Author: Matthew Inman

Cressy, David. England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Great Britain is an island world, separated from mainland Europe and comprised of a diverse group of nations – England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. But even this mixture of different lands contains its own island fringe, smaller places surrounding the main islands that contain a heterogeneous assortment of people groups who, along with the physical islands on which they live, have made important contributions to British history. In England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles, David Cressy focuses his attention on a number of these islands – primarily the islands of Man, Anglesey, Scilly, Wight, Guernsey, and Jersey – to show how they were noteworthy factors in the early modern history of Britain. A Humanities Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the Ohio State University, Cressy has written widely on the history of early modern England, and describes himself as an early modern social historian. For England’s Islands, he is expressly interested in relations between the center and periphery, and delves into multiple types of history, from the social to the legal, political, religious, military, maritime, and economic. He draws from a large range of documents, from manuscripts and letters of people involved in island history to government papers from groups such as the Privy Council and Parliament. Arguing that England’s islands are an under-served subject in the historiography, Cressy shows that the islands were diverse and complex places with varying degrees of autonomy that presented both challenges and opportunities for the central state government in London.

Cressy’s book does an excellent job of detailing the diversity among the different islands, showing how their locations, people, and histories impacted their particular cultures. On a number of the islands very few inhabitants spoke English, there were different religious practices, and distinct cultural differences from the mainland existed. There was also what Cressy refers to as a ‘legal pluralism’ in the islands’ relationships with the state, involving differing jurisdictional arrangements between particular islands and the central government. An apt example of this is evident in the contrasts among several of the islands. Anglesey, while heavily Welsh, was connected to the central state through having representation in parliament, being subject to English courts, and owing various subsidies and taxes to the state. The Isle of Wight had a similarly close relationship to mainland England, being politically and socially integrated with nearby southern England. But residents of Wight also enjoyed certain exemptions, such as not having to serve on juries, not paying rates for the county house of corrections, and their mariners being free from impressment. The Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey provide a strong contrast in that they were practically independent (almost French) satellites of England. The islands essentially traded their loyalty to England, in the form of military and commercial assets, in return for privileges and immunities from English interference in their affairs. The Channel Islands did not contribute to parliament, nor were they subject to English Common Law. They were not answerable to English courts or English taxes, and were not restricted in their choice of trading partners. As Cressy sums up, “they were under the English crown, but not controlled by the English state” (43). Taking all the peripheral islands into account, a view develops of the challenge faced by the central government in administering and dealing with numerous islands, each with a different relationship and set of rules and exceptions that favored their own liberties, traditions, and the status quo.

Even as the metropole had to manage the challenges of the periphery, there were simultaneous benefits provided by the island fringe that the state could take advantage of. First, the islands provided a certain degree of security to the mainland by essentially serving as maritime outposts of defense. Though Cressy points out that, at the same time, using the islands as defensive outposts presented its own challenges, such as push-back from islanders and the cost of providing and maintaining defensive structures and equipment. Arguably, the greatest benefit provided by the islands was their usefulness as prisons, a subject to which Cressy dedicates an entire section of his book. In the discussion of islands as prisons, he particularly focuses on the eras of the civil wars, the interregnum, and the Restoration to highlight how different leaders and governments all took advantage of the islands to isolate their enemies. The usefulness of this practice is seen in Cressy’s examination of several political prisoners who, while imprisoned in London, could still participate in the public sphere through the ability to meet with visitors and could write and publish pamphlets to spread their ideas. By imprisoning these types of government enemies on islands, the state could isolate them from almost all connections; as Cressy writes, “island prisons were intended to cut them off forever from the business of the world” (219). The state was able to hold its enemies in these prisons due to the paradoxes of the island fringe; they were connected to the state, but they were also somewhat extra-legal areas where normal legal codes, such as the writ of habeas corpus, did not reach. Governments could arbitrarily lock their enemies away in island prisons and those prisoners had no recourse to legal rights. Leaders from the Commonwealth to the Protectorate to the Restoration used this method to deal with enemies; even Charles I was a prisoner on the Isle of Wight.

Cressy notes that some of the islands have retained a measure of autonomy and distinct privileges into the present, but a major arc of his book shows a slow, steadily increasing hegemony of the center over the periphery. Through the shake-ups of the civil wars and changing governments there was a growing state power over the islands and a diminishing ability for them to go back to all the liberties of the past. Cressy lays out this argument by outlining many of the principal and high-profile actors in island events, but the perspectives of ordinary island residents are mostly absent. This could very well be due to a lack of documentation produced by or about these individuals, but it becomes a noticeable gap in the history of these islands. The inclusion of the viewpoints of ordinary people would have made this very good book into an excellent one.

