Repository logo
 

Immigration and the Common Profit: Native Cloth Workers, Flemish Exiles, and Royal Policy in Fourteenth-Century London

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Lambert, B 
Pajic, M 

Abstract

Copyright © 2016 The North American Conference on British Studies. This article reconstructs a crucial episode in the relationship between the English crown, its subjects and the kingdom's immigrant population. It links the murder of about forty Flemings in London during the Peasants' Revolt in June 1381 to the capital's native cloth workers' dissatisfaction with the government's economic immigration policy. We argue that, in the course of the fourteenth century, the crown developed a new policy aimed at attracting skilled workers from abroad. Convinced that their activities benefited the common profit of the realm, the crown remained deaf to the concerns of London's native weavers, who claimed that the work of exiled Flemish cloth workers in the city encroached on their privileges. Confronted for more than twenty-five years with political obstruction, the native weavers increasingly resorted to physical aggression against their Flemish counterparts, which came to a dramatic conclusion in 1381. The dissatisfaction of London's cloth workers and the massacre of the Flemings thus had much in common with the frustrations over the royal government's policy that had been fermenting for decades among many other groups in society: all came to the surface during the Peasants' Revolt.

Description

Keywords

Immigration, common profit, England, Flanders, London, fourteenth century, cloth industry, Crown, exile, revolt, ethnic violence, guilds

Journal Title

Journal of British Studies

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0021-9371
1545-6986

Volume Title

55

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP)