This book deals with the fundamental historical problems of migration which, still today, remain unresolved and dominate social and political debates. It will be based on a very concrete case study of the historical migration of Flemish textile workers to England which touches upon essential aspects (social, political, economic and cultural factors) behind the complex process of emigration and immigration. This historical example is drawn from one of the first well-documented policies of the English crown to encourage the immigration of skilled artisans, during one of the most dramatic periods in the history of the former Low Countries and the British Isles, in particular the county of Flanders and England, namely the fourteenth century. The Black Death, warfare, mass devaluations and production crises created a period of fundamental social, political and economic upheaval. In this book, I will focus on Edward III’s (1327–77) invitation to Flemish textile workers to settle in England in 1331, and their economic and social impact on its cities. This book will have two primary aims of analysis: the migration of Flemings and their settlement. The first will be to identify systems and build models of migratory movements within a long-term perspective, that is, understanding migration paths and causes, networks, strategies and migrants’ personalities. The second will focus on what is commonly known as ‘integration’, that is, the immigrants’ settlement, acculturation and acquisition of their social, economic and political position in the host country. In addition to a detailed treatment of these two aims, the book attempts to evaluate the economic impact of the immigrant community on a specific industry. I will argue that the success of immigrants was not solely reflected in the rise of their average earnings, but also in the fact that their skills and human capital acquired prior to emigration contributed to the development of the English textile industry in the fourteenth century.
The topic of immigration has received much attention in the past three decades, and migration history has become one of the booming fields. Numerous studies focusing on the fortunes of immigrants and their interactions throughout various historical periods have come to light.Footnote 1 Some historians have pushed back the temporal boundaries of studies of this subject, and it is safe to say that our views of pre-modern societies as ‘immobile’ have proved to be to a large extent false.Footnote 2 However, in the ocean of studies that include ‘migration’, ‘mobility’ and other terms used to describe the movement of people, there is still no consensus amongst historians about definitions and typologies that can be used to measure and qualify migration.Footnote 3 This is certainly due to a lot of parameters related to the distance of migration and the period of stay that we must take into account in order to establish whether someone is a ‘real’ migrant or seasonal mover.Footnote 4 Although we might have a tendency to think that, in order to become an ‘immigrant’, one must travel a long distance (internationally, or intercontinentally) and have a long-term stay, migration can also be internal and include mobility between cities, regions and provinces within the same state. There are also various reasons for people to migrate, and we can distinguish between voluntary and forced migration. Labour migrants are usually associated with voluntary migration, and their mobility has economic motivations, while refugees are driven from their homes by war, natural disasters, persecution and other violence. Some historians have treated these two categories separately, but Jan and Leo Lucassen suggest that although the motivations of labour migrants and refugees differ in principle, the disparities become less obvious in practice.Footnote 5 This is especially true if we look into the economic potential that highly skilled voluntary immigrants or exiles might have. Both groups are also likely to be attracted by the same places and settle in areas with higher economic possibilities.
As to the nature of the mechanisms under which migration operates as a phenomenon – where one country acts as the donor and the other as receiver – a variety of theoretical models for studying the causes of movement have inevitably imposed themselves as ‘pull-and-push’ factors. In order to determine why international migration happens, neoclassical economics has found an explanation in wage differentials and employment conditions between countries. It generally assumes that workers from a low-wage country will move to a high-wage country. On the macro level, the decline in the supply of labour in the low-wage country will lead to a decrease in the wage differential and the eventual elimination of movement. On the micro level, the individual migrant decides to move on the basis of a simple cost–benefit calculation.Footnote 6 The ‘new economics of migration’, in contrast, does not consider that decisions to migrate are taken by one individual, but rather collectively, most often as a household, in order to minimise risks that might occur to the existing family income from different market failures.Footnote 7 Such micro-level decision processes are generally ignored by the dual labor market theory, which links international immigration to the structural requirements of developed nations’ industries.Footnote 8 Instead of focusing on the situation in the sending country, according to this approach, labour migration is completely driven by the permanent demand for workers intrinsic to the economies of advanced industrial societies. The world systems theory assumes that the movement of people is determined by the same principle, adding historical and cultural to economic factors as the main causes of migration.Footnote 9 It sees immigration as a natural consequence of economic globalisation and capitalist penetration into the developing world.Footnote 10
Of course, since antiquity, cities have always represented centres of economic and administrative activity, as they are characterised by more employment opportunities, the hope of greater social mobility, and more freedom of thought and actions.Footnote 11 For these reasons they continue to attract people from outside their boundaries. The social backgrounds of people migrating to cities vary, according to the geographic distance and the duration of stay. Traditionally, unskilled labour came from the surrounding rural areas and tended to be only seasonal. Conversely, skilled artisans migrated from afar and established themselves for longer periods or permanently. They were generally part of more exclusive social networks, based on trade and administrative relations that connected different cities.Footnote 12 They were also a medium for the diffusion of new skills and thus more likely to make an impact on the development of the political, spatial, economic and cultural dimensions of the cities to which they migrated. Urban migration was mostly controlled by local authorities and to a lesser extent by supra-local governing bodies. They tended to restrict immigration in order to limit potentially destabilising effects for the native population, but sometimes institutions actively tried to attract immigrants, in particular, certain kinds of skilled artisan.Footnote 13 These active immigration policies to attract skilled labour were spurred on by high mortality rates. Until the eighteenth century, urban mortality rates were so high that the only way to maintain the increase in population and economic growth of cities was through immigration.Footnote 14 Such was the case in late medieval and early modern England, where foreign merchants and skilled artisans who contributed to economic development enjoyed legal and fiscal privileges from the government.Footnote 15
However, once the migrants had entered the new town, several other issues arose, most notably the question of integration into the new community. The study of integration or assimilation as part of migration history finds its theoretical roots in the pioneering works produced by late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociologists such as Tönnies, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel. Although immigrants were not at the core of their work, it is important to highlight several ideas that influenced later studies and that remain integral to the main themes of this book. The notion of community as a category of analysis was originally developed by Ferdinand Tönnies, in his first book in 1887, in which he made a direct contrast between the medieval and modern periods by introducing concepts of community (Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft). The former supposedly represented the structure of the past, while the latter embodied the behaviour of modernity.Footnote 16 For Tönnies, community (Gemeinschaft) is realised in the bonds of kinship, of neighbourhood and of friendship. It is a form of social integration where the house, the village and the city, as well as the guild, the corporation and the parish, are the basis of a community with strong shared beliefs and values. Society (Gesellschaft), on the contrary, is based on impersonal ties and materialised through contractual relationships, rationality, production and the exchange of goods, commerce and the market. ‘Society’ therefore means a higher division of labour, and a predominance of rational goals, self-interest and interdependence. In most cases, an established community opens up to new members on the basis of an agreement and contract decided upon in mutual understanding and with the acceptance of actions offered for the future.Footnote 17 It is from this point that the term ‘integration’ enters the vocabulary of sociologists and gets further developed as a concept to fit different geographical areas and periods.
