England's Immigrants 1330-1550: A Study of National Identity, Culture, and Integration

England's Immigrants 1330-1550—www.englandsimmigrants.com—is a major Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project that has just reached the middle of its three-year timescale. It is being coordinated by the University of York, under the direction of Prof. Mark Ormrod, and the project's team is working in collaboration with the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield (HRI Sheffield) and The National Archives (TNA) in Kew.¹ The project is exploring the extensive archival evidence about the names, origins, occupations, and households of a significant number of foreigners who chose to make their lives and livelihoods in England in the era of the Hundred Years War, the Wars of the Roses, and the early stages of the Reformation. The outcomes of the project will contribute creatively to the longer-term history of immigration to England and help to provide a deep historical and cultural context to contemporary debates over ethnicity, multiculturalism, and national identity.

Central to the project is a major HRI Sheffield-developed, Web-based database, which is currently being populated with data from a number of different sources. The database will pool all the collected data and make it fully searchable on-line, and it is scheduled to be publicly available by early 2015. The database will be enhanced with the use of GoogleMaps, allowing users to plot their searches and visualize the data. The core data sources are a series of tax assessments carried out between 1440 and 1487 in connection with the decision of the English Parliament to levy taxes on the resident alien population.² These records are being supported by a variety of other sources, including: Tudor subsidies (in which aliens were assessed alongside their native neighbors);³ letters of protection and denization issued to resident aliens from the fourteenth century onward;⁴ and Tudor denization lists.⁵ Further sources will be used in the next phase of the project to add additional names and to build biographical details pertaining to the individuals on the database: these include wills, petitions, and local sources, and other digital resources such as the York Cause Papers database.⁶ It is predicted that the database will eventually hold at least eighty thousand names of alien residents.

The project will tackle four key research questions concerning the individuals themselves and the rules governing them, their work, and their culture. The data on the individuals will show where the immigrants came from, where they lived and worked, and their relationships with other incomers and the native population. Another vital strand concerns how central and local government defined and regulated immigrants and immigration, and the various influences on policy-making. The role of aliens in, and their contribution to, the various economies of England will also be assessed, with a view to establishing any connections between the availability of work and the motives for immigration. The project aims to shed light on the extent to which aliens were integrated into the towns, villages, and rural communities of England, and to determine whether formal or informal types of "ghetto-ization" were applied to them. In addition, the project will explore how ideas of ethnicity and nationality were informed by English attitudes toward, and interactions with, resident aliens.

The study of aliens in England is certainly not a new idea, yet there have been specific limitations to what has been covered in the pre-existing scholarship. Firstly, much more needs to be done on the full social range: contrary to received opinion, by no means all the immigrants to England in this period were of high status, and servants, laborers, and other unskilled migrant workers feature significantly in the database. Many of these groups are to be found in rural areas, and so the need to widen the geographical focus beyond cities and ports is also being explored. Finally, the project is looking beyond groups, such as the Italians and the Hanse, that have been the subject of other intensive research, to include other designations. The so-called "Dutch" (covering a much wider socio-linguistic group...