Conclusion

The felt hats these craftsmen made were one of the essential consumer commodities fundamental to the post-plague economy in Europe. Craftsmen in Europe developed new processes for making a high-quality felt from the fur of certain mammals – beavers were best, but some kinds of sheep wool also worked. These felts could be moulded into brimmed hats that kept their shape in all weathers; by the end of the fourteenth century, ‘bever hats’ had become fashionable. The skills for making this kind of felt were unknown in England in the decades following the Black Death; caps were made in England, but so far as we were able to find hats made from felt or straw were imported from abroad, from the Low Countries, France, and Italy. In the fifteenth century we see the first evidence of felt hatmaking in England, but those hats were made by immigrants, not by English craft workers. By the 1480s and 1490s, there was a sizeable number of felt hatmakers in London, all, as far as we can tell, immigrants from the Low Countries. They kept a careful guard on the skills by which they produced their felt and, for decades to come, it was Dutch migrants who retained a monopoly on the knowledge of this artisanal process in England.

Though advantaged by their unique ability to make this popular form of headgear, the hatmakers settling in London in the later fifteenth century arrived at a turbulent moment for labour and craft organisations in London. The turn of the sixteenth century saw aggressive manoeuvring among the London citizen guilds, as larger crafts swallowed smaller ones and engaged in intense competition to control workers outside their memberships. Among those workers outside the London guilds were stranger artisans; anyone born outside the realm, as the Dutch hatmakers were, was barred by civic ordinance from full membership in the London craft guilds. Those guilds nonetheless wanted to control alien labour, ideally bringing skilled stranger artisans under the supervision of citizen guild masters.2 See chapter 1.

It was in that context that, around the year 1500, the Dutch hatmakers met in the Dominican priory to establish their fraternity. They undoubtedly chose Blackfriars because it was a liberty, outside City jurisdiction; some may have lived and worked within the precinct, while others certainly lived nearby in the parish of St Andrew by the Wardrobe. The hatmakers formed their association to resist incorporation as subordinate members of a London guild, a strategy that seems to have worked for about a decade. In 1511, however, the king’s council ordered the Hatmakers’ Fraternity of St James to be amalgamated into the much larger London Haberdashers’ Company. The terms of this merger were also written into the booklet with the ordinances, along with some modifications to that agreement probably written several years later following a court case about its terms.3 See chapter 3.

Prising open this unassuming document makes us pose new questions about language, writing, translation, labour, migration, and culture in London and across the North Sea at the threshold between the medieval and early modern ages. The way the ordinances were written reveals much about the linguistic reality of immigrants from the Low Countries in London in these years. Two scribes successively wrote the ordinances, the first around 1501, the second continuing in the decade following. They may have been the clerks of the Fraternity mentioned in the Ordinances or Dutch priests or friars hired for the occasion. The first scribe’s Dutch dialect shows origins in the north-eastern Netherlands and the handwriting reflects Dutch scripts; the second scribe, by contrast, wrote in a script with both English and continental features and in a dialect of Dutch spoken in the southwestern Low Countries. Perhaps in their places of origin, the two scribes would each have regarded the other as a stranger but, in London, linguistic commonality rather than dialectal difference brought them together. The scribes were also very much at home in English, showing a high level of bilingualism. The ordinances were not composed in one language and then translated into the other: the scribes drew up each version independently, conveying the same meaning but with different phrasing. If anything, the scribes were more comfortable in English than in Dutch, with the Dutch showing influence of anglicisms in some of its ordinary vocabulary: the Dutch ordinances, for instance, use ‘meer ouer’ when an English speaker would say ‘moreouer [moreover]’: a useful phrase but not a Dutch one. It is probable, then, that both scribes were immigrants from the Low Countries who often spoke both English and Dutch; the fact that the second scribe seems to have been trained to write in England could suggest that he was a second-generation Dutch speaker. As their language shows, they lived in a bicultural world, a common feature of immigrant life.4 See chapters 4 and 5.

The work life of the hatmakers also straddled the North Sea. The artisanal cultures in London and the Low Countries had much in common with one another, as we might expect given the close economic and cultural ties. They had some striking differences, too. English artisanal training was lengthy and more formalised than was the norm in the Low Countries and elsewhere on the European continent. For continental artisans, movement from city to city for work or for training was straightforward, allowing for easier responses to market conditions and facilitating a culture of artisanal exchange between cities. In London, by contrast, labour migration of skilled craftsmen was inhibited by the tight control of entry into citizen guilds: not only were aliens and strangers generally barred but so also were those who undertook apprenticeships anywhere else in England. The restriction of London guild membership to those who completed their training under those guilds’ aegis inhibited both geographical and social mobility: save for a few wealthy and well-connected exceptions, only boys with parents or guardians able to arrange London apprenticeships could become London guildsmen. Though the path to master citizen artisan in London was narrow, for those able to take the prescribed route the benefits were clear. The economic structures of the metropolis were configured as much as possible to favour citizens’ production and sale of goods at the expense of those outside the freedom of London.5 See chapter 1.

