Month: February 2022

Immigrant England shows the kinds of insights that can be gained from careful use of bureaucratic records, tax records in this study. This kind of “digital humanities” project allows estimates of the scale of immigration, the kinds of people who came to England in the roughly 250 years after 1300, where they went, and what kinds of work they did. Apparently, few formal narrative records of immigration exist for this period. But large numbers of records of the taxes imposed on these “aliens” have survived. Ormrod, et al., (hereafter just Ormrod) collected these archival documents and transformed them into a usable research tool Our reviewers this week have discussed the authors, the data sources, and the online database they created. Ormrod’s book provides one example of how to use the database they created.

England needed immigrants during this period because so many people in England in the 14C died from the bubonic plague. Demand for labor, particularly skilled labor, was high and the supply of workers was low. Unsurprisingly, some workers from the less-affected parts of Europe were motivated to travel to England. What Ormrod found was that one type of immigrant was a young artisan who had completed his apprenticeship but had not yet formed a relationship with a master. These medieval proto-journeymen from continental Europe—mostly, but not exclusively, from the Low Countries, France, and the Western “German” principalities of the old Holy Roman Empire—commonly took a “wanderjahr” when they traveled from town to town working in one or more workshops as they went. Some of these new journeymen spent their Wanderjahr in England. Master craftsmen opened workshops and unskilled workers, too, saw opportunities.

Ormrod shows that English guilds were ambivalent about these immigrants: some resented the competition, but others welcomed workers. Restrictions on immigrants were ordered, but enforcement was uneven. Immigrants with skills sought by the wealthy and well-connected (e.g., goldsmiths) often found a way to avoid the more onerous restrictions. Some became de facto citizens or “denizens” through a kind of naturalization process.

Although different type of immigrants settled in clusters, nearly all parts of England had some immigrant population. But immigrants comprised only a small part of the population. Refugees from as far away as Turkey settled in London in the last part of the 15C after the Ottoman Empire defeated the Byzantine Empire.

The digital researchers—and those among them who used their immigrant database to prepare  the book under review—have shown us something of this long-gone time and place. Another relatively unknown part of our past has been recovered, with the prospect of more to come.

I concur with Mathew’s and Emily’s implicit assessments that Immigrant England is a foundational text for historians studying English economic and social history during the period 1300 to 1550. As they note, the work makes excellent use of a rare, relatively robust, untapped database of contemporaneous records that includes alien subsidy (poll tax) records and letters of denization, supplemented by contemporaneous statutes, and other materials. As Emily notes, the underlying database is publicly available and the authors invite the community to build on their research, which Berry does. Accordingly, it is useful that the authors were are clear as to methodologies used to assess the data, for example associating high status with the ability of immigrants to pay for denizenship (26, 138), and the limitations of the data sets, for example where they deduce the numbers of immigrants in England. (Chapter 3) As Emily notes, the authors succinctly sketched background information on the “golden age of the English laborer,” Black Death, terminology (Chapter 1), guilds, English common law and other items to make their analysis of social and economic conditions meaningful to the general reader.  However, the work is clearly intended for a scholarly audience, and presumes some prior knowledge of regimes and events such as the Hundred Years War, Henry’s VIII’s excursion in Boulogne, Phillip the Good etc. (140) A strong argument, noted by Mathew, is violence against aliens was relatively rare and motivated by economic pressures rather than xenophobia. (chapter 10) The authors convincingly argue the “alien problem” in the latter fifteenth century was “invented and managed by Londoners,” especially the Guilds and often met by the central government’s “gesture politics”. (31-36). Chapter 6 is insightful with a focus on the high skills, new products, and technologies immigrants brought into fashion and other industries, and the “pull factors” drawing them to England. Berry’s article builds on this work and examines the acceptance of alien Goldsmiths.