Immigration and the Common Profit: Native Cloth Workers, Flemish Exiles, and Royal Policy in Fourteenth-Century London

Abstract

This article reconstructs a crucial episode in the relationship between the English crown, its subjects and the kingdom's immigrant population. It links the murder of about forty Flemings in London during the Peasants' Revolt in June 1381 to the capital's native cloth workers' dissatisfaction with the government's economic immigration policy. We argue that, in the course of the fourteenth century, the crown developed a new policy aimed at attracting skilled workers from abroad. Convinced that their activities benefited the common profit of the realm, the crown remained deaf to the concerns of London's native weavers, who claimed that the work of exiled Flemish cloth workers in the city encroached on their privileges. Confronted for more than twenty-five years with political obstruction, the native weavers increasingly resorted to physical aggression against their Flemish counterparts, which came to a dramatic conclusion in 1381. The dissatisfaction of London's cloth workers and the massacre of the Flemings thus had much in common with the frustrations over the royal government's policy that had been fermenting for decades among many other groups in society: all came to the surface during the Peasants' Revolt.

The Evil May Day riot of 1517 and the popular politics of anti-immigrant hostility in early modern London

“…Sometimes this hostility sharpened into collective violence, most spectacularly during the revolt of 1381 when a London crowd murdered at least thirty-five Flemings, partly due to a long-running dispute between English and Flemish weavers. 8 There were further fatal collective attacks on the Flemish and Dutch in 1435-6 and 1470, while rioters assaulted Italian merchants in 1457 and the Hanseatic enclave of the Steelyard in 1493. 9 Such violence was usually foreshadowed by complaints or lawsuits alleging that these immigrant groups were plotting sedition or monopolising trade.…”

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

“…65 At the local level, however, there were also long-standing animosities towards other alien groups: the Flemish in London, the 'Dutch' in Great Yarmouth, and so on. 66 As a result, a number of English towns, including London, Norwich, Coventry and Ipswich, adopted specific measures against aliens in the first half of the fifteenth century, denying them admission to the franchise and thus removing their representation in civic government. From the mid-century the crown also began to adopt an increasing range of anti-alien measures.…”

England's Immigrants, 1330–1550: Aliens in Later Medieval and Early Tudor England

“…In this instance, political factions within the city mobilized the mob to vent frustration against a royal policy that was famously (or infamously) pro-immigrant. 30 By the time of the Evil May Day, by contrast, various towns-and after 1484, the crown itself-had nailed their protectionist colors to the mast by developing policies that explicitly prevented aliens from participating in regulated trade: creating, in other words, what the Tory government of the 2010s has openly referred to as a "hostile environment" for immigrants. In an important forthcoming study, Sarah Rees Jones has pointed to the coincidence between the anti-alien legislation of 1484 and the shift in language forms around that time, whereby elites (including the bourgeoisie) who had previously practiced a functional multilingualism across French, Middle Dutch, and Low German came to assert a much more insular "English" language.…”