According to Émile Durkheim, the set of people’s norms, beliefs and values common to the average member of the same society makes up what he called the collective consciousness, or a shared way of understanding and behaving in the world.Footnote 18 The collective consciousness (social integration) binds individuals together across the whole society, regardless of their personal situation in time and space in a given country. These social similarities create a form of solidarity that can appear in several shapes: domestic solidarity, professional solidarity, national solidarity etc.Footnote 19 For Durkheim, thus, every society integrates its members, or should do so. Behavioural models, values and norms are transmitted through family, school and professions. Inserting newcomers into society is only one special case in an overall process of integration. Nevertheless, he considered that assimilating strangers was a long and complex procedure, which cannot be done without the assent of all members of the host community.Footnote 20 His contemporary, Max Weber, in his Economy and Society confirmed Durkheim’s assumptions that the integration of people on the move was complicated, adding the idea that conflict was inevitable. He claimed that the newcomers themselves can group around the same language and form their own group solidarity, and may thus be taken as a direct threat to the shared identity of the host community.Footnote 21 Weber, however, recognised that different communities can coexist with one another.Footnote 22
At the same time, the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel was interested in the dynamics of social relations between individuals and groups in industrial societies. In 1908, he wrote a text called The Stranger, in which he suggested several contemporary interpretations of the stranger within the urban space. Simmel defines the stranger as an individual who decides to stay, but who is still a potential traveller with ties elsewhere. However, it is not the stranger’s relationship to space that is decisive in Simmel’s analysis, but rather the interactions between individuals and groups. The stranger is thus found in the paradoxical position of being both a member of the majority group and outside the group (being both ‘close’ and ‘distant’).Footnote 23 Simmel’s reflections inspired the founding thinking of the Chicago School, renowned in the history of the social sciences, whose landmark work spanned 1915 to 1940. One of the school’s intellectuals, Robert E. Park, posited that assimilation is the eventual outcome of ‘all the incidental collision, conflict and fusions of peoples and cultures’ resulting from migration.Footnote 24
Most of these concepts are satisfactory when it comes to the study of the incorporation of migrants into the existing community. However, they do not tell us much about integration within the medieval context. In their analyses of urban society, Tönnies, Simmel and Durkheim all saw the Middle Ages as a period of a lower division of labour, where community is imposed on the individual. However, medieval society formed different groupings based on a feeling of common political, spatial, religious or professional identity, which sometimes had all the characteristics of Gesellschaft. Moreover, within the conceptual framework of medieval communities (urban, national or corporate), the inclusion or exclusion of new members remain central components of how they functioned. According to Miri Rubin,
community is neither obvious nor natural, its boundaries are loose, and people in the present, as in the past will use the term to describe and construct worlds, to persuade and exclude. That our subject lived, worked and played in groups, that they trusted, depended on each other, mutually helped each other is beyond doubt – but they did so in a knowing and deliberating way, choosing communities when possible, or negotiating their places within groups when less freedom of choice was available.Footnote 25
The hierarchical structure of the public sphere of the medieval town implies that various communities that controlled political and legal processes created boundaries around them in order to exclude those whom they considered not to be aligned with their values.Footnote 26 The people outside these boundaries would be marginal, whether they were elites or vagrants.Footnote 27 The creation of these communities relied heavily on the fact that their relationships were based upon trust.Footnote 28 In such a context, the case of strangers is distinctive. Their arrival is usually tolerated during the formation of urban centres, or to fulfil demographic shortages. However, this openness of urban structures in their initial period toward the influx of all kinds of new arrival becomes progressively limited, to grant access only to the rich and well-off kind of migrant.Footnote 29 This situation is one in which urban society was founded on trustworthy kin relationships between neighbours; strangers and migrants are automatically seen with suspicion and regarded as untrustworthy.Footnote 30
The aforementioned sociological and historical works help us to delineate the key theoretical frameworks on integration to focus on in this study. However, they tend to neglect the experience of the emigrant prior to departure. The first one to highlight this lacuna in the social sciences was the Algerian sociologist, and Pierre Bourdieu’s student, Abdelmalek Sayad in his pioneering work on Algerian immigrants in France in the second half of the twentieth century. For him,
any study of migratory phenomena that neglects the conditions of origin of immigrants is condemned to give only a partial and ethnocentric view. On the one hand, such studies give consideration only to the immigrant, not to the emigrant, as if his existence began at the moment he arrived in France. On the other hand, the implicit and explicit problematic of such studies is always the immigrant’s adaptation to the ‘welcoming’ society.Footnote 31
This means that we are interested in the immigrant as a whole, that we are committed to defining the social group to which this individual originally belongs, with its practices and everyday behaviours, and the extent to which all of these are challenged by the fact of immigration. Sayad was able to do so through a qualitative study, by interviewing numerous Algerians resident in France and their families in the country of origin. Applying exactly the same approach in this study would of course not be possible, as we cannot speak directly to our subjects. Nor can the medieval evidence fit the modern criteria. However, the approach that follows the emigrants can still be useful, and I will make an attempt to compare the sources from the country of origin with the sources in the country of destination in order to obtain similar information.
Taken altogether, the conceptual frameworks and approaches laid down here will be useful in exploring the experiences of migrant communities in the medieval urban context. I shall argue that while there may have been conflict between immigrants and natives, which could involve explicit exclusion and physical violence, the eventual outcome was the integration of the newcomers and the adaptation of the host society to these realities. In order to achieve this outcome, the migrants had to negotiate their integration into the new community. Negotiations of social relationships after settlement are threefold: first, between the migrant and the government; then between migrant and native societies; and finally between migrants themselves. This would include the perception of integration both from a social and an administrative point of view. Administratively, the integration is straightforward, as one is considered ‘assimilated’ once all the technocratic procedures are fulfilled – the highest form of integration being naturalisation or citizenship, as it granted certain sets of privileged political and economic rights. Socially, however, this process of ‘integration’ becomes more difficult as other external factors (not only the immigrants’ behaviour, but also their social environments) play an important role. That is to say, if the immigrant community faces rejection from the natives, intervention from the government in support of the migrants may help, as the natives would then be more likely to adapt to these realities.
