Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London

Jacob Selwood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754663751
• eBook ISBN: 9781317149255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a surprisingly diverse place, home not just to people from throughout the British Isles but to a significant population of French and Dutch immigrants, to travelers and refugees from beyond Europe's borderlands and, from the 1650s, to a growing Jewish community. Yet although we know much about the population of the capital of early modern England, we know little about how Londoners conceived of the many peoples of their own city. Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London seeks to rectify this, addressing the question of how the inhabitants of the metropolis ordered the heterogeneity around them. Rather than relying upon literary or theatrical representations, this study emphasizes day-to-day practice, drawing upon petitions, government records, guild minute books and taxation disputes along with plays and printed texts. It shows how the people of London defined belonging and exclusion in the course of their daily actions, through such prosaic activities as the making and selling of goods, the collection of taxes and the daily give and take of guild politics. This book demonstrates that encounters with heterogeneity predate either imperial expansion or post-colonial immigration. In doing so it offers a perspective of interest both to scholars of the early modern English metropolis and to historians of race, migration, imperialism and the wider Atlantic world. An empirical examination of civic economics, taxation and occupational politics that asks broader questions about multiculturalism and Englishness, this study speaks not just to the history of immigration in London itself, but to the wider debate about evolving notions of national identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Chapter 1
Setting the Stage: Finding a Place in Early Modern London

On 5 February 1572 Edwin Sandys, the bishop of London, examined a number of strangers apprehended in a search conducted under the supervision of the lord mayor, acting at the behest of the Privy Council. Sandys wished, in particular, to gauge the legitimacy of those immigrants who “pretend to be here for their conscience.”¹ Among those examined was Hans Pemable of Antwerp, a goldsmith, who had arrived in England three weeks previously “to seek work and also for religion.” At the time of his examination he had “not joined himself to any church” nor could he “tell certainly where to have work,” due to the fact that “he is not yet settled.” Pemable testified that if he was unable to find employment and join a congregation he would “depart into France.”² Twenty-one years later, one survey would count a total of 5,259 strangers within the various wards of the City of London with, presumably, many more in the wider metropolitan area.³ Hans Pemable was one of thousands of overseas immigrants in London. Some stayed to make the city their home, while others departed for further destinations within the British Isles or returned to Continental Europe.

Those who chose to remain in London struggled to find a place in the city. This meant negotiating their way through an elaborate web of organizations, from guilds and churches to the courts and councils of civic and national government. Finding a place meant finding a role, and roles—of occupation, civic citizenship and subjecthood—were guarded by a host of institutions. The officers of these institutions conferred belonging according to ancient rules, often granting exceptions only on an individual basis, in the face of financial influence or pressure from a patron. Such gatekeepers bestowed belonging and enacted exclusion by virtue of the sum total of their many decisions, with the traditions of institutional practice guiding and shaping their choices.

This chapter aims to define the stage upon which early modern Londoners created difference. Before moving to the ways in which the inhabitants of the metropolis responded to the diversity around them, it is necessary to have an understanding of the arenas in which their responses occurred, together with the wider events that shaped the city’s heterogeneity. This will involve a discussion not just of the various institutions through which immigrants sought belonging and Londoners affirmed or denied it, but of the nature and extent of the city itself, of the people who chose to make a life there, their reasons for doing so and the avenues open to them once they arrived. These details, however, constitute far more than background. It is a central contention of this book that difference was the creation not simply of episodic acts of xenophobia, but of the practice of everyday life.⁴ An anti-immigrant riot was one way in which people could cast those in their midst as “other.” Yet civic policy, guild membership, rules of apprenticeship, instructions concerning loom ownership, orders regarding housing and the keeping of shops, along with many other day-to-day actions, had at least as great an effect. Such minutiae served as the building blocks for belonging and exclusion in the City.

The Growth of London

When Hans Pemable arrived in London in 1572 he would have found himself in a city in the midst of explosive growth. The population of London for this period remains, in the words of Roy Porter, “a matter of informed guesswork,” although its dramatic upward trajectory is undisputed.⁵ Not only were there no censuses in the sixteenth century, but the figures supplied by historians vary depending on whether they include only those living within the city walls, the extramural areas within the City’s jurisdiction, or the wider suburbs that formed the larger metropolitan area. The areas under the control of City government, the 26 wards, extended beyond the medieval walls, forming an area often referred to as falling within the City’s “bars” (see Figure 1).⁶ Beyond this area of formal civic control fell extensive suburbs such as Moorfields, Shoreditch and Wapping. Some of these existed under the jurisdiction of the City as manors, others were formally part of the counties of Middlesex and Surrey, while some fell under the control of the Crown or ecclesiastical authorities.⁷ Other areas lay within the bars—both inside and outside the walls—yet were exempt from government by the City. These “liberties,” often formerly areas of monastic control dissolved by Parliament in 1540, were now governed directly by the Crown. This confusing patchwork complicates the definition of London itself, leading in turn to varying figures for the capital’s population.⁸

