Aliens and Guilds in London

The place of immigrants in artisanal production in London at the turn of the sixteenth century was various. In principle, strangers were either excluded from work over which the London guilds held a monopoly or subordinated to the governance of citizen guild masters. In practice, the independence and power of immigrant artisans reflected the nature of the work involved and the positions of the different craft associations in the intersecting hierarchies between and within London guilds.4 Davies, ‘Aliens’, pp. 125–26. Some immigrants to London – the representatives of the Italian mercantile firms, for example – flourished despite their exclusion from the guilds of their English peers; others, such as the stranger goldsmiths, were able to establish working relationships with citizen counterparts that benefited both, though usually the English more than the strangers.5 Francesco Guidi-Bruscoli and Jessica Lutkin, ‘Perception, Identity and Culture: The Italian Communities in Fifteenth-Century London and Southampton Revisited’, in Resident Aliens in Later Medieval England, ed. Nicola McDonald, W. Mark Ormrod, and Craig Taylor (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), pp. 89–104, 96; M. E. Bratchel, ‘Regulation and Group-Consciousness in the Later History of London’s Italian Merchant Colonies’, Journal of European Economic History 9 (1980), 585–610, 593; Charlotte Berry, ‘Guilds, Immigration, and Immigrant Economic Organization: Alien Goldsmiths in London, 1480–1540’, Journal of British Studies 60 (2021), 534–62. Many – probably most – immigrant workers, however, found their stranger status put them at a disadvantage in comparison to London citizens.

A factor of principal importance in understanding the labour situation and the place of immigrants in London in the decades around 1500 is that gender and birthplace were matters of the highest legal and political significance in defining how a worker could practise a trade. London citizenship and guild membership were co-dependent: one became a full member of one’s guild and entered the freedom of the City by the same process. Participation in civic politics and selling goods at retail within City jurisdiction were restricted to citizen guild members.6 Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People 1200–1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 204–16; Christian D. Liddy, Contesting the City: The Politics of Citizenship in English Towns, 1250–1530 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Maarten Prak, Citizens without Nations: Urban Citizenship in Europe and the World, c.1000–1789 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 83–115. Only men could fully inhabit the roles of London citizen and guild member, though sometimes widows of freemen could take over some aspects of their late husbands’ status. And as of 1427, no one alien-born was to be admitted to London citizenship, and the full membership in a London guild on which entrance to the freedom depended, unless he were ‘of the king’s allegiance’; in this London differed from other English towns and cities, which tended to be less strictly exclusivist as regards place of birth, though not gender.7 See LMA, COL/CC/01/01/002, Journal 2, fol. 90r (‘Concessum est quod nullus alienigenus admittatur in libertatem Ciuitatis nisi de ligencia domini Regis’); see also COL/CC/01/01/004, Journal 4, fol. 19v (3 March 1446); Ormrod, Lambert, and Mackman, Immigrant England, p. 40; Bart Lambert, ‘Citizenry and Nationality: The Participation of Immigrants in Urban Politics in Later Medieval England’, History Workshop Journal 90 (2020), 52–73; Miri Rubin, Cities of Strangers: Making Lives in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 16–18, 46–49; Stephanie R. Hovland, ‘Apprenticeship in Later Medieval London (c.1300–c.1530)’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 2006), pp. 63–71; Matthew P. Davies, ‘The Tailors of London and Their Guild, c.1300–1500’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford, 1994), pp. 183–84. Ki’chang Kim notes that the importance of being born under the king’s dominion as the basis of subjecthood (rather than, for instance, oath-taking) was shifting in this period: Ki-ch’ang Kim, Aliens in Medieval Law: The Origins of Modern Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 4–5, 57–59, 103–25, 147–75. And if Englishness and male identity were necessary for London citizenship they were not in themselves sufficient: most English-born men in the London area were also non-citizens, termed ‘forens’ (now spelled ‘foreigns’), from the Latin adjective ‘forinsecus’, outside. Forens were, like aliens, outside the freedom, not barred by virtue of their birthplace but by socio-economic status and life chances, as they had not completed an apprenticeship and thereafter entered the freedom through a guild.8 Matthew Davies, ‘Citizens and “Foreyns”: Crafts, Guilds and Regulation in Late Medieval London’, in Between Regulation and Freedom: Work and Manufactures in European Cities, 14th–18th Centuries, ed. A. Caracausi, Matthew Davies, and L. Mocarelli (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2018), pp. 1–21. Many others who lived in the City and its environs were also non-citizens, including aristocrats, gentlemen, clergy, lawyers, and crown functionaries; the status of citizen was fully identified with guild membership and so normally available only to the merchants and artisans who comprised those guilds.