Cultural interaction and change through migration have been constituent features of human history. This paradigm, throughout history, might create the construction of Others, based on ethnicity or other, larger categories. As Dirk Hoerder defines it: ‘on a cognitive level this process provided simple recognizable structures for the perplexing multiplicity of peoples. On the level of social relations it provided boundaries and permitted in-group solidarity. On the level of power relationships it denigrated the Other.’Footnote 32 Migrants have not only had to adapt to their new city, speak a different language or dialect, and adopt a new religion or religious culture, but have also transformed the demographic composition, legal framework and even the architectural perspective of the host city.Footnote 33 Often these changes, combined with other factors, would trigger a reaction from local communities in various forms – seeking an intervention from political elites to exclude the outsiders, discrimination or even physical violence. Outbreaks of confrontation have been way too easily attributed by historians to the expression of national sentiment and systematic xenophobia. In times of economic growth, migrants get little attention: it is only in times of crisis that they come to be at the centre of public debate. They are no longer only invisible workers, or heirs of immigration identified by their social affiliation: they are transformed into a separate social group, whose identity, their own culture, calls into question the host culture and national cohesion.Footnote 34 However, most immigrants spend almost the entirety of their lives peacefully in the host country, and the aforementioned forms of exclusion should rather be assigned to Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic violence.Footnote 35 On the rare occasions when native populations reaffirm their exclusiveness and superiority by physical force, they do so in order to reestablish their perceived social and political hierarchies.Footnote 36
Most of these aspects related to the phenomenon of migration or the mobility of peoples have been touched upon indirectly or directly in the historiography of medieval Europe. Many works that have appeared over the past forty years and adopt the perspective of an urban history dealing with social and economic developments make room for migrants in the chapter or chapters devoted to the urban population, a place that is often reduced, mainly due to a lack of sources. In his study of the Florentine textile industry in the fourteenth century, Franco Franceschi found a significant number of workers both from elsewhere in Italy and from northern Europe, including Brabantine and Flemish workers, and devotes a chapter of his book (Migrazioni) to their presence in the industry.Footnote 37 In Genoa in the fifteenth century, the textile industry recruited its workers in its contado and the villages on the coast or in the valleys of the interior.Footnote 38 This phenomenon was also a regular occurrence in late medieval Girona in Catalonia. The labour force, especially in the textile sector, came from the neighbouring countryside, but the further we go into the fifteenth century, the further the geographical distance becomes.Footnote 39 On the other hand, Catalan artisans can be found, along with mercenaries, royal ambassadors and consuls, merchants and ship-owners, living and working as far away as Dubrovnik in the fifteenth century.Footnote 40
Venice, severely affected by epidemics and endemic wars at the end of the fourteenth century, went even further and loosened up her strict policies on unfree labour in order to attract Albanian and Dalmatian workers to fulfil the shortages.Footnote 41 Similar policies would be developed by Louis XI when he specifically gave privileges to foreign craftsmen to settle in the cities of Cherbourg, Dieppe, Toulouse and Bordeaux in order to repopulate them.Footnote 42 Although the amount of archival material would allow a more systematic study of the wider history of late medieval French immigrant communities, with the exception of a detailed study on Brittany,Footnote 43 work to date has focused more on the legal status and condition of foreigners vis-à-vis the government and on entry into the naturalité.Footnote 44 More recently, collective surveys and scientific meetings have been devoted to these people ‘on the move’ from ‘elsewhere’, which have resulted in several collections of essays bringing together more localised case studies.Footnote 45 All of these works have attempted to show the great diversity of migrant experience from one city to another and from one era to another. Even though the European historiography of migration for the medieval period is still largely incomplete, the aforementioned works have several common conclusions in the broader context of migration studies. The rather vague terminology of migrant, stranger, foreigner, immigrant or mobility will vary according to historians, particularly because they deal with different realities according to time, region, distance of mobility and sources. Moreover, although experiences were very different for any given group of migrants, most of the studies confirm that the history of migration is a profoundly urban process.
When it comes to England, the historiography stands in slightly better shape in terms of late medieval migration. The pioneering study by William Cunningham (1897) gave an overview of the alien presence and their economic activities in medieval England, and presented an excellent starting point for further research.Footnote 46 Following this work and throughout the twentieth century, several studies appeared that focused on specific groups of migrants, such as Italian merchants, or on the legal status of merchants.Footnote 47 Others attempted to point the way to studies of even more specific categories, such as Gascons during the Hundred Years War.Footnote 48 More broadly, some local studies have made contributions by providing us with information about the number, origins and fortunes of more humble immigrants who settled in Southampton, Ipswich, Norfolk, Yorkshire and London throughout the fifteenth century.Footnote 49 All of these studies have raised the issues of the availability of sources and the analytical problems surrounding the study of migration, such as belonging, discrimination, persecution and the need to think carefully about immigrants’ contribution to economic development, as well as their integration into the job market. More recently, a major project run by the late Mark Ormrod at the University of York and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), ‘England’s Immigrants 1330–1550’, and its various outputs have shed new light on various aspects of the alien presence in late medieval England. Apart from the creation of a database with the names of more than 65,000 immigrants, the team managed to posit some very important conclusions about the development of England’s first regulatory framework on nationality, immigration and naturalisation.Footnote 50 Overall, in comparison with current literature on the Continent, existing studies lead us to believe that England attracted a lot more immigration than its continental counterparts, due to the number of suitable sources, as well as favourable pull-and-push factors.
The migration of Flemish textile workers, which is at the core of this book, still remains without a comprehensive study. It has been mentioned incidentally in works dealing with other aspects of English economic and social history.Footnote 51 The main debate surrounding this migration has revolved around the question of whether such Flemish workers had any influence on the development of the English cloth industry, which grew exponentially from the mid fourteenth century onwards. From very early on, historians have tried to pinpoint one specific reason as the root cause for the success of English woollen manufacture and its eventual ‘victory’ over the Flemish.Footnote 52 Ultimately, the debate surrounding the explanations for the rise of the English cloth trade have shifted around four hypotheses:
1) the regional shift of cloth manufacture. Several studies have suggested that the advantages of a lack of guild regulation, the proximity of wool-growers and cheaper labour influenced cloth-makers to move from urban to rural areas, lowering production costs and thus making cloths more competitive on the export market.Footnote 53
2) the introduction of the fulling mill. The biggest proponent of this hypothesis, Eleanora Carus-Wilson, claimed that the use of the fulling mill provided a reduction in cloth-production costs, which was overall reflected in the increased number of manufactured fabrics.Footnote 54
3) royal intervention to tax wool exports in order to foster domestic wool production.Footnote 55
4) the immigration of Flemish textile workers and the importation of their skills.
As the thesis of the fulling mill has been convincingly refuted, the widely accepted factors responsible for the expansion of the industry after 1350 come down to a combination of government protectionist policies (fiscal measures on wool) and the rise of the guilds, while the immigration of Flemings is accepted as a factor by some historians and not favoured by others. One of the aims of this book is to provide a convincing case about the impact of Flemish immigrants on the rise of English urban cloth-making.
