ABSTRACT
Leiden’s attraction for English students partly resulted from the solid Anglo-Dutch relations – England and the United Provinces, already geographically close, were also firmly linked through political, religious, economic, and cultural ties, the Netherlands being so ‘near our own country, as to be known to most persons, either by sight or relation’.1 Several thousand Dutch and Walloon refugees – rich merchants as well as artisans of moderate means – lived in England, and Englishmen in the United Provinces were even more numerous, making the Dutch Republic the continental country the English knew best.