The fifteenth-century ordinances barring aliens from citizenship were not always observed in the decades following their promulgation, but at various times in the fifteenth century it was considered that immigrants who became ‘denizens’ (that is, those who renounced their allegiance to the land of their birth and instead swore obedience to the English king) had thereby become a subject and so could be admitted as citizens if sponsored by a London guild.9 On denizen status, see Ormrod et al., Immigrant England, pp. 24–29; Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 15–16. For admissions, see a streak of grants of the freedom to strangers in 1473: LMA, COL/CC/01/01/008, Journal 8, folios 56r–66r. An example of denizen status as an apparent prerequisite for the grant of citizenship is the tailor John Bettes, who was granted denizen status in April 1493 and was then made free of the city through the Tailors’ guild in July 1493. CPR 1485–94, 490; Matthew P. Davies, ed., The Merchant Taylors’ Company of London: Court Minutes 1486–1493 (Stamford: Richard III and Yorkist History Trust in assoc. with Paul Watkins, 2000), pp. 256–57, 261. From about the 1480s onwards the exclusion of those born outside the realm – denizen or not – was more consistently enforced. Some London guilds were especially vigilant in their barring of the stranger-born: the Tailors’ guild stripped an apprentice of his status in 1493 when it emerged that he had been born in Berwick-on-Tweed, just over the border in Scotland.10 Davies, ‘Tailors of London’, pp. 183–84. To verify the Englishness of their trainees, the London Skinners’ and Tailors’ apprentice binding books for the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries listed the birthplaces of those they enrolled. In both cases, totalling some five hundred apprentices, everyone was born in the king’s dominions, the vast majority in England and a few in Wales, Ireland, and Calais.11 GL, CLC/L/SE/C/005/MS 30719/001; Hovland, ‘Apprenticeship’, pp. 63–71. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the very antiquity of the ordinances was invoked as critical precedents for even more exclusionary regulations.12 Laura Hunt Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions, and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 36–37. The patchily surviving London Freemen’s Register for the middle years of the sixteenth century shows the same consistency of birth under the king’s dominion, with no exceptions, for the more than one thousand men admitted to citizenship.13 Charles Welch, ed., Register of Freemen of the City of London in the Reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI (London: London and Middlesex Archaeological Society, 1908); Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 77–81. The naming of fathers as well as the recording of birthplaces in the Skinners’, Tailors’, and civic freedom registers suggests that English paternity as well as birth may have been an informal or implicit condition for London citizenship from the later fifteenth century. This criterion would become explicit in London in 1574 when the Common Council issued an injunction forbidding citizens from taking on apprentices whose fathers had been born outside the realm, a restriction extended in 1625 to grandfathers.14 Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 288–93; Yungblut, Strangers, pp. 76, 105; Lien Bich Luu, ‘Natural-Born versus Stranger-Born Subjects: Aliens and Their Status in Elizabethan London’, in Immigrants in Tudor and Early Stuart England, ed. Nigel Goose and Lien Bich Luu (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2005), pp. 58–60; Jacob Selwood, Diversity and Difference in Early Modern London (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 1, 15–18, 87–127.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, a few guilds were more friendly to strangers but the City government tended to keep a harder line. For instance, when the Goldsmiths’ Company enquired with the City chamberlain in 1511 whether stranger goldsmith John de Loren could be made free of the City upon payment of a £20 redemption, the chamberlain replied he could not, ‘that no straunger born sholde be made free’.15 London, Goldsmiths’ Hall, Wardens Accounts and Court Minutes [WACM], Book 4C, pp. 71–72; see also p. 41 for a similar bid the year before though less clarity that it had been supported by the guild. Exceptions continued to be made – other alien goldsmiths were granted the freedom in 1491 and 1514, for example16 London, Goldsmiths’ Hall, WACM A2, p. 491; Berry, ‘Guilds’. See also below regarding the stranger weavers in 1497. – but the conferral of London citizenship on an artisan or merchant born outside the realm was a rare event in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.17 Davies, ‘Aliens’, pp. 137–38; Berry, ‘Guilds’. An example of confusion caused by changing customs regarding the admission of immigrants to the freedom can be seen in the case of James Van Zant, alias James Bracy, a tailor born in Utrecht, who was granted London citizenship in 1473 and died by 1506; in 1517 the court of the mayor and alderman were evidently confused that his orphan daughter could be a ward of the City (a privilege of citizens) as both he and she seemed to them to be Dutch. LMA, COL/CC/01/01/008, Journal 8, fol. 66r; COL/CC/01/01/010, Journal 10, folios 360v–361r; COL/CC/01/01/011, Journal 11, fol. 36r; COL/AD/01/012, Letter Book M, fol. 144r; COL/AD/01/013, Letter Book N, fol. 35v; LMA, COL/CA/01/01/003, Repertory 3, fol. 134r; Bolton, Alien Communities, p. 64. For some migrants to London, the exclusion from guilds was largely irrelevant – this was true for international merchants, who flourished in any case, and for the pieceworkers in the proto-industries of cloth- and garment-making, whose English-born peers were not guild members either. But most alien craft workers both able and desirous of operating their own workshops and selling their wares at retail – that is, those who would have been guild members had they been English – could not do so within London jurisdiction.