Already in 1655, Thomas Fuller gave a very positive account of Flemish immigration in his Church History of Britain. Believing that England had no cloth production of any better quality than frieses (or friezes – a cheap type of cloth) throughout the thirteenth century, the clergyman painted a vivid picture of the newcomers’ arrival. ‘Happy the yeoman’s house’, he said, ‘into which one of these Dutchmen [sic] did enter, bringing industry and wealth along with them.’Footnote 56 Scholars of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries followed his lead and credited the immigration of Flemings with nothing less than the birth of English cloth manufacture. While explaining that the origins of England’s wealth lay in its woollen industry, the influential political economist William Ashley saw the immigration of Flemish weavers as the cause of the expansion, and the English woollen industry’s consequent reorientation towards export.Footnote 57 Backing their claims with archival evidence, William Cunningham, Ephraim Lipson and Louis Salzman, too, were struck by the close coincidence of the arrival of Flemish textile workers and the boost of the new industries that followed in the mid fourteenth century.Footnote 58 They all considered Edward III’s reign as a landmark for the success of the English woollen industry and praised his programme for developing local manufacture and fostering export, which included the invitation to Flemish weavers to set up their trade in England as one of those measures.Footnote 59 Across the Channel, historians have been equally impressed by the effectiveness of Edward III’s measures. ‘The English king gave them [the Flemings] asylum’, the eminent Henri Pirenne wrote in his Histoire de Belgique, ‘and the counties of Kent and Suffolk … became the cradle of an industry that would compete with Flanders half a century later.’Footnote 60
The influence that the migration of workers from the Low Countries may have had on the growth of the English textile industry was viewed more sceptically by twentieth-century scholars. The first one to offer a counter-argument to the early economic historians was H. L. Gray, when he examined the location of the cloth industry in the second half of the fourteenth century. Centres with the highest proportion of cloths produced were in the south-west, which was not a region where a Flemish presence had been previously attested. This led him to conclude that ‘it was difficult to believe that the foremost woollen producing district in the country in 1356 owed its prosperity to such an immigration’.Footnote 61 Henry Johnson was quick to point out that the invitation to the Flemish weavers to England by Edward III had nothing to do with the promotion of a native cloth industry, but was rather to coerce the Flemish into joining him into an alliance, and a war with France.Footnote 62 An authority on late medieval Flemish drapery, Pirenne’s student Henri De Sagher devoted an article to the subject in 1926 and concluded that ‘traditional historiography has attached an importance to immigration out of all proportion with its real role’. ‘Nowhere in England’, he continued, ‘can we discern a decisive influence on the future of the trade.’Footnote 63 In her 1959 overview of the fourteenth century, May McKisack considered the arrival of foreigners as a symptom, rather than a primary cause, of expansion.Footnote 64 Eleanora Carus-Wilson adopted these views later in her career.Footnote 65
Some of the local studies further amplified these views. Writing in 1965 on Yorkshire’s woollen and worsted industries, Herbert Heaton stated that the Flemish presence in the county’s medieval cloth manufacture was small and, its chronology not matching that of the development of textile production, that its influence was negligible.Footnote 66 Derek Keene made similar observations, claiming that Flemish influence on the revival of Winchester’s cloth industry from the 1350s was minimal.Footnote 67 These interpretations found favour with several influential historians. In his Medieval English Economy, Jim Bolton only reflected Heaton’s conclusions.Footnote 68 More importantly, even one of the greatest authorities on the medieval textile industry, John Munro, was approving of Heaton and Keene’s views.Footnote 69 Looking at the matter in 2005 from the perspective of immigrants’ contributions to the English economy during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Nigel Goose called the importance of foreign immigration for the establishment of the English textile industry in the fourteenth century wildly exaggerated and not to be compared with that of the low price of wool and the general availability of labour.Footnote 70 Interestingly, all of them ignored the findings of a local study on Colchester by Richard Britnell, who considered that the arrival of Flemings was critical to the growth of broadcloth production.Footnote 71
Several historians have been a bit more cautious in their appraisal and given somewhat neutral views. Frances Consitt provided a detailed account of the Flemish presence in London, without problematizing their contribution to cloth manufacture.Footnote 72 Looking at government policies as attempts to attract foreign skills before the sixteenth century, Lien Luu devoted several pages to Edward III’s invitation to Flemish weavers. She acknowledged that the pull-and-push factors were favourable, and that there was growth in the cloth industry after the arrival of the Flemish, but that the extent of their influence was still to be investigated.Footnote 73 In an essay published in 2011, Jonathan Good was more concerned with the relationship between Flemings and Brabanters than with the existing debate.Footnote 74 While interpreting the evidence about the Yorkshire cloth industry, Edward Miller and John Hatcher attributed rather more influence to Flemish and Brabantine textile workers than Herbert Heaton did.Footnote 75
One of the main obstacles that has stood in the way of every attempt at a critical assessment of the impact of Flemish immigration on the late medieval English cloth industry is the complete absence of numbers to fall back on. De Sagher estimated that during the entire fourteenth century no more than 200 Flemish textile workers could have settled in England.Footnote 76 May McKisack admitted that Edward III’s policies undoubtedly attracted a lot of textile workers from Flanders, but concluded that their numbers or influence on the English cloth industry were impossible to assess even approximately.Footnote 77 Lawrence Poos came to the same conclusions for rural areas in Essex in 1991.Footnote 78 Convincing conclusions were never reached, as all of these works had different topics as their primary focus. Moreover, none of the aforementioned studies examined the immigration of Flemings in enough detail to make strong hypotheses and widely confirm or dispute their influence. However, some of them, aware of the situation on the other side of the English Channel, gave hints of an open mind. Eleanora Carus-Wilson noticed the contraction of the industry in Flanders in the mid fourteenth century and confirmed that some of this was probably due to the unrest in the county, which led to the emigration of numerous artisans to England. But she concluded that it was impossible to assess the pace and scale of this immigration.Footnote 79 While concluding his observations on this immigration, John Munro said that William Ashley was ‘correct to observe that the Flemish civil wars, and their brutal terminations, of 1323–8 and 1344–9, did result in banishment, exile or flight of many artisans’, and asked, ‘but to what effect?’Footnote 80 This book will attempt to give an answer to this question, as the main focus will be on those who were banished and on those who left voluntarily after these revolts and settled in England. I will show that the combination of local, royal and continental records can unearth a lot more evidence of a significant presence of textile workers from the Low Countries than any of these studies has suggested.
The general economic trends in fourteenth-century England and its towns in particular were also indirectly favourable to immigrants. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, English society had become very market-oriented, with significant levels of market output and commercial activity.Footnote 81 By 1300, new towns had been founded and existing centres expanded to form an urban system that would remain intact up until the sixteenth century, even with the occasional outbreaks of plague from 1349 onwards. This urban network stretched from London as the capital, with around 60,000 inhabitants, through to provincial centres like Norwich, York and Bristol credited with more than 12,000 inhabitants each, down to numerous market towns like Colchester, Great Yarmouth or Lynn with 2,000–5,000 inhabitants each.Footnote 82 Although it is estimated that throughout the fourteenth century towns formed less than 20 per cent of the English population, their demand for food and raw materials represented a wide range of marketing opportunities for country-dwellers as well.Footnote 83 Most trade was local, or between an urban area and its hinterlands, but some towns were places where long-distance trade was more likely to develop. Indeed, as Bruce Campbell pointed out: ‘long-distance trade may have been the smallest and riskiest branch of medieval commerce, far eclipsed in volume and value by local exchange of staple commodities: its economic multiplier effects were disproportionally great as were the profits reaped by those successful engaging in it’.Footnote 84 England’s overseas trade principally consisted of exports of wool, cloth, lead, tin and pewter, in return for imports of raw materials, foodstuffs and manufactured goods. The most important markets were Flanders and the Low Countries, but there were other major trading links with the Baltic, France, Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean.Footnote 85 These established commercial networks only facilitated the movement of people and were the precursor for some of them to choose to stay on a more permanent basis.
