to exercise their historical imagination in claiming the same lineage. In the early 1880s Ford Madox Brown painted a series of historical murals for Manchester Town Hall. One of them, The Establishment of Flemish Weavers in Manchester, A.D. 1363, a detail of which appears on the cover of this book, created the attractive fiction that Edward III’s wife, Philippa of Hainault, had been patroness of a Flemish settlement in Lancashire and visited its members every springtime.¹⁵ The statue of the B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: immigrant England
• 2 Defining and regulating the immigrant
• 3 Numbers and distribution
• 4 Immigrants from the British Isles
• 5 Immigrants from overseas
• 6 Supplying the market
• 7 Wealth, status and gender
• 8 Old worlds, new immigrants
• 9 Cultural contact
• 10 Integration and confrontation
• 11 Conclusion: nationalism, racism and xenophobia
• Bibliography
• Index