London: The Biography

There were, however, occasions of criticism. “I do not at all like that city,” Richard of Devizes complained in 1185. “All sorts of men crowd there from every country under the heavens. Each brings its own vices and its own customs to the city.” In 1255 the monkish chronicler Matthew Paris was bemoaning the fact that London was “overflowing” with “Poitevins, Provençals, Italians and Spaniards.” It is an anticipation of late twentieth-century complaints that London was being “swamped” by people from Africa, the Caribbean, or Asia. In the case of the thirteenth-century chronicler there is an atavistic and incorrect notion of some original native race which is being displaced by others. Yet other forces are at work in his attack upon the foreigners; he was not wholly sympathetic to the commercial instincts of the capital, and felt himself alienated or removed from its heterogeneous life. Thus to single out foreign merchants was a way of neutralising or challenging the city’s commercial nature. Those who attacked immigrants were in effect attacking the business ethic which required the constant influx of new trade and new labour. The attack did not succeed; it never has succeeded.

The immigrant rolls of 1440-1 provide an absorbing study in ethnicity and cultural contrast. An essay by Sylvia L. Thrupp in Studies in London History, “Aliens in and around London in the Fifteenth Century,” offers interesting parallels with other periods. Some 90 per cent were classified as Doche; this was a generic term including Flemish, Dane and German, but more than half in fact came from Holland. The evidence of their wills suggests that their common characteristics were “a striving towards piety and economic advancement through honest work and mutual help within the group,” an observation which could equally be applied to more recent immigrants from, for example, South Asia. These fifteenth-century immigrants tended to settle into defined trades such as goldsmithery, tailory, haberdashery, clock-making and brewing. They were also celebrated as printers. Others mingled within the broader urban community as beer-sellers, basket-makers, joiners, caterers and servants within London households or at London inns. Evidence from the guilds and from extant wills also “indicates that English became the means of communication within this group,” again a characteristic and often instinctive response of any immigrant community. In the city wards the Italians comprised “a commercial and financial aristocracy,” although there were differences within the group. There were Frenchmen, and a number of Jews; and “Greek, Italian, and Spanish physicians,” but the underclass of that period seems to have been Icelanders who were commonly employed as servants.

There was a period of sustained suspicion in the 1450s, when Italian merchants and bankers were condemned for usury. But the imbroglio passed, leaving only its rumours as confirmation of the fact that Londoners were particularly sensitive to commercial double-dealing. The “Evil May Day” riots of 1517, when the shops and houses of foreigners were attacked by a mob of apprentices, were dispelled with equal speed and without any permanent effect upon the alien population. This has been the custom of the city over many centuries; despite violent acts inspired by demagoguery and financial panic, the immigrant communities of the city have generally been permitted to settle down, engage with their neighbours in trade and parish work, adopt English as their native language, intermarry and bring up their children as Londoners.

A wave of immigration in the mid-1560s, however, when the Huguenots sought refuge from Catholic persecution, provoked a general alarm. On 17 February 1567, there was “a great watch in the City of London … for fear of an insurrection against the strangers which were in great number in and about the city.” The Huguenots were accused of trading secretly among themselves and of engaging in illicit commercial practices such as hoarding. They “take up the fairest houses in the city, divide and fit them for their several uses [and] take into them several lodgers and dwellers”; thus they were held directly responsible for London’s overcrowding. Even if the children of these immigrants “born within this realm are by law accounted English,” they remained foreigners by “inclination and kind affection.” Once more it is a familiar language, adopted by those who were uneasy at the presence of “aliens” in their midst. There were also charges that they pushed up the prices of London properties.