This article challenges the assumption that the late medieval Low Countries were predominantly an immigrant-receiving region by highlighting the significance of emigration from these supposed ‘promised lands’. It examines evidence from the migrant confraternity of Saint Barbara in Florence. Database research on its membership register from 1445-1456 reveals details of 457 individuals who migrated from the Low Countries to Tuscany, revising Mario Battistini’s earlier figures upward. Migrants from these areas constituted the largest share of the confraternity, questioning its previous characterisation as ‘German’. Primarily composed of cloth and linen workers displaced by issues in their native urban textile industries, these migrants had different economic profiles compared to those moving to fifteenth-century England, who were mostly highly-skilled artisans. Cloth weavers found wage-based opportunities in Florence, while linen weavers faced less competition there. The confraternity also included many female migrants, but due to limited information, it is challenging to determine their reasons for migrating.

Mobility to and from cities represents an essential aspect of urban development in Flanders (Belgium) during the second half of the Middle Ages (AD 1000 – AD 1500). The city of Ypres was situated in one of the core regions of medieval urbanisation in Europe. Nevertheless, many uncertainties about the movement of men, and especially women and children remain. Oxygen and strontium isotope analyses were conducted on 113 individuals recovered from Ypres’ St. Nicholas parish cemetery (13th -14th centuries). The 87Sr/86Sr of the individuals suggests that a significant amount of foodstuffs available in the city probably originated from (present-day) northern France. Furthermore, 17

Processes shaping the formation of the present-day population structure in highly urbanized Northern Europe are still poorly understood. Gaps remain in our understanding of when and how currently observable regional differences emerged and what impact city growth, migration, and disease pandemics during and after the Middle Ages had on these processes. We perform low-coverage sequencing of the genomes of 338 individuals spanning the eighth to the eighteenth centuries in the city of Sint-Truiden in Flanders, in the northern part of Belgium. The early/high medieval Sint-Truiden population was more heterogeneous, having received migrants from Scotland or Ireland, and displayed less genetic relatedness than observed today between individuals in present-day Flanders. We find differences in gene variants associated with high vitamin D blood levels between individuals with Gaulish or Germanic ancestry. Although we find evidence of a Yersinia pestis infection in 5 of the 58 late medieval burials, we were unable to detect a major population-scale impact of the second plague pandemic on genetic diversity or on the elevated differentiation of immunity genes. This study reveals that the genetic homogenization process in a medieval city population in the Low Countries was protracted for centuries. Over time, the Sint-Truiden population became more similar to the current population of the surrounding Limburg province, likely as a result of reduced long-distance migration after the high medieval period, and the continuous process of local admixture of Germanic and Gaulish ancestries which formed the genetic cline observable today in the Low Countries.

Many people born outside England, defined as aliens, lived in late medieval London. Despite a growing literature on immigration in late medieval England and acceptance that speech was highly significant in premodern societies, studies of native-alien coexistence in London have focused on physical confrontations and have overlooked nationality-based insults. This article analyses these slurs, drawing on the records of English church and equity courts. It argues that there is little evidence supporting the view that late medieval England was characterised by a continuous and generalised anti-alien sentiment. Instead, it concludes that nationality-based insults were time and context-specific and that even the terminology of the abuse was informed by specific political and economic tensions.

During the early medieval period (5th–9th century CE), the North Sea coastal societies were involved in long distance maritime trade relations, which resulted in a pronounced mobility of individuals throughout the North Sea area. This work presents the first isotope data from human remains on diet and mobility from early medieval Belgian coastal populations. A total of 23 out of 51 excavated individuals from the archaeological site of Koksijde, Belgium (7th–8th century AD), was selected for isotope and elemental analyses (δ13Ccol, δ15N, δ18OP, δ13Cap, δ18OC, 87Sr/86Sr and [Sr]). The high δ15N values of part of the individuals buried at Koksijde indicate that high trophic level ranked fish was included in their diets, suggesting an intensive exploitation of marine food sources. The δ18O values are not compatible with the predicted ‘local’ values while the strontium isotope ratios have values close to that of seawater (0.7092). Either the actual oxygen isotope values in early medieval Belgium are offset by 1 or 2‰ compared to the current meteoric water predictions, or the population came from somewhere else. Whether or not this was linked to the population’s mobility is difficult to assess based on their δ18O and 87Sr/86Sr values. Nonetheless, the study of the population at Koksijde provides new insights into the lives of the early medieval coastal Belgian societies.

The oeuvre of Marc Boone (Ghent, 1955) has become standard reading for specialists of medieval European towns and cities, as well as for those interested in the history of state building - most notably that of the Burgundian polity. Honoring Ghent University’s venerable tradition of medieval studies begun by Henri Pirenne and building upon the work of his Doktorvater Walter Prevenier, Marc Boone also investigated taxation and the history of government spending, popular protest, and the persecution of “deviant” sexuality. Over the course of his rich career, he served as president of the European Association of Urban History and as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University. For more than twenty years, he taught the introductory course on historical criticism to every first-year student of the faculty, and thus had a major impact on the pensee critique of generations of young minds. Upon the occasion of his retirement in 2021, his former students have compiled this collection of some of his best historical essays, half of which have been translated from French and Dutch into English.

