As the discussions of Lowestoft and Yarmouth make clear, ‘strangers’ and ‘foreigners’ were not uncommon in Tudor Norfolk and Suffolk, but these social categories were not equated with any notion of race; they were associated with other factors. In the censuses of ‘aliens’ that were being carried out in the region during the fifteenth century, the underlying idea of threat and ‘difference’ was driven by government in response to the idea of a potential ‘internal enemy’. For example, the 1436 census was a response to the instigation of new hostilities with Philip, Duke of Burgundy, which made people from his territories – Burgundy, Nevers, Picardy, Artois, Flanders, Brabant, Zeeland, Holland, and Limberg – all potential enemies of the crown. In this instance, the term ‘alien’ carried a negative undertone for those in authority and government, but it was not a racially structured issue.

Another ‘difference’ that marked out such ‘aliens’ was religious difference, which in the widest sense was based around a difference between Christian and non-Christian, and more specifically after the Reformation saw distinctions between Protestant and Catholic, along with a concern that immigrants might include unknown numbers of Anabaptists. It was concerns such as these that led to various censuses being taken in locations where, as the Archbishop of Canterbury put it, ‘any settlement of strangers were’, but this was not an issue of skin colour. In late sixteenth-century Norfolk the term ‘Stranger’ became attached specifically to Dutch and Walloon-speaking refugees who arrived from the Low Countries from 1567 onward, fleeing persecution at home. The numbers of these ‘Strangers’ increased rapidly; by 1583 there were 4,677 recorded in Norwich. For a city whose population was no more than 12,000, this was a significant migrant population. Nonetheless, once their religious affiliation had been ascertained and accepted, both central and local government were keen to ensure that their community was integrated into Norwich’s social and economic structures. Their cloth-making skills had sufficient positive economic impact that the authorities were favourably disposed to them; as one commentator noted in the period, ‘all which company of strangers, we are to confess, do live in good quyet and order, and that they traveyle [work] diligentlye to earn their livings.’