Conversely, the Low Countries had become the most densely populated and one of the most urbanised societies in Europe already in the twelfth century. Because of their wealth, built on trade and cloth manufacture, the cities of Arras, Douai, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Lille and, increasingly important by the later fifteenth century, Brussels and Antwerp enjoyed a degree of political independence that almost matched that of Italian city-states. Also in terms of demography, the cities of the Low Countries were close to the Italian city-states. Ghent’s population was estimated at 64,000, Bruges around 45,000 and Ypres around 25,000, and seven other cities had around 10,000 inhabitants.Footnote 86 Paris, for comparison, is estimated to have had between 150,000 and 200,000 inhabitants, while Florence, Venice and Milan had at least 100,000 each.Footnote 87 Also, the overall level of urbanisation was higher than in England and quite elevated for the late medieval period. It is estimated that 36 per cent of the total population of fifteenth-century Flanders lived in cities.Footnote 88 Such a degree of development was achieved to a large extent because of the concentration of wealth based on the production and exportation of textiles. However, we will see in Chapter 1 how the fortunes of the cloth industry in Flanders depended heavily on the political situation in England.
The devastating effects of the Black Death and the drop in population in the second half of the fourteenth century did not have any major consequences for established trading links with the Continent, but they did for the organisation of manufacturing industries.Footnote 89 While the size of the English population was halved, the productivity of labour and average standards of living rose. For many manufacturers, demand per head of population increased.Footnote 90 Despite attempts to hold down wages, workers themselves enjoyed high real wages, as lower food prices enhanced their purchasing power.Footnote 91 These conditions were beneficial for urban textile industries as well, and gains in living standards after the Black Death enabled more consumers to purchase more cloth of better quality.Footnote 92 Higher domestic demand enhanced the ability of urban textile manufacturers to become more competitive on international markets as well. The shortage of workers caused by the Black Death reduced any strict control of newly arrived immigrants by the civic authorities. The rise of those who obtained the status of citizen was most visible in the mid fourteenth century. For example, the registers of new freemen in the city of York show that, apart from those immigrants who came from Yorkshire and elsewhere in the British Isles, there was a steady inflow from the Continent during the years of the outbreak of plague.Footnote 93
Resident aliens in England were nothing new in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: numerous merchants, members of the clergy and craftsmen from overseas chose to settle on a permanent basis. In urban environments, therefore, cultural exchange, assimilation and identity come to mind as prominent features. Another problem that most aliens in England might face was their legal status, which in practice was never straightforward. A clear distinction between those who were subjects of the king (indigene regni) and those born overseas (de natis ultra mare) had been made by 1351. This was created for the purposes of classifying numerous children born to English parents overseas, an increasingly prominent occurrence during the Hundred Years War. Those who fulfilled the conditions were issued grants at royal discretion.Footnote 94 Similar types of protection had been granted earlier to foreign merchants or important individuals, so that they could enjoy fiscal privileges related to customs within the realm as if they were native (tamquam indigena). They became an almost routine element of the chancery’s business in the course of the fourteenth century and were offered without discrimination to a wide range of national groups, including the French, Iberians, Italians, Germans and people from the Low Countries.Footnote 95 Over time, these letters of protection, issued in the form of letters patent, would extend their competence and, by the end of the fourteenth century, become accessible to alien craftsmen resident in England as well. They would become known as letters of denization, an embryonic form of the naturalisation that we know today.
Although letters of protection gave aliens a certain status of security for continued residence, some of them were still vulnerable during wartime measures. French residents and those under the suzerainty of the French king, such as Flemings and Bretons, were first in line. In 1294, their goods were confiscated, while in 1377 the parliament of Richard II petitioned for the expulsion of all subjects of the French king from English soil.Footnote 96 In peacetime, aliens were generally acceptable, but in wartime they would soon become the subject of suspicion. As Andrea Ruddick puts it: ‘Although there was no official, all-encompassing “anti-alien” policy during the reigns of Edward I, II and III, the concept of being an “alien” was nonetheless a politically significant identity.’Footnote 97 We will also see throughout this book that despite the more pragmatic crown policies towards resident aliens, local craftsmen, in particular, did their best to mobilise their guilds to limit aliens’ options to expand their trade.
This book, then, is an addition to the migration, social and economic history of England and Europe, focusing on the fortunes of the community of textile workers from the Low Countries that settled in various English towns during the second half of the fourteenth century. By combining both the archival material from continental Europe and England the main purpose of this study will be to shed new light on the economic contribution of Flemish immigrants in England. It will be an attempt to answer the following research questions: What was the profile of the Flemish immigrants, and how numerous were they? How did Flemish weavers transfer their skills to the English? What was the process of that transfer? Did political, economic and social events on the local level have any influence on the diffusion of skills? Where did resistance come from among guild organisations, entrepreneurs and the like? Did the immigrants’ influence transcend the economic transfer of skills, and what might have been the impact on the cultural level, such as donations to local churches, and the funding of or integration into existing religious confraternities, hospitals and other charitable institutions? Indeed, this study will show that the number of immigrants was far higher than previously thought, and that they were better placed in terms of capital and skills than their English counterparts.
Methodology and Sources
In order to fully understand the reasons behind Flemish immigration to England, we must bear in mind that before he or she becomes an immigrant, the migrant is always first an emigrant, and therefore it is imperative that our study should start not with the concerns of the receiving society, but with the sending communities.Footnote 98 Exploring the history and structure of the sending country will allow us to find out what the determinants for departure were, and thus reconstitute the whole trajectory of the individuals and groups under examination.Footnote 99 It is only then that we can pass on to different empirical and theoretical questions surrounding the political, social and economic impact on the host society of the group under examination.
This approach will be applied in order to reconstruct the conditions that first led immigrants from the Low Countries to emigrate to England and then how they settled, integrated and contributed to the English economy. Thus, a particular feature of this study is the integration of English and continental sources, and it relies heavily on prosopographical methodology. The main purpose is to identify and quantify the immigrants from the Low Countries in England, while examining qualitatively their experiences. The study focuses mostly on London, Colchester and Great Yarmouth, localities which were not chosen at random, but because of the incredibly high survival rate of their local records. More precisely, their judicial records, and borough court rolls in particular, form the cornerstone of this book. When and wherever possible, the extant relevant material from other English towns has been used, in order to reinforce the argument. Thus, a variety of the extant material allowed a more detailed analysis for the cities of Lincoln, Boston, York, Winchester, Bristol, Lynn and Norwich. The manorial courts of Clare, Hadleigh and Sudbury were included to illuminate Colchester’s hinterlands. All of the findings in the English sources were constantly compared with the archival material held in Belgium and France.
