This book provides a vivid and accessible history of first-generation immigrants to England in the later Middle Ages. Accounting for upwards of two percent of the population and coming from all parts of Europe and beyond, immigrants spread out over the kingdom, settling in the countryside as well as in towns, taking work as agricultural labourers, skilled craftspeople and professionals. Often encouraged and welcomed, sometimes vilified and victimised, immigrants were always on the social and political agenda. Immigrant England is the first book to address a phenomenon and issue of vital concern to English people at the time, to their descendants living in the United Kingdom today and to all those interested in the historical dimensions of immigration policy, attitudes to ethnicity and race and concepts of Englishness and Britishness.

It is now over 100 years since Cunningham wrote Alien Immigrants to England, which focused heavily upon the impact of immigration in later 16th and early 17th century England: it has yet to be supplanted by a comprehensive, up-to-date survey. Although much research has been completed on the subject, particularly during the past three decades, relatively little of this has appeared in mainstream history journals, while more general surveys have tended to concentrate upon the second wave of migration that followed the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

An original reinterpretation of the legal aspects of feudalism, and the important distinction between citizens and non-citizens.

The protestant reformation was critical to the efflorescence of printing in England between 1547 and 1553. Celyn David Richards explores English print culture during this turbulent period, in which an official programme of reform, new censorship dynamics and increasingly sophisticated commercial relationships contributed to the trade’s rapid expansion. Edward VI’s reign saw unprecedented levels of religious print production, London’s first publishing syndicate, and a climate of protestant ascendancy which helped English print culture to make up ground on its continental counterparts.

By examining their production practices in a variety of genres?including manuscript illustration, glass painting and staining, tapestry manufacture, portrait painting, and engraving?this book explores how Netherlandish artists migrating to England in the early modern period overcame difficulties raised by their outsider status. This study examines, for the first time in this context, the challenges of alien status to artistic production and the effectiveness of cooperation as a countermeasure. The author demonstrates that collaboration was chief among the strategies that these foreigners chose to secure a position in London's changing art market. Curd's exploration of these collaborations primarily follows Pierre Bourdieu's model of "establishment and challenger" in which dominance in a field of cultural production depends upon how much cultural, political, and economic capital can be accumulated and the effectiveness of the strategies used to confront competition. The analysis presented here challenges received opinion that a collaborative work is only a joint effort of artists working together on a single monument by demonstrating that the participation of patrons and middlemen can also shape the final appearance of a work of art. Furthermore, this book shows that the strategic use of collaboration served the goal of competition by helping to establish foreign artists in the London art market and suggests that their coping strategies have implications for the study of immigrant behaviors today.