A Laboratory of Immigration: Elizabethan Norwich

This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Lucy Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Alabama. You can follow Lucy on X/Twitter @drlucykaufman.

Lucy Kaufman

Thomas Kendall was despondent. “I am richer in years and in diseases than in any other riches,” he wrote to Thomas Windebank in 1574, in a thinly-veiled plea for patronage and employment. “I have in boarding and teaching gentlemen’s children and others been mine own decay, and now at midsummer I give it all over…I remain yet in the house of one John Paston whom I think you know, but no longer than midsummer next. I paid my rent truly for the year £5, but what moved him to warn me out, I know not. Our City is sore peopled with strangers but we almost know not where to place us.”[1]

It was a last-minute scribble at the bottom of the letter: strategic, a little self-pitying, and tinged with a nativist anxiety that sounds not terribly dissimilar to that you hear in political debates today. But it also reflected a particular view of a new reality: the soaring number of immigrants from the Low Countries—known as ‘Strangers’—in Norwich in the 1560s and 70s. In 1565, the city welcomed in 300 immigrants. By 1571, there were over 4,000 such immigrants in Norwich, men, women, and over 1600 children.[2] To put this in perspective, in 1565, Strangers accounted for no more than one percent of the population of Norwich, England’s second-largest city, next only to London in both size and wealth. Less than a decade later, one in three inhabitants was an immigrant.

They were driven to England by religious war. After the violent wave of Calvinist iconoclasm known as the Beeldenstorm destroyed images in the Low Countries, Spain set up a tribunal to prosecute heresy—one that would see nearly 10,000 put on trial. In response, Protestants began to flee from the Low Countries; some historians estimate more than 60,000 emigrating between 1567 and 1568 alone. Many of those, particularly from the areas of Zeeland and Flanders, followed the old woolen trade routes to England.[3] There, they settled in London, Canterbury, Sandwich, Colchester—and in Norwich.

My work on this is part of a project I’m just beginning, examining what I think is the first wave of what we, in modern words, might call ideological immigration into England. It was a movement sparked by geopolitical conflicts that sprung from the fractures of the Reformation, where populations were being imprisoned, attacked, and executed for their religious beliefs. What resulted in England, however, was something far different than expectations: new experiments in managing populations, new definitions of belonging, new capacities of state power.

Commonplace Legal Knowledge in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century England

This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law’ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Laura Flannigan is a Junior Research Fellow at St John’s College, Oxford University. She works on litigation, society, and politics in late medieval and early modern England. You can follow her on Twitter/X at @LFlannigan17.

Laura Flannigan

Historians often take for granted that the high usage of England’s early modern law courts denotes a widespread ‘law-mindedness’ in that period. Certainly by c.1600 English society was litigious on a scale unprecedented at the time and unrivalled since. But litigating was a complex business. It required an ample personal archive of evidence on which to base a case, and the know-how to appeal to the appropriate court with the correct documentation at the right time. Where few today would automatically know how to go about commencing a lawsuit, our pre-modern forebears were more likely to be legally literate. What did they know about law and its procedures in the midst of the early modern ‘legal revolution’, and how did they know it?

I’ve recently spent time tracing the circulation of legal knowledge through one type of source material: manuscript ‘commonplace’ books. By this I mean not the systematised collections of reading notes curated by learned gentlemen or the alphabetically ordered definitions accumulated by law students, both following humanist traditions of commonplacing. Rather, my focus has been the scrappier, personal notebooks of estate administrators, rural gentry, and urban merchants. These contain everything from astrological diagrams, popular literature, and religious treatises to more personal financial reckonings, instructions for hawking and hunting, medical remedies, and household recipes. At the time of writing this piece I’ve studied twenty such books from the period c.1400 to c.1600, originating from all corners of England – from Hampshire to Northumberland, Norfolk to Somerset.[1]

Their contents validate Christopher Brooks’s sentiment that law ‘provided one of the principal discourses through which early-modern English people conceptualised the world in which they lived’.[2] Several of these manuscripts include among their lists of aphorisms certain pithy observations on judicial processes, like ‘better is a friend in court than a penny in the purse’. Four notebooks from the early sixteenth century contain the same doggerel verse providing advice for those ‘who so will be wise in purchasing’ lands: recommending that they check the ‘seller be of age’ and ‘make thy charter of warrantise to thyn heires & assigneys’. Elsewhere in their notebooks these compilers – themselves often landowners and administrators – copied their own deeds and wrote memoranda about their own lawsuits. Legal information was as useful to have to hand as the financial accounts and domestic recipes recorded on other pages of the same books.