One of the remarkable things about the judicial records of medieval England is that they contain not just a few surviving excerpts, but thousands of cases spread across both local and central courts. Although the procedures and aims of manorial, borough or royal courts differed widely, they all recorded the names of the people involved and the nature of the cases or fines. Both civil pleas and felonies (criminal matters) included a number of immigrants from the Low Countries, who appear alongside English-born individuals or other aliens. They feature in a variety of cases and roles: as the perpetrators or victims of crime, as the sufferers of acts of misfortune (mainly accidental deaths), as the aiders and abettors of criminals, as pledges or debtors, or as witnesses, or the finders of bodies. Such records have already been used by scholars to analyse the histories of localised patterns of crime, the level of violence, the credit relationships of various communities, and attitudes towards law enforcement.Footnote 100 However, in the context of the presence of aliens, they have received little attention.Footnote 101 The data from these sources can facilitate the collection of immigrants’ names and estimates of their number, show patterns of alien residency, and provide information about their legal status and profession, as well as the presence of women.
As the most extensive and valuable sources that allow us to establish the long-term settlement of immigrants from the Low Countries and conduct an analytical study of their lives thereafter, the borough court records of Colchester and Great Yarmouth deserve to be described in more detail first. The key judicial institution of these two medium-sized towns in eastern England functioned in a very similar way in both places. To maintain law and order, the bailiffs of Colchester had two judicial bodies of the borough court at their disposal: the court of pleas, and the hundred court. The court of pleas dealt with private litigation concerning debt, detention of chattels, breach of contract and trespass, that is, cases of violation of private property and physical aggression that fell short of felony. Minor crimes, including night wandering and the carrying of weapons, and all kinds of police work, such as fines for prostitution, and making and selling ale and bread against the assize, were brought to the hundred court.Footnote 102 In Great Yarmouth, the borough court was organised in almost the same manner; it was just that its instances (i.e. competent judicial bodies) bore different names from those at Colchester. The exact equivalent for Great Yarmouth of the court of pleas in Colchester was the so-called court of petty and great pleas (querele and placita in Latin), while the equivalent of the hundred court was the court leet.Footnote 103 The important thing that distinguishes Great Yarmouth’s borough court rolls from Colchester’s is the presence of the particulars of the customs accounts. Indeed, imports and exports from this port town were kept by the local authorities, who probably copied what was enrolled for the royal administration. As the latter customs accounts do not survive at all for the period of this study, the local records in Great Yarmouth represent an invaluable source for medieval England as a whole.
In terms of timespan, the main focus of this study runs from after the exile of numerous textile workers from Flanders in 1351 until 1381, when members of the Flemish community were massacred in a number of places in England during the Peasants’ Revolt. For this thirty-year period the number of surviving rolls in Colchester and Great Yarmouth is quite voluminous. As can be seen in Table 0.1, for Colchester there are thirteen surviving rolls, each containing eight to fifty-seven membranes. Great Yarmouth borough court was even more voluminous, as its survival rate amounts to twenty-three rolls containing on average twenty membranes for the thirty-year period (1351–81). Court records are extant to a similar extent for both towns for the years leading up to 1351 and following on from 1381, and were also used to examine patterns of immigrant presence. The standard membrane, be it for the court of pleas in Colchester or for the court of petty and great pleas in Great Yarmouth, contained entries with the names of the plaintiffs, the type of plea that was brought before the court, the names of the defendants and the names of those acting as pledges for the prosecution. Additional information might be included, such as the names of attorneys, the amount of debt, the damages claimed by the plaintiff and the background of the plea, as well as any legal tools to force the defendant to appear in court, such as distraint.Footnote 104 One membrane (recto–verso) typically contains at least forty cases. The membranes of the leet-court usually contain the names of the capital pledges, who were actually those who pronounced the fines to the residents of Great Yarmouth. Below them are the names of those residents who were supposed to attend the leet session but had not shown up. Fines follow for misdemeanours such as breaking the assize of bread and ale, night wandering, physical aggression and forestalling.Footnote 105 The court rolls for Colchester were partially transcribed and translated by Herbert Isaac Jeayes, and later corrected and published by a former mayor of Colchester, William Gurney Benham, in four volumes.Footnote 106 However, some information from the manuscripts was omitted, and in this case they can only serve as calendars. Therefore, where Jeayes’s translations correspond to the manuscript, I have referred to his editions, while in cases where I refer to the manuscript from the Essex Record Office (ERO), it means that both Jeayes and Benham omitted valuable information for this study. In the case of Great Yarmouth, there is neither a calendar with transcriptions nor translations.
| Court roll | Year/term | Number of membranes |
|---|---|---|
| CR 72 | 1351–2 | 11 |
| CR 73 | 1352–3 | 14 |
| CR 74 | 1353–4 | 19 |
| CR 75 | 1354–5 | 15 |
| CR 76 | 1358–9 | 15 |
| CR 77 | 1359–60 | 14 |
| CR 78 | 1360–1 | 15 |
| CR 79 | 1361–2 | 24 |
| CR 80 | 1363–4 | 24 |
| CR 81 | 1366–7 | 26 |
| CR 82 | 1367–8 | 26 |
| CR 83 | 1369–70 | 18 |
| CR 84 | 1370–1 | 17 |
| CR 85 | 1371–2 | 18 |
| CR 86 | 1373–4 | 18 |
| CR 87 | 1374–5 | 21 |
| CR 88 | 1376–7 | 13 |
| CR 89 | 1377–8 | 14 |
| CR 90 | 1378–9 | 17 |
| CR 91 | 1379–80 | 16 |
| CR 92 | 1380–1 | 14 |
In order to obtain information for London similar to that in the borough courts of Colchester and Great Yarmouth, we must turn to a combination of extant judicial records for the second half of the fourteenth century. Given the size of the city, London’s legal institutions were divided into three courts that dealt with different problems related to property, wills, civil litigation and minor infractions: the court of husting, the mayor’s court and the sheriff’s court. Of these three courts, only the court of husting survives for the period of this study. However, its plea rolls mostly handled cases related to land and property, and very few of them involved immigrants from the Low Countries. The sheriff’s and mayor’s courts dealt with personal actions, such as debt, trespass or covenant, and are therefore very similar to the borough courts of Colchester and Great Yarmouth. Unfortunately, they only contain several rolls that cover a few years between the late thirteenth century and early fourteenth century.Footnote 107 Nevertheless, later legal proceedings recorded in the mayor’s court have been in part preserved in the so-called plea and memoranda rolls. These documents run from 1323 until 1482 and are entirely translated in six volumes.Footnote 108 Penny Tucker considered that only a small part (maybe one-third) of pleadings from the mayor’s court were compiled in the plea and memoranda rolls.Footnote 109 However, despite the limited number of copied entries, numerous cases relating to the Flemish community that settled in London may be found there. Another valuable source from London that was used for this study was the so-called Letter Books of London. These run chronologically from 1275 until 1496 and are kept in seven different books named in alphabetical order from letter A to letter L.Footnote 110 More economic in character, Letter Books in a way complemented the information recorded in the plea and memoranda rolls. They contained such information as writs and returns, political occurrences, the proceedings of assemblies, the ordinances of crafts, and the assessments and appointments of civic officers. Significant quantities of material related to the guild of Flemish weavers in London and some of their economic activities during the second half of the fourteenth century are kept in Letter Books G and H.