The interests of London citizen guild members as regards the labour of stranger artisans in the years around 1500 differed, depending on various factors: whether immigrant labour directly competed with citizens’ ability to practise their trade or whether, conversely, the strangers’ work benefited citizens (providing skilled or cheap labour, sometimes necessary to the proto-industrial networks in the metropolitan area). The entirely mercantile guilds – for instance, the Drapers, Grocers, and Mercers18 A. H. Johnson, The History of the Worshipful Company of the Drapers of London, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914), I, 275–76; Pamela Nightingale, A Medieval Mercantile Community: The Grocers’ Company and the Politics and Trade of London, 1000–1485 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 359–63, 392–95, 504–5; Anne F. Sutton, The Mercery of London: Trade, Goods and People, 1130–1578 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 114–18. – did not admit strangers in any fashion in this period. The lower-ranked artisan guilds also tended to exclude or tightly restrict stranger labour when they could; from the fifteenth century, Londoners repeatedly attempted, with some success, to obtain parliamentary legislation disallowing strangers from working outside guild supervision in certain artisanal trades in the larger metropolitan area surrounding London.19 Relatively few of these guilds have records surviving from the early sixteenth century; for those with surviving records we have found nothing about strangers as members of any kind in the Brewers’ Company (GL, MS 5442/2); the Skinners’ Company (GL, MSS 30727/2; 30719/1); the Coopers’ Company (GL, MS 5614A). The Coopers did record quarterage they collected from ‘forens’, non-citizen English workers. Those statutes, however, exempted the liberties, independent economic zones in and around London (on which more below) that fell outside the jurisdiction of the City of London, with the resulting development of a thriving manufacture and retail of shoes and other leather goods in these liberties.20 3 Edw. IV c. 4, 5; 17 Edw. IV c. 1; SR, II, 396–402, 452–61; similar exemptions were made in the labour statutes of the 1520s (14 and 15 Hen. VIII c. 2; 21 Hen. VIII c. 16; SR, III, 208–9, 297–98). The only statute governing alien labour in this period that does not exempt the precinct of St Martin le Grand, a significant centre for alien shoemaking and other leather work, is 1 Ric. III c. 9, SR, II, 489–93. See Shannon McSheffrey, Seeking Sanctuary: Crime, Mercy, and Politics in English Courts, 1400–1550 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 112–39; Lien Bich Luu, ‘Aliens and Their Impact on the Goldsmiths’ Craft in London in the Sixteenth Century’, in Goldsmiths, Silversmiths, and Bankers: Innovation and the Transfer of Skill, 1550 to 1750, ed. David Mitchell (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995), pp. 44–49; Rappaport, Worlds, pp. 45–47. A more fruitful strategy that worked in certain economic sectors was the incorporation of immigrant labour in an inferior position, in those complex networks of production for the different stages of rendering raw materials into finished clothes and accessories, where citizen guild members were able to maintain their dominant status.21 Davies, ‘Tailors of London’, esp. pp. 99–102, 167–71, 187, 208–9. And in some high-skill artisanal trades, especially those producing luxury goods, it was profitable for guildsmen to incorporate aliens in a manner that brought mutual benefit to the Londoners and the stranger artisans. As Charlotte Berry’s analysis of the Goldsmiths’ company shows, partnerships between citizen and alien goldsmiths gave London guildsmen access to high-quality wares they could purvey to the luxury consumer and the stranger artisans a trouble-free retail pipeline for the goods they produced, without the worry of harassment for illegal sales. Strangers were even integrated, in a limited fashion, into the official structures of the guild, participating in searches of stranger goldsmiths’ shops and participating in the nomination of wardens.22 Berry, ‘Guilds’. The place of aliens in the Goldsmiths’ Company, however, was not typical; from the 1490s into the seventeenth century other crafts saw hostility and rivalry, in some cases fierce, between stranger and English practitioners of artisanal crafts. As Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin has noted, the London guilds shaped a specifically English artisanal identity in response to the presence of skilled alien workers in the metropolis.23 Jasmine Kilburn-Toppin, Crafting Identities: Artisan Culture in London, c.1550–1640 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021), pp. 8–19; see also Lien Bich Luu, Immigrants and the Industries of London, 1500–1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 226–27.