England’s Islands in a Sea of Troubles explains the significance and complexity of the relationship between the center and the periphery in the early modern period, but it also points toward themes and events in the subsequent modern era, particularly the development of the modern nation-state. Britain’s interactions with its nearby islands also provided experience for its future efforts with colonialism in the wider Atlantic world and beyond. In the same way the British state sought to use its islands to its own profit, in its colonies it strived to both impose British law and culture while simultaneously taking advantage of the colonies as legal gray zones to engage in behavior that was prohibited at home. Its island fringe had provided it with long involvement in seeking mastery over peripheries in pursuit of achieving the greatest benefit for the British state.

Reviewed by Matthew Inman, George Mason University

Timbers, Frances. Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.

Magic has had a long history of being used as a tool to both convey and define cultural ideas in society, and the ways that magic was regarded and used by people in early modern England is the focus of Magic and Masculinity: Ritual Magic and Gender in the Early Modern Era by Frances Timbers, who is currently an adjunct professor at Trent University and who focuses her research on ritual magic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Magic and Masculinity was her first monograph, published in 2014, and it grew out of Timbers’ doctoral thesis at the University of Toronto. The work’s primary concern is examining the ways in which ritual magic intersected with ideas of gender in early modern England, and Timbers shows how magic was opportunistically used by some in ways that reinforced traditional gender hierarchies, but also by others to undermine those established gender roles. Timbers relies heavily on manuscripts written by people directly involved in magic during the era; people such as Elias Ashmole, a well-educated and well-connected alchemist, and Goodwin Wharton, who left behind an extensive diary of his life with Mary Parish and their experiences with the spiritual world. While these manuscripts may contain any amount of fabrication, they remain historically useful sources because they open a window onto the culture in which they were produced and shine a light on contemporary gender issues. Timbers also uses Quarter session records from Essex to illuminate a legal episode that involved accusations of magic use.

Timbers opens her work with a quite useful primer on the subject of magic and the differences between ceremonial or ritual magic and witchcraft. While witchcraft was viewed as a means of supernatural harm, ritual magic was widely accepted as a positive and useful natural philosophy. It was largely employed by respected and educated men who sought to manipulate the natural world or engage with the spirit world in a synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. In the early modern era, the boundary between the tangible and the intangible worlds was highly permeable or even non-existent, with widespread belief in magical ideas and spiritual beings like demons and fairies. This general belief in magic allowed those who practiced it to be influential drivers of culture.

A foundational argument of Timbers’ book is the way that magic was used as a pathway to manhood and its attendant power, control, and honor. Men used ritual magic to achieve their masculine desires and to strengthen the patriarchal structure of society. Male magicians were considered to be experimental scientists who used science, which was personified as male, to subdue nature, which was personified as female. This behavior by educated and influential men supported traditional patriarchal ideas of the dominance of men. The men who performed ritual magic sought to demonstrate control over both the natural and spiritual worlds. In the religious and cultural landscape of the early modern era, patriarchy was firmly entrenched in society and it was generally accepted that women were naturally subordinate to men; in fact, this was believed to be the divinely ordained order of things. Men extended these beliefs to the spiritual world and used ritual magic to subordinate and command spirits as well. Timbers explains that the demonstration of control over the spiritual world could add greatly to a magician’s sense of masculinity.

In this same vein, there was an upper-class fraternity of men involved in ritual magic who formed groups that allowed for elite occult status that had the effect of enhancing the social status and masculinity of these men. Groups like the Royal Society and the Freemasons provided men who were interested in magical arts with a measure of exclusivity, secrecy, and occult knowledge. Timbers cites Elias Ashmole as an example of a rich and educated man, interested in astrology and alchemy, who was very drawn to these kinds of groups that had a mystique of ancient and secret knowledge available only to the male elite. Of course, these groups excluded women and lower-status men, thereby upholding patriarchal hierarchies and notions of masculine elitism.

