Medieval Migration

Immigration is back in the news in Britain and Ireland. Amidst ferocious political rhetoric about immigrants as a problem, including threats from Reform of large-scale deportations from the United Kingdom, polls show that people today overstate the level of immigration and misunderstand who immigrants are and where they come from. These current narratives also shape our perception of immigration in the past. Frequently, I see individuals online commenting that immigration is a modern issue, that there were no immigrants before the twentieth century, or that there was a past where no-one moved around much. This is completely wrong.

“Tombstone of Regina, 2nd century AD, Arbeia Roman Fort & Museum” by Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 2.0. 

Humans have been on the move to and among these islands for as long as we have records and as far back as we can see in the archaeology. A Roman citizen living near Hadrian’s Wall in the Second Century CE, for example, identified himself as coming from Palmyra in modern-day Syria on his wife, Regina’s, tomb inscription. She was a local from the Catuvellauni tribe of south-eastern England and she died on the border with modern-day Scotland. Unusually, the inscription uses the Palmyrene language as well as Latin. DNA studies show us something about individuals’ backgrounds and allow us to make informed inferences about whole populations. DNA testing of bones from cemeteries has found people born far from Britain and Ireland living in these islands in the prehistoric period. Indeed, there are questions about European migration in the Bronze Age that are being probed by DNA analysis.

Ireland makes a good case study here thanks to its records and archaeology. Viking towns at Dublin and elsewhere along the coast show sustained settlement from Scandinavia in the early medieval period from c. 700 to 1100 CE. The Norman Conquest of Ireland after 1171 brought individuals from across western Europe onto the island. Names such as Walsh (from Wales), Fleming (from Flanders), and Scot or Scott (from Scotland) testify to individuals either being from those places themselves, or taking their surname from ancestors who had come to Ireland in the wake of conquest. Other local place names from England can also be found in the Irish records, such as Robert de Nottingham, who was a citizen of Dublin in 1309. Italian merchants, particularly those associated with the Riccardi of Lucca, traded and settled in Ireland in the thirteenth century.

If you search any of these names in the medieval portal of the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland, you will find many, many examples from the records of the English colonial government based in Dublin. However, that government did not control the entirety of the island. Within the Gaelic world too, individuals moved. For example, the galloglass were hereditary mercenary soldiers from Scotland who served the Irish kings and settled in Ireland from the mid-thirteenth century. The term itself comes from the Irish for “foreign warriors.” But names and descriptions like galloglass don’t tell us about individuals’ experience of migration, and people with occupational surnames like Brewer or Baker could and did move as well. 

Irish gallowglass and kern. Drawing by Albrecht Dürer, 1521. Public Domain.

Helpfully for historians today, medieval government was concerned about foreigners and from the mid fourteenth century attempted to track people born abroad and living in England. That doesn’t mean that immigration was new then, it is just that from that point, immigrants started to be recorded in a more systematic way. Foreign individuals might seek “letters of denization,” which allowed them to have the same privileges as English men and women. Others might ask for “license to remain” in England. Almost certainly incomplete, and motivated by a suspicion of foreigners, these records and later taxation of “foreign aliens,” allow us to think more broadly about who immigrants in later medieval England were.

The England's Immigrants Project turned official documents into a searchable database. This resource lets you discover more about the c. 65,000 individuals who were identified as resident aliens by the English government between 1330 and 1550. Here we can find immigrants living in the towns and cities, as well as the countryside. At that time, about 1%-6% of the population were immigrants, with the higher percentages in towns and cities like London. Men, women and children are all present. They range from elites and merchants through to servants and the poor. Not all of them had their place of origin recorded. Those that did came from across Western Europe and beyond, with four people from Rhodes in the eastern Mediterranean and five from Scandinavia, for example.

Surprisingly, despite Ireland being partially under English control in this period, people born in Ireland could be treated as resident aliens - even if they were from the English community. The England’s Immigrants database has information for 2,000 or so individuals who were identified as Irish. The government was interested in people moving to England from Ireland because the English colony there was under threat in the second half of the fourteenth century. Gaelic Irish kings were expanding their territories and raiding into English-controlled areas. From the 1390s onwards, the government issued proclamations saying that no-one should leave Ireland without license. We start to see fines paid, often by clergy, for being “outside the land of Ireland contrary to the ordinances.” Others received licenses to be absent from Ireland for good reasons. In addition to the stick of fines and bans, there were also carrots to try to increase the English presence in Ireland. Land-grants, such as this one of a town in Co. Waterford to Katherine de Desmond in 1403-4, expected that in return for land, the new owner would find people willing to move there and rebuild. Whether Katherine found such individuals in Ireland or elsewhere is unknown.

Those who did leave Ireland to settle in England might have to pay extra taxes in the fifteenth century, when a new additional tax on resident aliens, the alien subsidy, was levied. Among those paying this tax in 1440 was John Asche and his wife Elena, both identified as from Ireland and then living in Leicestershire. Also named in this tax return from Leicestershire were individuals from what is today the Netherlands, France, Scotland and Belgium as well as many more from Ireland. Sometimes additional details reveal what might have brought someone to England like the Irish woman, Christina Ragge, who was identified as a servant. Michael Frenchman had an English wife, and so may not have been liable to pay the tax.

I’ve focused here on one small area of a much larger and more complex set of stories about how people moved and settled in the medieval period. I haven’t discussed how individuals experienced migration, or the ways in which they might experience discrimination. However, just by looking at Ireland, both those moving there in the wake of invasions, whether Viking or Norman, and those who ended up moving to England in the later Middle Ages, gives us a sense that people in the past migrated for a variety of reasons, just as they do today. They might move for education, employment, family reasons or simply to seek a better life. They might stay for a short time, or they might put down roots, marry locally and have children (who would not be classed as aliens because it was their place of birth that mattered to the English law at the time).

Despite the rhetoric of anti-immigration sentiment, both then and now, people migrate. There are not nearly as many immigrants today as people commonly believe, but most of us are descended from someone who was an immigrant at some time. How far back do you have to go to find an ancestor who left home and went somewhere new?

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Elizabeth Biggs is currently a research fellow on the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland project at Trinity College Dublin, which is reconstructing the Public Record Office of Ireland, which burnt down in 1922. For that project she has translated and edited the surviving Latin records of the medieval Irish exchequer, the office responsible for managing the English king’s revenues on the island.  She has also translated and made available online a series of legal agreements between the Gaelic Irish kings and the English government from c. 1370 to 1500. Her current research looks at women’s engagement with royal government across the Plantagenet world and particularly at its contested edges, in Ireland, France, Wales and Scotland. 

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