In the absence of complete sets of local records, other judicial documents have been used to complement this study. These include those of the higher jurisdiction courts kept at the National Archives (TNA) in Kew, the King’s Bench, the Court of Common Pleas, coroner’s rolls and gaol deliveries.Footnote 111 The evidence from these central courts was particularly useful in the case of Lincolnshire, where no local record of the same value survives. The Court of Common Pleas includes mostly civil actions to recover property or debt, and it excludes felony. The jurisdiction of the King’s Bench was divided into two parts: the ‘crown’ side, which served as a forum for all kinds of criminal case throughout the kingdom, and the ‘plea’ side, which dealt with actions of trespass and appeal for felony, or served to correct errors by other courts.Footnote 112 Both of these records run uninterrupted for the period of the study and are quite voluminous. The plea rolls of the Court of Common Pleas contain between 1,000 and 2,000 membranes a year, whereas those of the King’s Bench could fill up to several hundred. Given their size and the time constraints, I had to make some delimitations. I was able to go through the entirety of the King’s Bench rolls for the years 1350–1400, while for the Court of Common Pleas, I sampled twenty terms across the period as representative material to show the patterns of immigrants’ activity. Civil pleas in these records that involved Flemings were particularly useful for determining their business connections and trade patterns with both natives and other immigrants.
Information about such serious crimes as homicide, rape, grand theft, abduction or adultery can be found in the coroner’s rolls and gaol deliveries. The former served as the court of first instance, where homicides and accidental deaths were recorded. Suspect felons were usually held in prison, or on bail, in their counties while waiting for officials from the central courts for trial. The justices acting as commissioners of gaol delivery were sent two or more times a year on circuit to hear and determine the cases of the accused held in county prisons.Footnote 113 Apart from the names of victims and perpetrators, the coroner and the justices of gaol deliveries often recorded their residences, occupations and origin, and details about the stolen goods, as well as the names of those who had (in cases of alleged murder) found the body, or potential witnesses. These records, together with the borough court rolls and other judicial sources of the crown, were used mostly to determine the social context of Flemish migration to England.
Although the details from the pleas in local and central courts are invaluable in reconstructing the interactions between various social groups, they inevitably contain some problems that need to be addressed. There are numerous gaps in the available records, and one must combine numerous sources in order to trace the immigrants from the Low Countries. Unfortunately, the borough court of Great Yarmouth is the only local source for which the records survive in an unbroken series. Amongst the central courts, this is the case for the Common Pleas and to some extent the King’s Bench. While the unbroken series of records is helpful in rendering more convincing the immigrants’ diffusion throughout different regions, as well as some details of their lives (occupations, wealth, gender and social networks), these do not outweigh other imperfections. First, the total number of immigrants is probably under-recorded, as those who appear in judicial records are usually noted because they were involved in some sort of legal infraction. The vast majority, like the native population, would never have become embroiled with the law in any way. The immigrants’ ‘nationality’ is not systematically recorded, so we have to rely on our ability to recognise them by their foreign forenames and surnames, which will be discussed in more detail below. The same goes for their occupations; that sometimes must be determined indirectly, or in combination with other sources where Flemings appeared. Moreover, the vast majority of pleas for debt, breach of covenant or detinue only very occasionally provide more details and mention the types of goods and the amounts of money concerned. As such they permit only a qualitative study of the economic context.
More direct sources for the immigrants’ involvement in the English economy lie in the particulars of the customs and alnage accounts kept at the National Archives.Footnote 114 The alnager was the royal official appointed to certify the size of the cloth (for the sake of the buyer) that was to be exported. In order to put a seal on the cloth before it was shipped from England, the alnager imposed a subsidy of 4d per cloth, and wrote down how many cloths were sold, where they were made and by whom. We will see later that most Flemish immigrants were involved either in the production of or trade in cloth; the particulars of customs and alnage accounts allow us to quantify the immigrants’ importance for the growth of the English economy.
All of the findings in the English sources were constantly compared with the archival material held in Belgium and France. The most important documents were those held in the State Archives of Belgium in Brussels and the ones in the archives départementales du Nord in Lille. These consisted of various charters, preserved in the comital chamber of the accounts, that recorded numerous sentences and orders pronounced by the count. They range from 801 to 1700 and are kept under the first series (1e reeks) collection in Brussels and under Série B in Lille.Footnote 115 For both collections of charters, there are fairly good inventories (i.e. finding aids or indexes).Footnote 116 From the second half of the fourteenth century, some charters were actually the sentences of the banishment of rebels outside of the county, as will be discussed in Chapter 1. These are our main interest, as most of them contained nominatim lists of people who were supposed to leave the county of Flanders for a certain period of time. Here we should clarify that these sources contain both the names of individual felons who were sent into exile as a form of punishment and those who were banished collectively for political reasons. The focus will be on the latter, who were exiled for their involvement in different revolts throughout the fourteenth century.
Apart from the aforementioned collections, various edited cartularies from this period that contain similar information were used as well.Footnote 117 In the first instance, Flemish names from English sources after 1351 were compared with the names from the lists. Once I had found names that are a perfect match, which means only those with the same name and occupation in both the English and Flemish sources, other sources in Flanders were investigated for the period before the banishment in order to find out more about the profile of the newcomers in England. These include the city accounts of Ghent and Bruges for the period 1340–51, where information about the political and economic profile of the immigrants before banishment can indirectly be found. Those for Ghent were transcribed and edited for the period of the study, while those for Bruges were used in manuscript form.Footnote 118 More direct information about the economic activities of exiled Flemish textile workers before banishment was also found in the incredible collection of documents related to the history of Flemish drapery compiled by Espinas and Pirenne.Footnote 119 Some other sources, such as testamentary evidence in London, or local courts of Ghent (Keure and Gedele), were also used; however, their description fits better in Chapters 3 and 5. The aforementioned continental sources provided useful information for addressing and analysing the overall living conditions of immigrants before their departure, most notably in terms of craft skills, networks and wealth.