Timbers also includes a case study of a local legal suit in the 1640s between John Alston and Robert Aylett. Alston, who was a prominent man in his community, accused Aylett and some fellow conspirators of breaking into his home in the night and sexually assaulting male and female members of his family. Alston explained the men of the family’s lack of resistance by claiming that Aylett had caused them to be charmed asleep during the assaults. This is a prime example of Timbers’ notion that magic was a tool that people wielded in various ways. By leveling an accusation of magic use at Aylett, Alston was able to frame himself and his family as victims of the supernatural, thereby retaining his honor in a situation that otherwise would have cast him as a weak patriarch who was unable to protect his family and home. Alston was able to retain his manhood by accusing his enemy of the nefarious use of magic.

Timbers’ examination of women’s use of magic also shows variations and inconsistencies in the ways it intersected with gender ideas. Goodwin Wharton wrote about his partner, Mary Parish, a female magician who sometimes undermined patriarchal ideas with her magic, and at other times seemed to support the notion of traditional patriarchy. In the accounts of Parish’s magic, she was submissive to the spirit world rather than in command of it, as male magicians would have been. This puts her below men in terms of magical prowess and feeds into ideas of women as naturally weaker and more subservient than men. But in another instance, she had to defend Wharton’s male virtue when he was being sexually abused by female spirits. This event reversed the usual patriarchal hierarchy of powerful males protecting the virtue of weaker women.

Magic and Masculinity examines how cultural opinions about gender were impacted by ritual magic, and by the way magic was used by various individuals, both male and female. The work should appeal to scholars interested in cultural or gender history, but could also hold wider scholarly appeal as the issue of magic in the early modern period overlaps with numerous other subjects, such as religion, science, and medicine. Timbers admirably covers a surprising amount of ground in a brief book, but Magic would have profited from a bit more analysis in the conclusion. She does well to write about the theme of boundaries, with male magicians seeking to build and control boundaries between the worlds while female magicians tended to blur those boundaries. But there seemed to be some additional themes in the book that she could have expounded upon as well, such as power or belief. That said, the book is well-written and full of fascinating ideas, so perhaps the criticism about the brief conclusion is just another way of saying that readers will be left with a curiosity to know more about this intriguing subject matter.

Reviewed by Matthew Inman – George Mason University

Blakemore, Richard J. and Elaine Murphy. The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2018.

The civil wars fought in the British Isles during the seventeenth century have been extensively studied and analyzed by historians over the centuries, but it is the significance of the waters and seas surrounding those islands, and what happened there, that is the focus of Richard J. Blakemore and Elaine Murphy’s The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653. Blakemore and Murphy produced this work upon the realization that the historiography of the civil wars has left a gap by its lack of examination of maritime and naval events, and that those events add crucial context to the understanding of the civil wars themselves, and to Britain’s post-civil war history. Both authors are well-suited to this subject; Blakemore is at the University of Reading and focuses his research on British seafarers in the early modern period, and Murphy is an Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth, focusing on British naval history. Both have written extensively on the maritime history of Britain, and this collaboration received multiple scholarly accolades after its publishing. The skills of both Blakemore and Murphy are on display in their impressive use of primary sources for the book. They build their work with documents from the National and Parliamentary Archives, including documents from the High Court of Admiralty and the Calendar of State Papers. They also use a large number of printed manuscripts and London propaganda newsbooks like Mercurius Aulicus and the Moderate Intelligencer. The goal of The British Civil Wars at Sea is to demonstrate how the British navy progressed from being a feeble fleet in 1638 to a dominant naval power by 1653, and how naval actions were critical factors in the outcome of the civil wars.

Blakemore and Murphy structure the general arc of the book to present a roughly chronological narrative of naval events during the civil wars. With a general build-up of European naval strength in the seventeenth century, due to growing maritime enterprise and threats posed by privateering and piracy, Charles I instituted a very unpopular tax for the benefit of the navy, which was just one of the many causes that led to the outbreak of war. Charles faced rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, and at home, a defiant parliament that had taken control of the navy. Over the next several years, naval success went back and forth between royalist and parliamentarian forces, with most maritime action coming through siege blockades and strategic movement of supplies and reinforcements rather than head-on ship battles. After the parliamentarian victory in 1646 there was growing dissatisfaction and disunity within the navy, which led to a major mutiny in the Downs in 1648 led by seafarers who wished to treat with the king and to the renewal of naval conflict between royalists and parliamentarians. It is possible that Charles I and his forces had a small window of opportunity for victory during this time, but in the end, any advantages essentially backfired and Charles was defeated once again. The conflict continued for several more years, with Charles II and his royalist forces eventually losing out.