Truth and Trust: Remembering Perjury in the Early Modern Community

This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Zoë Jackson (Twitter: @ZoeMJackson1, Bluesky: @zoejackson.bsky.social) is a PhD student at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, researching the relationship between memory and perjury in later seventeenth-century England.

Zoë Jackson

From personal experience ‘perjury’ (intentionally lying under oath in a legal setting) is not a widely understood term amongst most people today. Whenever I explain my research, I usually have to define what perjury is (and sometimes must clarify that I’m not specifically concerned with other, similar sounding terms – ‘purgatory’, anyone?) Calling someone a ‘perjurer’ today would probably get you, at most, a quizzical look.

But in early modern England, as Mary Basnett was made fully aware, calling someone a ‘perjurer’ was grounds for a defamation suit. In November 1673, the Consistory Court of Chester ordered Mary Basnett to perform penance in the parish church of Frodsham, by reciting before the congregation the following words: ‘Whereas I Mary Basnett have wronged Alice Gee in rashly saying, If shee hath taken such an oath shee is forsworne, I am heartily sorry for the same, for I know no such crime of her, and I desyre her to forgive mee’. In the court case that preceded this judgment, multiple witnesses testified to hearing Mary Basnett accusing Alice Gee of taking a false oath in a previous trial.[1]

The courtroom of the Chester Consistory Court is one of few surviving courtrooms of its kind. Photo taken by author.

Legal disputes like this one between Mary Basnett and Alice Gee are of interest to me for what they reveal about local understandings of perjury (as opposed to the formal definitions you find in legal treatises and dictionaries). Perjury was a crime in early modern England, but it was also a sin, breaching both the Third Commandment (against taking God’s name in vain) and the Ninth Commandment (against bearing false witness). In church court defamation cases, witnesses described whether or not accusations of perjury were made, and what damage this did to the alleged perjurer’s reputation. As historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis and others have established, although these records do not represent the direct words of the people, they can still be useful in illuminating contemporary attitudes and practices, such as in this case around the functioning of community.

The People and the Law: an Online Symposium

Mark Hailwood

England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a remarkably – and increasingly – litigious society. Whether through a growing drive to prosecute crimes and enforce laws, or a greater willingness to take neighbours to court, early modern men and women across the social scale routinely found themselves in the legal arena as plaintiffs, defendants, and witnesses. This level of popular engagement with the law was arguably at a higher point in the years between 1560 and 1640 than at any other time in English history.  

This is great news for historians of this period, and especially for the practitioners of ‘history from below’; whilst the common people, who were likely to be illiterate, leave us few written sources penned by their own hands, their actions – and sometimes their attitudes – did leave an imprint in the legal sources recorded and retained by the many courts of early modern England. Since the 1970s, then – when social history began to take off in UK university History Departments – researchers have often turned to court records in their attempts to uncover the history of early modern non-elite actors.

William Cecil presides over the Court of Wards, c.1560-1590

The first wave of work on legal sources often focused, quite understandably, on what these records could tell us about patterns of crime and criminality, not infrequently using a quantitative approach to make sense of the changing nature of court business. From the 1990s, under the influence of the ‘cultural turn’, the emphasis shifted from counting crimes to offering close qualitative readings of legal sources, especially the detailed statements – or depositions – given by those called before the courts, for what they could reveal about the gender dynamics, or social conflicts, at the heart of certain types of case. More recent work has often adopted an ‘incidentalist’ approach, using these depositions to examine everyday activities that were mentioned in passing, rather than being the subject of a case, thereby reconstructing patterns of work and sociability, or the experiences of particular groups in this society, such as female servants.

The Rabble that Can Write: Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550-1700

Mark Hailwood

I have often said that writing a blog post can be a good way to disseminate research findings or ideas that you don’t think would sustain a whole article. But sometimes a blog post can act as a seed that slowly germinates into something more substantial, and before you know it you realise that most of your articles started out as blog posts. At which point it feels like the right thing to do is to complete the cycle and blog about those articles, as some kind of superstitious homage – an offering of thanks – to the blog format, in the hope it will provide again.

So, this August saw the publication of my article on ‘Rethinking Literacy in Rural England, 1550-1700’ (open access!) which was the product of several years of musing on a post I wrote on this blog some nine years ago: ‘The Rabble that Cannot Read? Ordinary People’s Literacy in Seventeenth-Century England’. In that post, I wondered whether historians of the early modern period were missing a trick when using people’s signatures to ascertain their literacy skills, with a full signature taken as evidence of full literacy, and anything else – termed a ‘mark’ – as an indicator of illiteracy. It seemed to me that there was a lot of variety in the way people signed off on various legal documents – from full signatures to initials, images of tools, crosses, circles, and a whole host of other squiggles and shapes – that might in themselves reflect hierarchies of reading and writing skills.