The exceptions are immigrant wills, petitions and court depositions, which have been the subject of particular scrutiny, but, being formulaic and produced by legal professionals, have their own limitations when it comes to reflecting aliens' personal experiences. Inspired by the genre of microhistory, the aim of this study is to mine this unusually rich body of evidence and to see what the singular story of an alien beer brewer can tell the reader about immigrant experiences in later medieval England that government records, wills and petitions alone cannot. Burgess has argued that churchwarden accounts, in particular their formal copies, could have been intended as documents for commemoration, celebrating the churchwarden's contributions to the parish. It seems safe to say then that if Hermanson's will and churchwarden accounts were meant to serve self-fashioning purposes, they did everything but define him by his immigrant background.

During the later Middle Ages, the presence of tens of thousands of people of foreign birth in England required royal government to consider issues of nationality and alien status. This study claims that the legal, administrative and fiscal framework for the rights and regulation of immigrants that was developed in response never created a straightforward binary between aliens (people born outside the kingdom) and denizens (those born in England). Drawing on the records of the alien subsidies and on chancery documents, it argues that the local agents of the English crown deployed national labels in very specific and purposeful ways, contingent on the vagaries of international politics and trade, rather than on a supposed generalised anti-alien sentiment.

This article explores the participation of immigrants, or people born outside the kingdom, in urban politics in later medieval England. It demonstrates that the nationality of these newcomers was of only secondary importance. What mattered most was whether immigrants’ economic and political interests aligned with those of the civic political elites. If they did not, aliens’ nationality could be mobilized to exclude them from urban politics. If, however, immigrants’ activities complemented those of the urban elites economically and politically, they had every chance to engage with all aspects of civic political life and be elected into the highest civic offices.

Chapter 8 addresses the evidence for the presence of people from religious and racial minorities in England between 1300 and 1550. While stressing that the numbers of people who can be thus identified remains very small, it urges a corrective to the body of scholarship that supposes the general absence of minorities (including black people and Muslim people) in England before the middle of the sixteenth century. The chapter includes an assessment of the 1290 expulsion of the Jews from England and the wider impact of this measure on attitudes to minorities in the centuries that followed, before going on to identify examples of 'Saracens', 'Moors' and people of 'Inde' in the English records of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The chapter concludes with a reassessment of the supposedly racist tendencies of sixteenth-century English governments and provides a case study of the 'mass denization' of French people resident in England (and some others) during the reign of Henry VIII.

Chapter 4 is the first of two chapters that deal with immigrants to England under the various 'national' labels that were ascribed to them by the English crown and its agents. It assesses the numbers, social profile and geographical distribution of Welsh, Irish, 'Islander' and Scottish immigrants to England. The data for the Welsh is poor; although it seems likely that the highest concentrations of Welsh migrants settled close to the Welsh border in the English West Midlands and South-West, there is some evidence for Welsh settlement further afield, too. The Irish evidence is stronger, and reveals that a significant proportion of Irish migrants to England may have been skilled and prosperous people who made targeted decisions about the optimal places to settle. The 'Islanders' were people from the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and the Orkney Islands (the latter being treated separately from Scotland because, at the time, they were still under the jurisdiction of the king of Norway). They appear in small numbers. Finally, the evidence for the Scots presence in England is the strongest of all, and reveals significant numbers of Scots migrating across the border into the northern counties of England, many of them transient agricultural workers but some of them being higher-status individuals such as merchants and members of the clergy. These higher-status Scots also settled more generally around England, and were a recognised presence in the South and East.

Gender & HistoryVolume 31, Issue 3 p. 545-564 Special Issue Double Disadvantage or Golden Age? Immigration, Gender and Economic Opportunity in Later Medieval England† Bart Lambert, Corresponding Author bart.lambert@vub.be orcid.org/0000-0002-4921-9420 Correspondence Email: bart.lambert@vub.beSearch for more papers by this author Bart Lambert, Corresponding Author bart.lambert@vub.be orcid.org/0000-0002-4921-9420 Correspondence Email: bart.lambert@vub.beSearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 February 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12454Citations: 2Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume31, Issue3Special Issue: Migration, Institutions and Intimate LivesOctober 2019Pages 545-564 RelatedInformation

Chapter 9 is the first of two chapters that consider the cultural aspects of the topic of immigration to later medieval England. It eschews the language of 'assimilation' and instead considers degrees of acculturation, stressing not only that the lives of immigrants were altered by the process of movement but that English culture (and 'Englishness' itself) were influenced and changed by the immigrant presence. After reviewing contemporary understandings of national characteristics, and the various (and often derogatory) stereotypes that the English used for their European neighbours, it considers those who effectively changed nationality (whether through denization or through other means) in the given period and whether their change of status can be seen to have been an affective, or merely a pragmatic, process. The chapter then proceeds to consider the internationalism of the royal court and its patronage of alien writers, musicians and artists. Next, it considers the role of language and the methods by which immigrants acquired various degrees of understanding of the English vernacular. Finally, the chapter reviews the evidence of immigrants' personal names as represented in English government records and considers what these can tell us about the perpetuation or loss of 'foreign' identities.