England’s Immigrants 1330–1550: A New Prosopographical Database

Pre-sixteenth-century England was not unfamiliar with the comings and goings of immigrants, but the period 1330–1550 was not one of particular note for large migratory events. Following the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and before the arrival of the Huguenots from 1550, there were no significant shifts in populations. Yet this period witnessed increasing xenophobia in England’s populace and the government responded to the perceived threat of various migrant groups with a variety of policies. These policies produced some unique records that have allowed the historian to analyze the resident immigrant population of England between 1330 and 1550. Using data from these records, in February 2015 a new online database—www.englandsimmigrants.com—was launched by the University of York that contains 65,000 instances of resident immigrants in England between 1330 and 1550. The project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, relies on a substantial collection of sources held at The National Archives in Kew. It is an extensive prosopographical study of immigrants in Europe which contributes to our knowledge of this particular group of people in England in the later Middle Ages. The database and website, built by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, allow the researcher to explore the extensive data of individual biographies, to create graphics from the data (including maps and graphs), and to download the data for further manipulation. The potential of the database is demonstrated in this paper in a case study of the immigrant population of Berkshire between 1330 and 1550