Well, since then I have encountered a lot of signed documents as part of my research on the Women’s Work in Rural England project, so I duly collected as many examples of marks and signatures as I could, and in my recent article I subjected them to more sustained analysis. I don’t want to go into too much detail about the findings – I want you to read the article! – but the headline is that I think we can usefully sort sign offs into the following categories:

• Signatures
• Double Initials
• Single Initials
• Icons
• Circles
• Crosses
• Multi-stroke marks
• Single-stroke marks
• Indistinct scrawls

Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s ‘Black Lives in the English Archives’: A Bibliography

Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell

Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives was situated within the longstanding and growing fields of early modern Black British History and Premodern Critical Race Studies (PCRS). To conclude our series, we provide a non-definitive bibliography of some key texts for readers interested in pursuing these subjects further.

• Catch up with all the posts in the Black Lives in the English Archives series.
• Download the bibliography (word doc).

Adi, Hakim (ed.). Black British History: New Perspectives. London: Zed Books, 2019.

Adi, Hakim. African and Caribbean People in Britain: A History. London: Penguin, 2022.

Akhimie, Patricia. Shakespeare and the Cultivation of Difference London and New York: Routledge, 2018.

Amussen, Susan Dwyer. Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Remembering Imtiaz Habib: Creating an “Affective Community.”

This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Jyotsna G. Singh

Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

Special thanks to Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell for generating “the multi-event symposium, bringing together scholars working at the forefront of early modern Black history and premodern race studies” to discuss the vital importance and continuing legacy of Imitiaz Habib’s path-breaking text. These non-competitive and generative scholarly conversations of the symposium (blogs) will, I hope, serve as a model for future exchanges committed to activism and social change.

Personal Reminiscences

Imtiaz Habib and I were regular SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) friends for many years, from the late 1990s onwards, till his untimely death in 2018. At every meeting we caught up with long chats, which in his native Bengali, one would call Adda – a popular term for “hangout,” or extended conversations among small groups, often verging into cerebral arguments, yet also producing a unique conviviality. We would often discuss the history of the Sub-continent, from the colonial period through the violent partitions and their lingering effects. Imtiaz’s memories stretched a generation before mine and he vividly recalled the birth of Bangladesh in violence, the assassination of Sheikh Mujib-Ur-Rehman and continuing national divisions. Thinking of him today, in that Adda modality, I imagine his happy bemusement and slight disbelief at the belated attention his book is currently receiving. He would be vigorously engaging with each blog post in the Symposium in his honor, approving, challenging, or even interrogating the different perspectives. We would all be enriched by his brilliance and critical rigor, but above all, by his intellectual generosity.

‘To Be Seen or Not To Be Seen? That is the Question’: An Account of Academia’s Engagement with the Black, Female Presence in Early Modern England.

This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Rebecca Adusei

Rebecca Adusei is a PhD student at King’s College, London. Her project locates and analyses depictions and characterisations of Sub-Saharan Africans in Early Modern literature and drama. Trained in Literary Studies, Rebecca’s research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Drawing together Literary Studies and History, she looks at Black individuals in the early modern archives and scrutinises their characterisations in literature. Rebecca runs a book blog on Instagram where she sometimes discusses the Early Modern period. She has previously conducted tours for KCL’s Visible Skin Project. She has spoken at the London Shakespeare Centre and the Shakespeare’s Globe’s Home and Early Modernity Conference. In 2021/2022, she was awarded the SRS Scholars of Colour Bursary for her work in Early Modern Studies.

Studying the Black Presence in early modern texts and contextually has been the bedrock of my research for the last six years. It all started in a Shakespeare lecture back when I was an undergraduate student. We were studying Titus Andronicus and discussing the character, Aaron. I came to the lecture bristling with ideas. I was especially taken with the language that was used in the tragedy. I found the epithet ‘Moor’ quite interesting; it struck me that Aaron’s race became an intrinsic part of his characterisation and how others in the text sought to weaponize his race and demonize him for it. An example of this is when Marcus dubs him a ‘black ill-favoured fly’.[1] Whilst I did not have the vocabulary to eloquently articulate my ideas, I was aware what these examples were evidence of: anti-Black racism. However, whilst we discussed Aaron in the lecture and the subsequent seminar, I was shocked that no one picked up on these ideas, that led me to question whether I was wrong in my examinations. This all changed in 2018 when I read Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible.  

