Foreigner

Unlike today, when the word ‘foreigner’ refers primarily to the status of an individual who originated outside of the country they reside in, its early modern usage embraced three groups. The first group, similar to today's ‘foreigner’, were outsiders, people entering England from abroad. The first usage cited by the Oxford English Dictionary from the early fifteenth century distinguishes a person as not being from the country they were resident in, ‘foreyners, nought of his propre peple’. ¹ However, in this usage ‘alien’ or ‘stranger’ was generally preferred. The second group can be defined as spiritual foreigners, people who through their faith were perceived to be biblically alienated from God and salvation. John Calvin used this often in his works to describe the gap in the relationship between God and the sinner, particularly Catholics: ‘I am here a foriner and stranger, as all my fathers were’. ² Perhaps least expected, the third – and most common – category referred to a domestic migrant, who, having moved from one parish or county to another, was considered a foreigner to the locality in which they settled. This wave of domestic migration in early modern England was the result of rapid population growth and the saturation of the agricultural job market. ³ From parish to parish, county to county, English authorities became increasingly paranoid about the social effects of migration, and attempted to define and regulate those migrants. Those English men and women who migrated within England, leaving their rural homes for emerging towns and cities, were thus perceived to be foreigners by the authorities where they settled, as when local magistrates in Liverpool in 1565 passed an act in which ‘men of Bolton, Blackburne or any other places’ were to be given the status of ‘foreigner’. ⁴