The stranger-born were thus, with a few exceptions, barred from full membership in London craft guilds. In forming the Fraternity of St James in the Blackfriars convent, the late fifteenth-century Dutch Hatmakers attempted to create an alternative form of association outside the framework of the London civic guilds. Their fraternity was not, however, the first craft guild of strangers in London: the fellowship of Stranger Weavers in London flourished from the 1350s up to the 1490s as a guild distinct from the English Weavers’ guild. That separate existence of the Stranger Weavers came to an end in the 1490s, when they were forced to come under the rule of the English Weavers. The suppression of the Stranger Weavers occurred at the same time as the Hatmakers organised their guild, so it is worth a closer look.

Clothmakers from the Low Countries had been offered the freedom to live and work in England by Edward III, and in 1352 they established a guild in London which was recognised by the Crown and soon after, with some reluctance, by the City. English and stranger weavers occupied different niches in the weaving industry, the English producing cheaper cloth and the strangers more fashionable coloured and rayed (striped) fabrics. In the post-Black Death economic readjustment, the English weavers fell on hard times while the demand for the more expensive cloth the stranger weavers made remained relatively robust. Their English counterparts resented the protection of the royal government under which the Dutch weavers flourished, that resentment likely spilling over into outright violence during the Great Rising of 1381, when perhaps forty Dutch weavers were massacred on the streets of London.24 Bart Lambert and Milan Pajic, ‘Immigration and the Common Profit: Native Cloth Workers, Flemish Exiles, and Royal Policy in Fourteenth-Century London’, Journal of British Studies 55 (2016), 633–57; Frances Consitt, The London Weavers’ Company, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), I, 33–60, 180–91. In the fifteenth century, the separate existence of the English Weavers and Stranger Weavers was maintained, though how the alien guild fitted into the urban governing structure is somewhat unclear. On the one hand, the guild’s ordinances were approved by the mayor, aldermen, and common council in 1441, but on the other, it seems that the members of the Stranger Weavers were not citizens.25 LMA, COL/AD/01/010, Letter Book K, fol. 193v; Consitt, London Weavers’ Company, I, 198–200. In the meantime, the weaving sector of London’s cloth-making industry continued to collapse, for the English Weavers more precipitously than for the smaller number of Stranger Weavers, who still specialised in more expensive fabrics. It seems likely that their small size and insignificance allowed the survival of the Stranger Weavers into the last years of the fifteenth century despite more insistent exclusion of the alien-born from London guilds in the second half of that century; perhaps, also, they had a good relationship with prominent citizen merchants who handled the marketing of their luxury cloth.

Such tolerance for an anomalous alien guild would not outlast the 1490s. Open conflict between the two weavers’ guilds flared up from time to time; one such episode fell in September 1497, prompting the mayor and aldermen to summon representatives of the societates or guilds of ‘Englisshwevers’ and ‘Wevers Strangers’ to address the issues on which they were at variance: the record of this summons in the City’s Journal of the Court of Common Council put both brotherhoods on a par, each labelled a societas. At the end of November, the mayor and aldermen decreed a settlement, also entered into the Journal, which had a significantly different tone. The separate Stranger Weavers’ guild had rhetorically simply vanished, replaced by twenty-five individually named alien weavers who agreed to join the ‘Felaship’ of English Weavers.26 LMA, COL/CC/01/01/010, Journal 10, folios 105v, 113r–115r; COL/CA/01/01/001, Repertory 1, fol. 29v; Consitt, London Weavers’ Company, I, 33–60; 130; 223–26. On the face of it, this agreement conferred considerable benefit on the twenty-five named stranger weavers even if it erased their collective identity: henceforth, they were to become full members of the ‘Gilde of [Citizen] Weuers’. Moreover, in order to solve the category confusion of strangers as full guild members, a status normally reserved for citizens, twelve were granted the freedom of the City with the promise of more to come – a significant concession given the alien-unfriendly climate of the 1490s. The strangers were, in addition, to be integrated into the governing structure of the English Weavers’ Company with reserved bailiff and warden positions for alien members. In return, the aliens were not henceforth to meet separately or in any other way to cultivate an independent existence. They could take apprentices, but only boys born in the realm.

