Immigrant England, 1300–1550

Immigrant England, 1300–1550 provides a comprehensive account of the identities, nationalities, occupations, families and experiences of first-generation immigrants to England during the later Middle Ages. It addresses both official policy and public responses to immigration in the age of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War and the early Tudor monarchy, revealing how dramatic changes in the English economy fundamentally affected levels of tolerance and discrimination.

Drawing on data unique in Europe before the nineteenth century, the book provides both a quantitative analysis of immigrants and a qualitative assessment of the reception these incomers received from English society at large. Accounting for one per cent or more of the population of England in the fifteenth century and coming from all parts of Europe and beyond, immigrants spread out over the kingdom. They settled in the countryside as well as in towns, and in a multitude of occupations, from agricultural labour to skilled crafts and professions. Often encouraged and welcomed, sometimes vilified and victimised, immigrants were always on the social and political agenda in late-medieval England.

This book is the first to address a phenomenon and issue of vital concern to English people at the time, to their descendants living in the United Kingdom today and to all those interested in the historical dimensions of immigration policy, attitudes to ethnicity and race, and concepts of Englishness and Britishness.