ABSTRACT
In 1771, the English jurist and Tory politician William Blackstone concluded that the people of England could be split into two distinct legal groups: ‘Aliens, that is, born out of the Dominions, or Allegiance of the crown of Great Britain; or Natives, that is, born within it’. 1 Blackstone's mid-eighteenth-century binary division of natives and foreign-born aliens, also known as ‘strangers’, had a long tradition dating back to the fourteenth century. This division was based on the difference between a native-born ‘natural and perpetual’ allegiance to the monarch, and an alien's ‘local and temporal’ rights and allegiance. 2 In early modern England, aliens and strangers were defined by their status as foreign-born national residents. Unless endenizened or naturalised, they owed their allegiance to someone other than the English monarch. However, this distinction became increasingly troubled over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the number of migrants into England increased as English commerce grew and religious groups fled persecution and conflict in France, Germany, and the Low Countries.
