ABSTRACT
In contrast to the more recent experience of overseas immigration in many English provincial towns, London, as the capital city and a trading centre located within the European circuits of commerce, was a highly cosmopolitan city with a deep-seated tradition of immigration, stretching as far back as the eighth century, with merchants regularly flocking to the City to conduct business. Particularly prominent among the foreign traders were the German merchants who had, by the 1170s, established a permanent base in Dowgate Ward in the capital. Popularly known to contemporaries as the ‘merchants of the Steelyard’, named after the building they occupied, these men included those from Hamburg, Lübeck, Cologne and its hinterland, and were members of the Hanseatic League, a loose confederation of German cities formed to promote trade by setting up a series of bases at strategic sites for their operation. By the mid-thirteenth century, merchants from France, Spain, Portugal and northern Italy had also established themselves in London.1 As a result of their prominence, distinctive organization and the greater availability of evidence, the Hansards and the Italians, in particular, have attracted much historical interest. Recent studies, especially by Keene on the Hansards and Bratchel on the Italians, have thrown fascinating light upon the internal organization of the communities, their activities and relations with the host society. While drawing attention to the contrasting organizational structures of the Hansards and Italians, these studies also emphasize their strong collective identity and rotating migration, with young and unmarried men at the beginning of their careers being sent from the headquarters to spend a few years at each of the various European bases to gain professional training, before returning to the home city at a later stage in their lives. Residence in London thus formed a temporary, if not a necessary, phase in their professional career. In the early sixteenth century, the Italian and Hanseatic mercantile communities in London declined in significance, as trade could now be conducted at a more convenient location at Antwerp. There were probably only seventy Italian and eighty Hanse merchants resident in London at this date.2 Although still a force to be reckoned with, the power of the Hanse and Italians may have waned by 1547.3
The foreign merchants were the most prominent and influential, but were
greatly outnumbered by the humbler and poorer craftsmen who became more numerically significant from the fifteenth century. Pettegree has estimated that merchants and brokers perhaps formed only 10 per cent of some two thousand aliens in the capital in 1440.4 Driven by the search for work and better economic opportunities, many moved in chain migration with their wives and children, and therefore found it easy to put down permanent roots in the new society. But like any other immigrant groups, their social behaviour also exhibited ‘clannishness’, preferring to marry women and employ servants from their own cultural backgrounds.5
