Immigration and the Common Profit: Native Cloth Workers, Flemish Exiles, and Royal Policy in Fourteenth-Century London
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- ISIDORE Id: 10670/1.9a8bba...
- hal: hal-04859367
- doi: 10.1017/jbr.2016.75
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London Weavers' Company Flemish immigrantsCiter ce document
Bart Lambert et al., « Immigration and the Common Profit: Native Cloth Workers, Flemish Exiles, and Royal Policy in Fourteenth-Century London », HAL SHS (Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société), ID : 10.1017/jbr.2016.75
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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.A t the end of May 1381, disagreements about the payment of the royal poll tax in the English county of Essex sparked off a violent uprising that would soon spread across other parts of the country and would become known as the Peasants' Revolt. 1 On 13 June, the rebels, including both townsmen and people from rural communities, entered the city of London and attacked symbols of royal authority. The next day, the Flemish community living in the capital was massacred. The bloodshed was recorded both by chroniclers and in administrative sources such as the letter books of the city of London. 2 These accounts