These differences meant that the culture of artisanal labour to which the Dutch hatmakers were accustomed when they came to London was substantially different from what English Londoners expected. The Dutch craftsmen were presumably baffled by the restrictiveness of London’s guild membership, not to mention insulted by the nativist rules that excluded anyone born outside the realm. To English guildsmen, the short continental apprenticeships must have appeared laughably inadequate, while the Dutch craftsmen themselves probably rightly regarded their artisanal skills as no less developed than those of their English counterparts, though acquired differently. In the case of the hatmakers, the quality of continental artisanal training was even more obvious, as no English artisans had the skills to make the fashionable felt hats. When they established their ordinances in the Blackfriars’ priory around the year 1500, the Dutch Hatmakers adhered closely to continental norms in the structure of their craft: ‘learners’ (the word they used in English instead of ‘apprentice’) trained for two years, not seven to ten; artisans trained in other crafts or in other cities were welcome to join their association simply by demonstrating their skills; procedures for establishing the credentials of those migrating from elsewhere (letters of attestation) were written into the rules. The ‘Dutchness’ of the ordinances of the Hatmakers’ Fraternity suggests an implicit rejection of the English way of organising artisanal labour: to the Hatmakers, their own way of doing things seemed right.6 See chapter 2.

The Dutchmen who formed the Fraternity of St James the Less in the London Blackfriars priory did so not simply or even primarily because they wanted to organise their craft as suited them, but because they needed to act collectively to resist absorption as subordinate members of one of the London citizen guilds. Though they were able to avert a takeover for about a decade, in 1511 they were forced by order of the royal council to put themselves under the supervision of the London Haberdashers’ Company. As legal wrangles in the following years show, this was not a friendly union: in at least some cases, hatmakers agreed to swear an oath to the Haberdashers only after all their goods had been seized by civic authorities. Testimony in litigation in the 1510s shows mutual disdain between the English haberdasher merchants and the Dutch hatmaker artisans: the former decried the stranger artisans’ unwillingness to subordinate themselves to the company wardens’ authority, while the latter complained that the haberdashers knew nothing of hatmaking and should leave them to regulate themselves.7 See chapters 2 and 3

Though hostility may have prevailed in the initial years after the forced merger in 1511, in subsequent years both citizen haberdashers and stranger hatmakers prospered in an expanding market for consumer goods. We can see this especially in a parliamentary petition which the London Haberdashers’ Company organised in 1531 on behalf of many different artisans who made headgear, including citizen haberdashers who made caps and non-citizen artisans who participated in various parts of the industry, including the Dutch hatmakers. As the petition shows, the stranger artisans shared interests with the citizen guild members and benefited from collective representation. Two decades after the Hatmakers’ merger with the Haberdashers, thirty-five hatmaker masters employed over a thousand workers. The small workshop-based hatmaking craft had become part of a larger development in textile production in London and other parts of Europe in the early sixteenth century: chains of production with pieceworkers performing different stages of the process of making a hat in their own homes. The hatmaker masters – still overwhelmingly Dutch, judging by their names – oversaw these production sequences, presumably performing the most recondite aspects of fabrication of hats in their own shops. As tax records show, at least some of these hatmakers were doing well.8 See chapter 3.

Yet as the 1510s court cases and the Haberdashers’ records of later decades make clear, neither the haberdashers nor the hatmakers themselves regarded the Dutch artisans as full members of the London Haberdashers’ Company. As strangers born outside the realm they were ineligible for citizenship. Because only those alien-born artisans knew the craft of hatmaking, however, the nativist logic of London guild membership meant that no hatmakers, regardless of where they were born, became citizen guild members over the first half of the sixteenth century. Only citizen guild members could be apprentice masters, but no hatmakers could be citizens, as they were strangers; that, in turn, meant there could be no future hatmaker citizens, as only those who had served an officially registered guild apprenticeship could become freemen of London and guild members. It was only in the 1560s following parliamentary legislation mandating seven-year apprenticeships for all artisanal trades that this vicious circle was interrupted: following the statute, the Haberdashers were forced to make special grants of citizenship and guild membership to several cohorts of hatmakers so they could serve as apprentice-masters for new generations of English-born apprentices. These new hatmaker citizen haberdashers were English or Welsh, judging by their names. We can guess that they had trained with the stranger hatmakers who had dominated the craft in the London area over the previous three generations; up to 1567, however, they, like their alien hatmaker masters, were excluded from London citizenship despite their English birth because they had not undertaken a formal apprenticeship. Though immigrant hatmakers, increasingly from northern France rather than the Low Countries, continued to move to the London area in the second half of the sixteenth century, the craft was no longer entirely confined to stranger artisans. Hatmaking grew, of course, to be an even more significant industry in England over the early modern centuries.9 See chapter 3.

