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.
