This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Lucy Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Alabama. You can follow Lucy on X/Twitter @drlucykaufman.

Lucy Kaufman

Thomas Kendall was despondent. “I am richer in years and in diseases than in any other riches,” he wrote to Thomas Windebank in 1574, in a thinly-veiled plea for patronage and employment. “I have in boarding and teaching gentlemen’s children and others been mine own decay, and now at midsummer I give it all over…I remain yet in the house of one John Paston whom I think you know, but no longer than midsummer next. I paid my rent truly for the year £5, but what moved him to warn me out, I know not. Our City is sore peopled with strangers but we almost know not where to place us.”[1]

It was a last-minute scribble at the bottom of the letter: strategic, a little self-pitying, and tinged with a nativist anxiety that sounds not terribly dissimilar to that you hear in political debates today. But it also reflected a particular view of a new reality: the soaring number of immigrants from the Low Countries—known as ‘Strangers’—in Norwich in the 1560s and 70s. In 1565, the city welcomed in 300 immigrants. By 1571, there were over 4,000 such immigrants in Norwich, men, women, and over 1600 children.[2] To put this in perspective, in 1565, Strangers accounted for no more than one percent of the population of Norwich, England’s second-largest city, next only to London in both size and wealth. Less than a decade later, one in three inhabitants was an immigrant.

They were driven to England by religious war. After the violent wave of Calvinist iconoclasm known as the Beeldenstorm destroyed images in the Low Countries, Spain set up a tribunal to prosecute heresy—one that would see nearly 10,000 put on trial. In response, Protestants began to flee from the Low Countries; some historians estimate more than 60,000 emigrating between 1567 and 1568 alone. Many of those, particularly from the areas of Zeeland and Flanders, followed the old woolen trade routes to England.[3] There, they settled in London, Canterbury, Sandwich, Colchester—and in Norwich.

My work on this is part of a project I’m just beginning, examining what I think is the first wave of what we, in modern words, might call ideological immigration into England. It was a movement sparked by geopolitical conflicts that sprung from the fractures of the Reformation, where populations were being imprisoned, attacked, and executed for their religious beliefs. What resulted in England, however, was something far different than expectations: new experiments in managing populations, new definitions of belonging, new capacities of state power.

Of course, much brilliant work been written about immigration and migration in early modern England.[4] But most, though certainly not all, of the work done on early modern immigration has focused on the city of London. It’s a natural place for the focus, for both historical and archival reasons: it was the epicenter for immigration, and it also has far the best records of its immigrants.[5] But what we don’t really understand is immigration outside the metropole.

And this isn’t just a gap in the historiography, a matter for historical curiosity, or a promising project for a historian poking around for less-trod ground. It matters fundamentally to our understanding of early modern England. Because in the immigration of the strangers to Norwich and other East Anglian urban centers, the Elizabethan state was facing new problems—proportionately massive immigration into a city that had neither the infrastructure nor the policy nor the discourse to deal with a 50% population growth in just a few years, composed of people from a different culture, with a different language, religion, and political structure. What this meant, in the end, was that East Anglia, and particularly Norwich, became a laboratory for immigration: for patterns, for responses, for policies.

My new project traces some of the outlines of these varied experiments: those dealing with religion, poverty, crime, housing, family, politics, authority, and nationhood. The English sources are strong, many of them housed in the truly excellent Norfolk Records Office. Many records of the Strangers themselves, though, were destroyed in the many wars that swept over the Continent from the early-seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries. To hear their stories more fully, then, I’ve had to read against the grain of English legal records.  

Take one example: the Norwich mayoral court books.[6] These are a goldmine for any historian, enough to create a lifetime of publication, with records about social relations, economic policies, lawsuits, crimes, scandals, and more. They also reveal new ideas about immigration.

Initially, the Strangers were treated as a separate group of foreigners, to be regulated and protected by the centralized state (the Privy Council, the state episcopate, the Crown).  Following the discovery of an anti-immigrant insurrection planned in Norwich in 1570, it became clear that more local control was needed with a population that was looking increasingly settled rather than temporary. The Privy Council determined that the Mayor and Aldermen should be granted “full power and authority, to have and determine all such matters as shall arise between strangers and Englishmen, Englishmen and strangers.”[7]

This should have been a simple matter: a chance to punish people like the Norwich citizen sent to prison for breaking into “Wallyn’s [Walloon’s] house” to take away yarn that he believed had been purchased illegally.[8] But what is remarkable is that very quickly, the Mayor and Aldermen began to regulate the behavior of the Dutch and Flemish just as they did their own citizens. In December 1571, Joan Wallwen (“a duche woman”) was “set in the stocks with a paper for evil Rule upon her head.”[9] In March of 1572, a Dutch woman was whipped “for lying with a kinsman of hers not being married.”[10] The September of the following year, a Stranger and his wife were banished from the city “for their misbehavior.”[11] People with Dutch last names were “whipped with a rod in the Assembly chamber” for vagrancy.[12]

And these were not particular or special punishments—they were exactly the same sorts of punishments given to Englishmen and women who violated the moral and socioeconomic codes of the godly elite of Norwich. It is perverse, of course, to see in such oppressive disciplining a kind of welcome or acceptance—and I’m certainly not making a normative claim with what I’m about to argue! And yet, it is worth noting that, as much as the Strangers remained a separate population, they were increasingly treated as belonging in Norwich—even if that belonging made them subject to harsh correction by Norwich’s oligarchs.  They had become part and parcel of the domestic political sphere.

What we can trace in the Mayor’s Court Book, then—if we listen closely and carefully, if we fill in the gaps necessarily left by such a record—is this laboratory for immigration creating new approaches to governance, to nationality, to oligarchy, and to capacities to define a population through discipline.

There is much, much more to be said on the matter—exactly why I’m so looking forward to this project as it develops, to telling new stories by listening closely to familiar records, and to discovering the ways in which the Strangers allow us to understand the early modern—and indeed England itself—in important new ways.

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[1] State Papers (SP) 12/103, f. 66r.

[2] Frank Meeres, Strangers: a History of Norwich’s Incomers.

[3] Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477-1806, pp. 151-160.

[4] I am particularly excited about Matthew Lockwood’s forthcoming This Land of Promise: a History of Refugees and Exiles in Britain. I ought to disclose that I would be excited in any case—Matt is my husband. But I think (as objectively as I can) that his work is brilliant and important. It touches on some of the issues that I’ve been working on, but each project has been developed very independently (in fact, we’ve created a kind of marital firewall on the subject, because we want to be able to write without stepping on each other’s toes—I still haven’t read his manuscript and won’t until its publication in June). So the excitement is genuine and the anticipation real!

[5] For instance, see the very good work done by: Jacob Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London; Brodie Waddell, “The Evil May Day Riot of 1517 and the Popular Politics of Anti-Immigrant Hostility in Early Modern London”; Matthew Dimmock, “Converting and Not Converting “Strangers” in Early Modern London”; Shannon McSheffrey, “Disorder, Riot, and Governance in Early Tudor London: Evil May Day, 1517.”

[6] Norfolk Record Office (NRO) NCR/16a (Elizabethan records: NCR 16a/8-13).

[7] SP 12/77, f. 136r.

[8] NCR 16/a/9, f. 82v.

[9] Ibid, 132v.

[10] Ibid, 146v.

[11] Ibid, 183v.

[12] Ibid, 524v.