The authors couple their overview of the wars with the argument that naval events were crucial factors to the course and eventual outcome of the wars, a perspective they contend is missing from much of the historiography. To begin with, the fact that parliament gained control of the navy in 1642 was a colossal advantage and the authors argue this was a contributing factor to parliament’s victory. Control of the navy allowed the parliamentarians to defend London, support the land war throughout the islands, and control maritime trade and security. A few ships remained loyal to the king, and both sides were forced to hire private merchantmen to fight, but in a conflict where the number of existing ships was finite, the advantage fell on the parliamentarian side. While the royalists made a determined effort, the authors write that “in the long run they lacked the capabilities to pose a serious threat to parliamentarian domination of the seas” (128).

The initial maritime advantage that the parliamentarians benefitted from seemed to grow more commanding as the wars went on. The authors show that this was due to effective infrastructure and organization. Parliament added newly-built warships to its fleet, while also hiring many private ships to act as an auxiliary force, and the admiralty was run by effective leaders. Over time, this led to increasing control of the seas around Britain, which gave parliament a certain amount of control of shipping and trade routes, and provided security from foreign invasion. For parliament, this only aided the ability to support the land war, while the abilities of the royalist navy slowly shrank. This development is most evident in the later stage of the wars, after the execution of Charles I, as the new Commonwealth felt beset by enemies, and the authors cite N.A.M. Rodgers’ comment that it was “the fear and insecurity of a military dictatorship surrounded by enemies real and imagined which made England a first class naval power” (154). The fears and pressures of war encouraged the investment in naval power and increasingly paid off in real advantages. This can be seen in the Commonwealth’s gradual overwhelming of the royalist navy in the 1650s, as Prince Rupert’s fleet was increasingly ineffectual and seemed to be merely avoiding capture, rather than contributing to the war effort in any meaningful way. The necessities of war were the impetus of the build-up of the parliamentarian navy, and the authors conclude that by 1653 the British navy was “the pre-eminent naval force in Europe, and a key pillar of the Commonwealth” (174). This mastery of the seas poised Britain for its imperial future across the globe.

The British Civil Wars at Sea is a strong and well-researched military history that is clearly intended for serious scholars of the conflicts in Britain during this time period. It provides a focused examination of one piece of the larger puzzle of the civil wars; a reader will not come away with an understanding of the wider events of the civil wars from this book alone, but it would contribute to a fuller understanding in combination with other scholarship on the subject of the wars. The one point on which Blakemore and Murphy could be criticized is that after writing a compelling work on the importance of the naval element in the civil wars, they seem to somewhat downplay their conclusion. While stressing the significance of the maritime conflict, they also admit that it was land battles that ultimately decided the outcome of the wars. While their effort to avoid hyperbole or unmerited overemphasis of naval events is appropriate, it does feel a bit undermining to the central arguments of the book.

Reviewed by Matthew Inman, George Mason University

Nicholls, Angela. Almshouses in Early Modern England: Charitable Housing in the Mixed Economy of Welfare, 1550-1725. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2017.

It is a widely accepted principle that shelter is a basic human necessity, and the administrators of almshouses in early modern England attempted to address that need in a way that was fitting for the time. In Almshouses in Early Modern England: Charitable Housing in the Mixed Economy of Welfare, 1550-1725, Angela Nicholls makes the case that the almshouses of this time were highly diverse in their forms and styles of operation, and also served their local communities as vital providers of welfare. She challenges the established historiography by arguing for the high degree of variation in almshouse practices that counters the standard portrayal of the almshouse as “a quaint but largely irrelevant institution, providing care and shelter for a small number of respectable, privileged elderly people” (224).  Nicholls is an Associate Fellow at the University of Warwick, and this book is focused on her particular concentration of research, namely, almshouses and their place in the welfare systems of the early modern period. Here, Nicholls employs archival county records, particularly from Durham, Warwickshire, and Kent, and covers a little less than two centuries to make her arguments about almshouses in early modern England. A good number of primary and secondary sources are utilized in the work as well. She integrates both quantitative and qualitative data throughout the book, including multiple tables and charts as well as numerous examples of the experiences of individuals.