Hans Pemable probably found himself in a metropolis of at least 100,000 souls. Although accurate statistics are almost impossible to come by, recent estimates provide a general picture of the size of London and its suburbs, along with the stunning growth that the city underwent during the period of this study. According to Roger Finlay and Beatrice Shearer, including the suburbs beyond the bars and factoring in the large number of temporary residents and transients, London probably housed around 120,000 people in 1550. By the end of the century that figure would reach 200,000. In 1650 around 375,000 people resided in the metropolis, rising to a staggering 490,000 by 1700.⁹ Vanessa Harding has taken issue with these numbers, describing the figures for the mid-sixteenth century as over-inflated and those for the latter half of the seventeenth century as too low. She suggests a tentative figure for 1548–50 of 61,000–75,000 for the 122 or 123 London parishes within the walls, the extramural liberties and Middlesex and Surrey included in the annual Bills of Mortality.¹⁰ Derek Keene, meanwhile, cites 80,000 for 1550 and largely echoes Finlay and Shearer’s numbers for 1600 and 1700.¹¹ A seasoned traveler at the beginning of the seventeenth century would have found only two Western European cities of larger population: Paris (with 220,000 people) and Naples (281,000). London eclipsed both Mantua (120,000) and Venice (139,000).¹² Within a period of 150 years, England’s capital underwent explosive growth, increasing at least fourfold in size.¹³

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Figure 1 Map of London’s wards and administrative boundaries (from Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds, p. 33; reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press)

The rate of population growth in London during this period far outstripped that of England as a whole. While England increased its population by 24 percent between 1600 and 1650, London grew by 88 percent. Growth slowed during the next fifty years, but the same disparity is evident—a metropolitan increase of 24 percent, compared to a national drop in population of 6 percent.¹⁴ Yet London was characterized by its high mortality, even during its period of most explosive growth. Four of the five major outbreaks of plague in the city from 1563 to 1665 killed at least 20 percent of the population. And as Finlay and Shearer note, “the absolute level of London mortality was probably rising towards the end of the seventeenth century,” even as the danger of plague decreased. Diseases endemic to the city filled the vacuum left by departing plague bacilli. Overcrowding and sickness created a situation in which more Londoners died before marriage than not. In the face of pestilence, whether sensational or prosaic, London’s population could not possibly be self-sustaining. The city’s explosive growth came from without.¹⁵

London grew because of English migrants, not Continental immigrants. The percentage of strangers in the city was always dwarfed by the number of residents born elsewhere in the realm. The migration needed to sustain—let alone actually increase—the city’s numbers in the face of its stunning mortality came from England itself. While aliens may have reached as much as 12.5 percent of the city’s population in 1553 (falling to around 5 percent forty years later), some estimates suggest that around one in eight English people surviving birth in the early modern period would eventually move to the metropolis.¹⁶ Most came to London to serve as apprentices and servants. The overwhelming number of apprentices were male, 90 percent of whom came from beyond the City. Of these, up to two-thirds arrived from a distance of eighty miles or more, mainly from rural areas, joined by many others of similar background seeking casual labor outside of the guild system.¹⁷ Women, although generally precluded from apprenticeships, also flocked to the city in search of work, whether as domestic servants or in a variety of independent trades, relying on informal networks of support rather than civic institutions and guilds. England’s metropolis, then, served as a magnet for people from throughout the realm, some seeking their fortune within the framework of apprenticeship and service, others in search of casual or unregulated employment.¹⁸

Continental Immigration

London had long attracted people from beyond the British Isles. Although Hans Pemable was part of a new surge of settlers from abroad in the second half of the sixteenth century, he and his thousands of cohorts followed closely in the footsteps of others. For centuries most new arrivals from the Continent had come from northern France and the Low Countries. Exceptions fell largely within the elite, such as the Italian bankers, moneylenders and merchants that filled the vacuum left by the expulsion of the Jewish community in 1290 and the traders of the North German Hanse who rose to prominence in the fifteenth century. Artisans and craftsmen, however, had usually arrived from immediately across the Channel. That they would continue to do so in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is a sign of London’s place within a cross-Channel borderland region.¹⁹ Even without speaking a word of English, then, Pemable would probably have been able to get by. In 1571 an estimated 61 percent of the city’s strangers had arrived from Dutch, Flemish and German-speaking areas (most from the Netherlands and Flanders). French-speakers made up the next largest group, at 20 percent. The trend, however, was towards more immigration from France, up to 34 percent by 1593, with Dutch, Flemish and German-speakers declining to 55 percent.²⁰ Whatever their point of origin, these new arrivals, like English migrants to the city, would have taken advantage of informal networks of aid and assistance provided by those of common origin.

The Population of Strangers

When Pemable arrived in the metropolis in 1572 his fellow strangers probably numbered around 6,500.²¹ This was up from about 3,000 in the City itself in 1500.²² These figures would rise steadi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Setting the Stage: Finding a Place in Early Modern London
• 2 “No Better Than Conduit Pipes”: Occupational Practice and the Creation of Difference
• 3 “English-born Reputed Strangers”: Birth and Descent in Theory and Practice
• 4 Jewish Immigration in an Anti-stranger Context
• 5 The Islamic World, Captivity and Difference
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index