The exclusion of the stranger hatmakers from the London guilds affected them economically, socially, and culturally. We can trace the outline of the career of Anthony Levison, one of the four Hatmaker wardens in 1511, a defendant in a 1514 lawsuit between the Haberdashers’ company and several hatmakers, and the chief hatmaker master in the 1531 parliamentary petition. He certainly prospered over the decades, but not nearly as much as citizen cappers and haberdashers whose careers coincided with his: inability to retail his own goods and significantly higher tax rates were structural disadvantages that affected him and every other immigrant artisan working in London. The strangers were also excluded socially and culturally from most aspects of guild life, the often-elaborate feasts, processions, and other ceremonies that have been much studied as occasions for the building of conviviality and solidarity among London’s artisans. Such ceremonial demonstrated who was in and who was not. Yet if excluded from the company feasts, hatmakers nonetheless developed social relationships with their English neighbours and business associates: they married English women, they gossiped with their English neighbours, they stood as guarantors for work colleagues in legal disputes. Strangers in London, even those who had lived in the City for decades, experienced that liminal status of both belonging and not-belonging: vital to the labour and production of the City’s economy and tied by close relationships with the English-born, yet vulnerable to xenophobic resentments that at times turned violent, as during the Evil May Day anti-immigrant riot in 1517.

The Dutch artisans in London in the early to mid-sixteenth century thus straddled a line between inclusion and exclusion in the City’s life – but, of course, they themselves were sometimes ambivalent about or resistant to assimilation. The reasons for these artisans’ leaving the Low Countries in the first place are unclear. The usual push and pull factors were no doubt pertinent: intermittent political turmoil in Dutch cities and poor employment prospects on the one hand; economic opportunity, higher wages, new horizons, and personal ties in London on the other. The evidence of the Dutch hatmakers’ lives in London, fragmentary as it is, suggests, however, that by no means did they seek to abandon their culture in their move across the North Sea. It is no surprise that Dutch immigrants had close relationships to one another. The will of one of the hatmakers, Gerard Rowst, who together with Anthony Levison signed the 1511 agreement, shows those ties: he, like so many other Dutchmen, made his last confession to the subprior of the Crossed Friars, Brother Godfrey Borken, who, together with other Dutch-speaking confessors, Bartholomew Lanselott of Antwerp and Brother John Hellinck, looked after the spiritual needs of the ‘strangers’ in their mother tongue in the early sixteenth century.10 LMA, DL/C/B/004/MS09171/9, fol 94rv, will of Gerard Roest, 1518; cf. other Dutch wills in the same register at folios 46r, 87r–88r, 113rv, 126v. And just as they cleaved closely to the underlying structures of Dutch artisanal life when they wrote the ordinances for their fraternity at the turn of the sixteenth century, so also did they stick to other aspects of Dutch life. The ordinances, for instance, provided for situations of interpersonal violence between the fraternity’s members, including even the possibility of homicide; the hatmakers who drew up these ordinances imagined that the usual Dutch arrangement for such conflicts, private settlement between the parties, would prevail, though the very different English legal context mandated that serious crimes be prosecuted in the royal courts. The Dutch hatmakers may simply have been unaware of the usual English way of doing things – or they may have preferred the more direct Dutch way of resolving conflicts.11 See chapters 2, 3, and 5.

The Dutch hatmakers who came together in Blackfriars in the late fifteenth century to make the Fraternity of St James carried with them a host of assumptions, understandings, and practices from their formation as artisans in the Low Countries. Their lives as Dutch-speaking immigrants in an English-speaking city were marked by linguistic and cultural cross-currents. Though limited by the structures that constrained their labour as alien-born artisans, they established a new industry in their adopted country. Over the ensuing centuries the making of hats became an ever more central sector in the English economy, growing from the small seed planted by several dozen immigrants from the Low Countries in the fifteenth century.