A main theme of Nicholls’ book concerns the difference that existed between the aspiration of housing welfare policy and the real-world actuality of how housing for the poor was tangibly achieved. The legislation of the period reveals a desire for institutional solutions focused on work and discipline in order to address those who were poor for socially acceptable reasons, and also those who were perceived as vagrants and idlers. But the actual administration of housing policy was far less organized or uniform. While legislation enacted parish taxes for poor relief, thereby making local parishes responsible for the poor in their areas, Nicholls shows that even with these taxes, almshouses very often relied on the philanthropy of wealthy benefactors, whose personal whims often dictated how the almshouse was operated. She shows that the founders of almshouses were inspired by an array of diverse motivations, often founding almshouses in order to display their wealth, status, and virtue. These selfish motivations are evident in the fact that founders sometimes named their almshouses after themselves or required almspeople to wear insignia bearing the founder’s initials. But it wasn’t all self-aggrandizement, as many founders were spurred by notions of religious charity or humanist ideas of social responsibility.

Just as there were many differing motivations to found almshouses, their administration and operation was also highly variable, as were the residents whom they accepted. Almshouse residents could be young or old, male or female, they were sometimes able to work, and experienced differing levels of poverty. The high degree of variation in the demographics and circumstances of residents supports Nicholls’ argument of the diversity of almshouses in different locations. The most common requirements for residents were that they had been living in the local parish, not in a faraway place, and that they were ‘deserving’ poor, generally defined as someone having been reduced to poverty through no fault of their own.

Many almshouses were quite small, in that they had room for relatively few people, and Nicholls demonstrates that gaining a place in an almshouse was most likely highly desired by poor people due to the substantial benefits that it brought. There were numerous advantages in being an almshouse resident, the principal one being that placement in an almshouse was for life, with expulsions rarely occurring. Many residents had a room to themselves and their own hearth for warmth and cooking, and some almshouses also provided stipends to residents. While these stipends were often insufficient for survival, necessitating almspeople to work or rely on other forms of charity, their advantage came from the fact that they were guaranteed and regular, providing a certain amount of stability for almshouse residents. In addition to the tangible benefits, there were social benefits to having a place in an almshouse. The general design and functioning of almshouses conferred a degree of individuality and autonomy on the people who lived there. It afforded them the opportunity to live as independently as one could while receiving this kind of charity. Additionally, a place in an almshouse served as a signal of acceptance in the local community. Though poor, almspeople seemed to enjoy social inclusion in their communities; the fact that they depended on charity did not seem to be stigmatized. Despite these points, Nicholls still argues that almshouses differed so widely across localities that “it would be hard to say that there was such a thing as a typical almshouse” (138).

Nicholls concludes the book with a case study of a specific almshouse that effectively supports the arguments she makes throughout the book. She details the specific workings of the almshouse in the parish of Leamington Hastings in Warwickshire to show how this particular almshouse fit in with the surrounding community. The almshouse presents a picture of pragmatic decisions being made to meet the needs of the local poor while maintaining social order and economic stability in the parish. Essentially, decision makers were attempting to do what was best for their community, and Nicholls is attempting to show that what was best would differ across communities, and therefore, there was not a typical way of managing and operating almshouses.

A shortcoming of Almshouses is that it leaves readers in the dark about the broader facts of poverty in early modern England. One is left wondering just how much of a social problem poverty was at this time, and what became of poor people who did not find a place in an almshouse. Nicholls does mention that parishes were engaged in poor relief outside of almshouses, but as almshouses had relatively few spaces, one wonders where other poor people went. Were they funneled into workhouses or prisons? Were they left in wandering homelessness? More background on the wider issue of poverty may have given readers a greater appreciation of the important role that almshouses played in communities. Despite that drawback, Almshouses should appeal to both economic and social historians. Nicholls’ examination of how almshouses fit into the wider issue of welfare will be useful to those historians focused on economics, and her inclusion of many examples of the individual people involved in and affected by the almshouse system, from founders to almspeople, will be of interest to historians concerned with the social aspects of the topic. The case study of the Leamington Hastings almshouse also contains aspects that brush up against perspectives of microhistory and history from below.

Overall, Nicholls’ examination of the administration of almshouses in early modern England reveals a surprisingly benevolent, non-judgmental, and localized system of welfare provision in communities, and demonstrates their diverse and philanthropical provision for the genuinely impotent poor.

Ormrod, W. Mark, Bart Lambert, and Jonathan Mackman. Immigrant England, 1300-1550. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019.

The general notion that the Middle Ages were a time of static experience for the people living through them is an idea that is countered by W. Mark Ormrod, Bart Lambert, and Jonathan Mackman in Immigrant England, 1300-1550, their examination of the immigrant experience in England through the end of the medieval period. The conclusions they are able to draw propose that England during this time period was a “viable – and in many cases a positively attractive – place to move to” for foreigners seeking opportunity (37). The work is the result of a collaboration among Ormrod, Professor of History at the University of York, who led the project, and Lambert and Mackman who assisted with research. The book is connected to a larger research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom that produced a research database and website (www.englandsimmigrants.com), where one can access and study the raw data on which the book is constructed.

