Tag: YAS Medieval Section

I must confess I had an ulterior motive in inviting our December speaker, Dr Bart Lambert of the University of York, to give a talk about late Medieval migration. Migration has been one of the topics of Manchester Museum’s thematic collecting project for the last 18 months, which culminated for me  in a visit to the Greek island of Lesvos to collect a refugee’s life jacket just over a year ago.  As part of the project I’ve looked at Roman inscriptions from Mancunium or Manchester in the museum collection but the medieval period  posed more of a challenge. Everyone’s familiar with the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans but Dr Lambert’s talk opened up a whole new chapter about the movement of people during the later Middle Ages.

We are certainly no stranger to late Medieval migration in Leeds. One of the city’s prominent  landmarks in City Square opposite the railway station is a statue of the Black Prince created by sculptor Thomas Brock (1847-1922). It was set up thanks to the generosity and civic-mindedness of Colonel Thomas William Harding  who sought a suitably distinguished subject to be the focus of the Italianate piazza he had created. That there was no direct link with the history of city  mattered little and the bronze scroll around the base of the statue reads like a roll-call of the Ladybird book of well-to-do, respectable and famous people during the reign of Edward III: Sir John Chandos, Sir Walter Nanny, William of Wykeham, John Wycliff, Chaucer, Froissart, van Arteveldt and du Guesclin. Not to mention bronze panels depicting the battles of Crecy and Sluys and a plaque honouring the Black Prince himself, ‘Edward, Prince of Wales, surnamed the Black Prince. The Hero of Crecy and Poitiers. The Flower of England’s chivalry…’

Of these, van Arteveldt is credited with encouraging Edward III to bring Flemish weavers and dyers to England, which Colonel Harding may have believed helped to lay the foundations of the West Yorkshire textile industry. As our speaker explained it is more likely that van Arteveldt was finding a home overseas where political exiles from Flanders wouldn’t pose a threat.

If civic statuary inspired by Victorian medievalism is a rather dubious source of information about late Medieval migration, Dr Lambert presented data of far more reliable kind: the records of the country’s alien population that were created for taxation purposes during the reign of Henry VI in order to help fund the war in France. The tax operated between 1440 and 1447. Juries were appointed in each community to identify who was an alien. Returns from the alien subsidy  highlights the presence of French people, many of whom must have been refugees fleeing parts of France which had been occupied by the English but were being recaptured by the French monarchy. There were also   labourers and servants from the Low Countries who realised that they could earn more money on the other side of the Channel. Similarly, there were Scottish People on the borders and Irish people in the West Country who at that time would have been classified as aliens because they came from a different kingdom of the British Isles.

If any of this echoes recent events  you might not be surprised to learn that the immigrants brought with them new skills in making fine and fancy goods including clothing, footwear and jewellery that native crafts people found difficult to compete with. This caused tensions that resulted in appalling acts of violence against the newcomers,  and even threats to mutilate immigrant workers so that they could not compete with English (in practice London) crafts people.

The tax came to an end in 1487 because it had ceased to gather significant sums of money. Bart suggested that by this time people on local juries had formed relationships with the immigrants and had less reason to report them to the authorities for taxation. So what begins as a rather unpleasant story about penalising vulnerable people in medieval society develops into something more heartening, a story of solidarity not marginalisation of the other.

Someone once said there’s nothing new  under the sun except perhaps the cigarette. In this lecture the echoes of Brexit were all too loud. Many thanks to Bart for making us think as much about the present as about the past.