Because of the source material that allows us to examine the experiences of immigrants prior to their exile, and because they were the most numerous immigrant group in fourteenth-century England, the book will inevitably focus more on the Flemish community. However, the presence of Brabantine immigrants will also be examined. They are frequently found grouped together with Flemish immigrants, and in this context it would be difficult to treat them completely separately. As we will see, the conditions in Brabantine textile towns were heavily influenced by the social, economic and political developments in the county of Flanders in the fourteenth century. These were also the main driving forces for the textile workers from Brussels, Louvain or Malines to emigrate to England. Moreover, once they arrived in English towns, they stuck together with their Flemish counterparts, especially in settlements outside London, where rivalry about preserving skills and know-how was less important.
The terminology of migration that will be used across the book also deserves to be explained. The term ‘immigration’, or ‘immigrant’ in its modern use, refers to someone or a group of people who have moved for a longer-term period or permanently from one place to another across political borders. In the same way, it will be applied here to the immigrants from the Low Countries, both to those who left voluntarily and to those who were exiled for political reasons. We will see over the following chapters that some of those exiled were actually allowed to return to Flanders, but then, after some time, went back again to England. Indeed, permanent migration such as exile might unintentionally end with return, when hostile and life-threatening regimes have been loosened up or terminated, or when the conditions in the host society have become unsatisfactory. Similarly, the same set of social conditions in the sending country (i.e. social upheaval, economic decline, natural disasters) that could have generated a particular form of emigration might happen in a more localised environment and push the exiles or migrants to change their location in the host country.Footnote 120 As we will see throughout this book, there are cases of both Flemish and Brabantine exiles who would return to Flanders and Brabant for several years and sometimes even emigrate back to England. Thus, they became immigrants who would leave their country on a voluntary basis. These varieties of mobility and settlement make it rather difficult to bracket all immigrants from the Low Countries under a single term.
The book will also focus more on what in modern terms would be called first-generation immigrants. This is because the source material rarely allows us to determine for sure what happened to the children who came with their parents from the Low Countries. The problems might range from the recording of their surnames – on several occasions these would change completely, or they would adopt an occupational surname – to complete integration and blending in with local population, making it impossible for them to be recognised in the sources. Continual comings and goings between the ports of England and the Low Countries might have also played a role, in that many of them would probably be tempted to move locations when presented with better opportunities.
One question still remains. How can one recognise whether a person recorded in the English sources was Flemish, in order to compare them with the lists of exiles? There are five different ways of identifying immigrants from the Low Countries in the English sources. In some cases, such as those of Walter le Baker and John Barat, the Colchester town clerks unambiguously added that the litigant was Flemish.Footnote 121 In other cases, the plaintiff or the defendant was given the family name ‘Flemyng’ or ‘Braban(er)’. A third group consisted of those whose surnames referred to a place within the Low Countries, such as Everard van Deste, or Diest, or Heyne van Cortrike, better known as Courtrai.Footnote 122 A fourth category, including John van Loo, John van Neke and John van Wynd, had family names preceded by the typically Middle Dutch prefix ‘van’.Footnote 123 Finally, some litigants, such as Clays Seger, Copin Stuk or Lieven Cornelis,Footnote 124 went by forenames characteristic of the fourteenth-century Low Countries.Footnote 125 Probably the most interesting variation of recording is the Flemish forename Copin. It is actually a Flemish diminutive of Jacob. For example, Copin Seland, a hosteller and eventually a citizen of London, appears first with the forename Copin in 1371 as the owner of a tenement in St Swithin’s Lane.Footnote 126 In 1378 the scribe records that Jacob Seland alnaged sixty-eight pieces of cloths for export, but he reappears in a petition under the name of James, when he begs leave to stop paying the maintenance of some merchants who had been his former guests but were imprisoned in London by the city authorities.Footnote 127 In the latter case, the scribes probably heard the Latin version of Jacob and directly transformed it to James in the source. From Richard II’s reign, the word ‘Dutchman’ (Ducheman) or ‘Dutchwoman’ started being used interchangeably with Flemyng or Braban by English scribes. As far as women are concerned, in some cases their surnames are transformed into ‘Frowe’, probably from the Dutch word for woman, Vrouw. This is evident in fourteenth-century Southwark.Footnote 128 However, the scribes on the other side of London Bridge were not completely unfamiliar with the form. On 21 July 1365, Katherine van Ordingham was committed to prison for assaulting the constable and beadle of Dowgate Ward, and three weeks later, when it was confirmed that she would stay at Newgate Prison, her surname is entered as ‘Frowe’.Footnote 129 The names of Flemish immigrants in the present work were used as I found them in the English sources and as they were recorded by the English scribes. Thus, Lambert Funderlynde has not been corrected to Lambrecht van der Lynden, for example. Surnames that suggest a place-name origin, such as Lamkyn van Durdraght, or Margaret van Outraght, which are obviously the towns of Dordrecht and Utrecht, have also not been corrected. Note also that when I have used the word ‘Flemings’, I see it mostly as a term for those people coming from Flanders. In parts, where appropriate and possible, the terms Zeelander, Brabanter or Hollander have been attributed accordingly. When people’s origins are unknown, but their names are obviously Dutch, the term ‘immigrants from the Low Countries’ is used to define all of them.
In the first chapter we will deal with the economic situation in England and that in Flanders prior to the Black Death and show how their relationship created the pull-and-push factors for this migration to happen. Moreover, I will present the turbulent political and social situation in the county of Flanders from the end of the thirteenth century until the 1350s, and explain what led to the revolts and the exile of Flemish textile workers to England. The main focus will be on the legal tools used by the comital authorities for mass expulsions of people. The second chapter will present the numbers of exiled immigrants in: London and some of its suburbs; Colchester and its hinterlands in Essex and Suffolk; and Great Yarmouth, Norwich and Lynn in Norfolk; as well as in Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, the South-West and the Midlands. Apart from their numbers, this chapter examines the immigrants’ occupations, gender, the places where they settled within urban areas and, to some extent, their profile before exile. Chapter 3 takes a wider look into the social relationships and business networks of the immigrant community in urban areas. Chapter 4 examines the economic activities of Flemish immigrants and their influence on the English textile industry. In the first place, the main focus is on the economic activities of the exiles after their arrival in England from 1351 in comparison with what they had been doing in Flanders during the 1340s, a decade before banishment. Meanwhile, the remainder of the chapter looks into their involvement in the wool trade and their general wealth. Chapter 5 focuses on the presence and occupations of Flemish women in England. Completely new evidence will reveal that immigrant women, both single and married, had a very active role in the English economy during the fourteenth century. Chapter 6 looks into the involvement of the Flemish community in the events of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. As we will see, the Flemings were ferociously massacred in a number of places between 14 and 16 June 1381, and this has been considered in several studies. However, with some new findings from various judicial documents, this chapter sheds new light on these events and clarifies what happened in the aftermath of the attack on the Flemings.
