Those of us obliged to observe the convulsions of the past few years, as the English and their European neighbours struggle to come to terms with ‘Brexit’, may be forgiven for casting our minds back to earlier Anglo-French ruptures. To go or to stay? That is the question now posed to many thousands of English expatriates resident in France as to their French equivalents living in England. Much the same question was posed after 1204, to those confronted by the Capetian conquest of what had previously constituted the continental dominion of the Plantagenet King John. In recent years, considerable interest has been shown in the fate of Normans and other Frenchmen living as emigrés in England after 1204. Such ‘aliens’, it is recognized, both lay and clerical, played a significant role in English politics. Not only this, but the confiscation of what had previously been English estates controlled by families now chiefly resident in France brought a vast influx of land to the English crown. In the short term this greatly boosted the King's powers of patronage. On a wider scale it destabilized longer-term patterns both of patronage and of politics, to an extent perhaps not seen again until the Dissolution of the Monasteries after 1536. So much is acknowledged. By contrast to the interest shown in the French in England, however, much less has been written of Englishmen after 1204 stranded or resident in France.

There are exceptions here. Some attention has been paid to estates in France that, after 1204, remained in the hands of English proprietors, both lay (principally William and Richard Marshal earls of Pembroke), and clerical. The monks of Canterbury continued into the fourteenth century to profit from vineyards west of Paris, at Poissy, Triel-sur-Seine, and Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt, the outcome of a grant made to them by Louis VII in 1179 in honour of the recently martyred St Thomas. Further south, at Quincieux and Lyons, in the Rhône valley, Canterbury struggled to retain control of an even more distant estate, again as part of Becket's legacy.