First recent full-length analysis of a major medieval poem. The late fourteenth-century English poem Winner and Waster narrates a debate between the forces of avarice (Winner) and generosity (Waster); it ranges widely over a number of major issues in the political life of England during Edward III's reign. This book sets out to re-date the poem from the 1350s to the 1360s, and in so doing to question whether its principal message really revolves (as so much earlier scholarship has insisted) around the state of public order and the costs of warfare in the 1350s. Instead, it proposes that the poem echoes debates about Edward III's ability to maintain concord between the members of his household, to manage the extravagance in clothing that prompted the sumptuary laws of 1363, and to run his peace-time finances of the 1360s in such a way as to guarantee the solvency of the crown. Drawing extensively on the records of parliament and on contemporary chronicles, this volume sets Winner and Waster within the wider context of other complaint literature of the fourteenth century, and characterizes it as one of the most politically - and socially - engaged works of the period.
Petitions to the Crown in Parliament from women of gentry and lesser social status fall into a number of sub-categories. Petitions from women acting on their own behalf, as femmes soles or independent women (often, though not always, widows) cover a multiplicity of causes, but often present a gendered view by casting the source of the petitioner’s troubles in terms of the greater power enjoyed by male protagonists. Discourses of poverty and helplessness are therefore a regular part of the rhetorical strategy deployed by female petitioners. Petitions from women as wives of named husbands generally arose where there was a dispute over land to which the wife, rather than the husband, had the formal claim. There were, however, a number of instances in which women could petition on their own, in the absence of their husbands: when the latter were held in gaol, or were prisoners of war, or were otherwise abroad on pilgrimage, etc. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the petition of Margaret Basset against Sir Richard Stanhope, heard in the Leicester Parliament of 1414, when Margaret herself may have been present for proceedings.
This article, a revised and annotated version of a plenary lecture given at the North American Conference on British Studies meeting in October 2018, considers the place and significance of aliens in England's history between the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and the arrival of the French and Dutch Protestants from the 1540s onward. It draws extensively on a new database of immigrants to England between 1330 and 1550, which itself relies principally on the remarkable records generated by a tax on aliens resident in England, collected at various points between 1440 and 1487. Aliens emerge as a significant element in English society-sometimes chastised, sometimes subject to violence and other abuse, but also recognized clearly for their contribution to the economy. If immigrants were sometimes seen as a potentially disruptive presence, they were also understood to be a natural and permanent part of the social order.
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 Palgrave Pivot provides the first ever comprehensive consideration of the part played by women in the workings and business of the English Parliament in the later Middle Ages and considers the positions of women of varying rank, from queens to peasants, vis-à-vis this male institution.
Between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth century, England and France were repeatedly at war. Little attention has been given to the status of those from France who emigrated to England over this period. The development of a distinction between the 'alien in amity' and the 'alien in enmity' suggests that these people may have been particularly vulnerable to official and unofficial hostility. Yet, while we know that the French were the single largest element in the immigrant population, there is next to no evidence that they were subject to particular discrimination. This study offers several explanations for this apparent conundrum. The position arose partly because significant numbers of French immigrants were low-status agricultural workers whose presence fulfilled a labour need and whose presence was uncontentious. The main reason for the apparently relaxed attitude of the English state to the immigrant French, however, was a legacy of empire. Because a significant part of the French immigrant population came from lands that were, or had been, part of the Plantagenet dominions in France (especially Normandy and Gascony), and because the English crown continued to assert a right to the throne of France, officialdom tended to treat all French incomers as actually or potentially in amity. As a consequence, immigration from France continued in significant numbers: The article includes detailed analysis of the two occasions on which something approaching a census of French immigrants is possible, in the alien subsidy of 1440 and the mass denization of the early 1540s.
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.
