Enmity or Amity? The Status of French Immigrants to England during an Age of War, c.1290–c.1540

Abstract

Between the late thirteenth and the mid‐sixteenth century, England and France were repeatedly at war. Little attention has been given to the status of those from France who emigrated to England over this period. The development of a distinction between the ‘alien in amity’ and the ‘alien in enmity’ suggests that these people may have been particularly vulnerable to official and unofficial hostility. Yet, while we know that the French were the single largest element in the immigrant population, there is next to no evidence that they were subject to particular discrimination. This study offers several explanations for this apparent conundrum. The position arose partly because significant numbers of French immigrants were low‐status agricultural workers whose presence fulfilled a labour need and whose presence was uncontentious. The main reason for the apparently relaxed attitude of the English state to the immigrant French, however, was a legacy of empire. Because a significant part of the French immigrant population came from lands that were, or had been, part of the Plantagenet dominions in France (especially Normandy and Gascony), and because the English crown continued to assert a right to the throne of France, officialdom tended to treat all French incomers as actually or potentially in amity. As a consequence, immigration from France continued in significant numbers: The article includes detailed analysis of the two occasions on which something approaching a census of French immigrants is possible, in the alien subsidy of 1440 and the mass denization of the early 1540s.

Fear, Hatred and Strategy during the Wars of the Roses

“…This tactic represented the adaptation of the policy employed by Edward III early in the Hundred Years War when the constitutional position of the French, as supposed subjects of the English crown, meant that a 'generally conciliatory policy that took the presence of French people as a given' had replaced tactics in 1294, 1324 and 1337, that sought to expel them from England because of anxieties over security. 81 After eighteen months of bloody civil war, it suited the new Yorkist establishment in to present Edward IV as the rightful king of the entire kingdom and therefore avoid incorporating any divisive regional prejudices in the 'official' version of the war.…”