Reading Habib’s work made me feel vindicated and valid. In the opening sections of Black Lives Habib writes that ‘scholars have been unable to regard historical blacks in the reigns of Elizabeth and her immediate successors as anything more than stray figures in an “anecdotal” landscape, too accidental and solitary to be even a historical statistic.’[2] I was one of these scholars. The lack of critical engagement and discussion of the Black Presence contextually in early modern England and in early modern texts in my undergraduate class made me second guess my own beliefs. It made me question what I saw right in front of my eyes: blatant examples of anti-Black racism. However, reading Black Lives gave me the vocabulary, strength and confidence I so desperately needed to pursue this important work. Countering the long established idea in early modern discourse that there were no Black people in early modern England, Habib also shows that ‘[…] obscure, truncated and largely inaccessible documentary records, which are only now becoming fully available, paint a very different picture about the size, continuity and historical seriousness of the black presence in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, well before English black populations become known through the transatlantic slave trade.’[3]

Habib and the London Parish Register

This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Jamie Gemmell

Jamie Gemmell is a historian of race and power in the early modern Anglo-Atlantic World. He is an AHRC-funded History PhD student at King’s College, London. His project traces how London life changed in the wake of Atlantic slavery in the late seventeenth century. His project is titled “Reckoning with Race in Early Modern London, 1655-1712”. Jamie is Assistant Editor at the University of Maryland’s Slavery, Law, and Power Project and Project Director of jamesknightjamaica.com. He is former Editor-in-Chief of Retrospect Journal, where he co-edited “Race in Retrospective” with RACE.ED.

For Imtiaz Habib, the parish register “is the predominant source for [black] records” and “the most inclusive.” While these lists of baptisms, marriages, and burials were the result of Tudor dictate, “such dictates specified only purpose, not format”. As a result, the register’s format reflects “the non-standard orthography and improvisational documentary habits of the local clerical record keeper”.[1] In their randomness, they offer proximity to everyday social relations.[2] As argued by David Postles and Alexandra Shepard, the very ubiquity of these kinds of record permit an understanding of the early modern English structure that begins with social relations.[3] Habib skilfully uses the records to connect the growing numbers of encumbered Black lives, and their geographies, in the later seventeenth-century London registers to the emergence of empire and racial slavery.  Specifically, the registers add further context to the 1677 Butts v. Penny decision, a King’s Bench precedent that legalised racial slavery across England and its emerging empire, by revealing how social practices preceded, and necessitated, legal clarity from above.[4]

Here, I wish to build on Habib’s use of the London parish registers and present them as sites of contestation.[5] Since the publication of Habib’s Black Lives it has become easier to access these records via the London Metropolitan Archives’ “Switching the Lens” (StL) project. The project has databased and digitised the London Anglican parish registers that list people of African, Caribbean, Asian, and Indigenous American heritage between 1561 and 1840. While some work has been done on the individual lives revealed by StL, the dataset remains underused.[6] Between 1660 and 1730, the period of my research, there are 563 “black citations” within the StL dataset. Most of them are, relatively, standard. They note the date of the event (baptism, marriage, or burial), the individual’s name, and, in the cases examined here, include some kind of racial signifier.

Possibilities and Provocations: Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677

This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Montaz Marché

Montaz Marché is a writer, historian, presenter, and PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on early modern Black British history. Recently, her research has explored eighteenth-century gender, racial politics, and experiences of Black women in London. Her PhD thesis is titled ‘Mapping the Dark and Feminine: A Population of Black Women in Eighteenth-Century London’. She sits on the History Matters Online Journal editorial board and is the Artistic Director of the Ruckus Theatre Company, alongside regular work in historical public engagement and the media and television industry. 

Habib’s sentiment that this research into collecting Black lives is “a daunting task” was unsurprisingly accurate. But Habib exposed what is possible regarding the archives’ statistical and qualitative analysis of the Black population. His work made an essential intervention in British early modern historiography. He set a solid foundation of archival evidence of Black people in English archives and proved what details and cultural contexts could be revealed in these references, despite their brevity. Some examples include Black people’s religious practices, social interactions, and roles in English society. He aligns the Black lives he found in the archives to early modern global trends, such as the development of racial ideologies and chattel slavery, contextualising Black experiences and countering the narratives that Black people were “passive” in early modern England. What sets Habib apart is his emphasis on the research process alongside evidence and conclusions. This level of articulated nuance, investigation, and contextualisation about Black lives in Britain, rationalised with a detailed methodology, an understanding of the archive’s biases and its influence on our historical consciousness, was, in 2008, new and, as we would discover, long overdue to the field. As a historian focusing mostly on the eighteenth century, Habib’s research was a learning curve but also challenged me to take ideas of Black thought and agency one step further than his research. I reflect here on how Habib’s work helped me think about gender and race in the early modern period and how far the field has come.