All in all, then, the 1497 amalgamation of the English and Stranger Weavers appears to have offered the strangers a more-or-less equal place in a new larger guild. The twentieth-century historian of the craft, Frances Consitt, saw it generally as a peaceable union that allowed for power-sharing between the English and stranger weavers. Possibly that was indeed the general spirit in 1497, but any equitable arrangement was short-lived. Consitt reports that the bailiffs for 1498 duly included two English men and one ‘freeman stranger’, for instance, but the appointment of the stranger bailiff soon fell into disuse.27 Consitt, London Weavers’ Company, I, 91. Moreover, the grant of citizenship that had been made to twelve alien-born weavers under the 1497 agreement was – as the City was to make clear – a one-time-only offer. Despite assurances to the contrary in the agreement, stranger weavers were to be refused the freedom (and, in 1503, several wardens of the guild were thrown into prison for daring to present an alien for citizenship).28 They were found guilty of having ‘falsly and subtilly presentid’ the stranger-born weaver to the chamberlain for admission to citizenship, ‘expresly contrary’ to the oaths they had sworn as citizens themselves. LMA, COL/CA/01/01/001, Repertory 1, fol. 128v. In the sixteenth century the Weavers’ Company settled into the same kind of relationship with its alien members as pertained in other guilds that incorporated (as opposed to outright excluded) strangers: the strangers were of a secondary status, working under the supervision of the guild, paying higher rates of admission to the craft, but without being considered full members eligible for governance positions.29 This is what Consitt implies, though she does not state this explicitly. London Weavers’ Company, I, 130.

Other immigrant craftsmen sought another route: working outside the physical boundaries of the City of London and the jurisdiction of its guilds. For the purposes of guild jurisdiction, London’s boundaries extended some three miles beyond the walls, but those seeking independent zones closer to or even within the City walls could find them in the many liberties in the metropolitan region. In liberties such as the precincts of the collegiate church of St Martin le Grand, the hospital of St Katherine by the Tower, or the Blackfriars convent, strangers could both produce and retail their wares outside the reach of the London guilds’ monopolies. In the precinct of St Martin le Grand, within the London walls just north of St Paul’s Cathedral, for instance, lived a dense population of stranger artisans, mostly from the Low Countries, who made and sold artisanal goods, especially shoes and pouches, much to the chagrin of the Cordwainers’ and Pouchmakers’ guilds.30 Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Stranger Artisans and the London Sanctuary of St Martin Le Grand in the Reign of Henry VIII’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43 (2013), 545–71.

There is, however, no evidence that any hatmakers were among the hundreds of Dutch strangers who lived in St Martin le Grand,31 Of the more than 500 residents of the precinct of St Martin le Grand traced for the period 1500–1550, none were hatmakers or cappers. Spreadsheet available here: Shannon McSheffrey, ‘Research: Residents of St Martin Le Grand’ <https://shannonmcsheffrey.wordpress.com/research/>. a fact which points up some of the differences between the hatmakers and their countrymen who made shoes and pouches. For the latter, the ability to operate shops in which their wares could be sold directly to consumers was paramount, and the liberty privileges of the precinct of St Martin le Grand allowed them to do so outside the structure of the London guilds. Evidently the hatmakers, however, were not especially interested in retailing their products – or perhaps it was simply impracticable for them to sell directly to the more select market for finely-produced hats among courtiers and other elites. There were some hatmakers who lived in the precinct of the Hospital of St Katherine by the Tower, another liberty just outside the City walls on the east end, but complaints about them focused on London merchants buying wholesale from them rather than on their illicit retailing.32 TNA, C 1/462/38. It seems that the craft of hatmaking in London focused on manufacture rather than retail, providing the hats wholesale to merchants, usually London citizen hatter merchants and haberdashers, who would take on the business of selling to the consumer.

Although in some crafts, such as shoe- and pouch-making, stranger artisans were able to work outside the guild structure through the whole process from manufacture to retail, the hatmakers appear to have wanted or needed to deal with London mercantile guilds to get their product to the consumer. Yet the stranger hatmakers were evidently unwilling to subordinate themselves to the guilds with whose members they would normally deal and tried instead to establish their own governance through the Fraternity of St James in Blackfriars. Though they did not use the jurisdictional freedom of liberties in the same way as the shoemakers and pouchmakers did, to both make and sell their wares, they did take advantage of the liberty privileges of Blackfriars in another way, forming their fraternity there outside the City’s boundaries. Thus, the establishment of a formal guild for Hatmakers in the years around 1500 was likely an attempt to resist incorporation into one of these London guilds striving for control of both the headgear market and the craft workers, citizen, foren, and stranger, who produced caps and hats.