The foundation of the work rests primarily on two types of documentation, pulling heavily from the files of the Exchequer and Chancery courts. First, the authors used records of a special tax known as the alien subsidy, which was applied to foreigners residing in England and was collected at different times between 1440 and 1487. The most important aspect of the subsidy was that it served as a “crude form of alien registration” (6), thereby providing a crucial resource to researchers as to how many immigrants were in England during the span in which the subsidy was applied, where they came from, and what type of work they did. While there is much inconsistency in the documents, tax officials many times recorded the nationality of aliens, and the researchers were also able to draw conclusions about origins based on the recorded surnames of aliens. Second, the authors collected letters of denization which allowed foreigners who intended to stay in England the rights to use English courts and to hold property in return for swearing an oath of fealty to the king of England. While denization was never widely used, it does provide information on the backgrounds and activities of immigrants.

The findings provided by these sources show that immigrants were coming to England from a wide variety of places, from both within the British Isles – Wales, Ireland, and Scotland, and from overseas locales such as France, Italy, and the Low Countries. And while there were higher concentrations of immigrants in the larger English cities, the records show that immigrants were living in every corner of the country, even in most rural areas. The authors note this as an important finding, for while the degree of interaction varied, “virtually all the indigenous population of England had some degree of personal knowledge of foreigners” (69). The finding also suggests a high degree of mobility in the British Isles and Europe, and a robust degree of migration that popular views may not associate with this time period. Nearly all native English people, even those who lived in rural communities, would likely have experienced some level of interaction or relationship with foreigners. The authors additionally attempt to illuminate groups that are often ignored in most existing historiography, such as women, religious minorities like Jews and Muslims, and the low-status poor, who mostly show in the alien subsidy returns under the catch-all term ‘servant’, making it difficult to determine specific information about their circumstances. Though these groups certainly existed, little of their experience was documented, leaving their lives in the gaps of the archive. Notwithstanding the archival silences concerning women and minorities, an issue which is admittedly a larger problem within historiography in general, the evidence suggests that, overall, opportunities were limited for women and minorities, particularly if they were also immigrants.

After establishing that thousands of immigrants were in England in the late Middle Ages, the authors examine what brought them there and what they did once in England. After multiple outbreaks of the plague during the Black Death, there was major depopulation in England which caused labor shortages and resulting wage increases. Higher wages resulted in more disposable income and the appearance of a consumer economy. As more goods were produced, manufacturing increased and foreign workers were attracted by the economic opportunities of this situation, not to mention the legal benefits offered by denization. Skilled craftsmen who immigrated to England for work often employed fellow immigrants as workers, sustaining the flow of immigration. The authors detail a number of industries in which immigrant workers played a role, such as the clothing industry, building materials, and beer brewing. At times, the prevalence of immigrant craftsmen and merchants, and the popularity of their goods, caused tension between them and native workers. The authors describe several instances when the tension between immigrants and English natives boiled over into violence in order to make the point that violent outbursts of this kind were relatively rare and were not the result of pervasive anti-alien sentiment, but arose more from general economic and political unease that was occasionally directed toward immigrants.

The work of Immigrant England is impressive due to the amount of knowledge it is able to draw from the alien subsidy records and other associated government documents. The majority of the book uses these documents to delve into the immigrant experience with illuminating results, but perhaps a minor critique of the book could be made with the last few chapters, focusing on the social and cultural experiences of immigrants, which while certainly important, seem to feel a bit like a different book. That said, the chapters do help fill out the picture of immigrants in England, and they allow the authors to show how the interactions of official institutions with aliens and immigrants were perhaps some of the first glimmerings of nationalism, and in hindsight could be seen as a step in the development of the nation-state. The official tax records of the alien subsidy are a good example of the type of categorization that goes along with nationalist thought, i.e., who is English, and who is not English.

Immigrant England seems to skew toward being intended for more serious scholars as opposed to a general readership. Particularly if it is read in conjunction with the database website, it gives one a great deal of insight into conditions in England, and into evolving ideas of nationalism and ‘being English’ in the last centuries of the medieval period and the transition toward the early modern era.

Reviewed by Matthew Inman, George Mason University