Friendly Foreigners: International Warfare, Resident Aliens and the Early History of Denization in England, c.1250-c.1400

B Lambert,W M Ormrod

doi:10.1093/ehr/ceu344

Abstract

The search for the origins of the process of denization in England has traditionally focused on the needs of merchants and the context of international trade, and no credible explanation has been given for why denization emerged as a recognisable Chancery form in the 1380s and 1390s. A new consideration of wartime treatment of aliens demonstrates the slow emergence, between c.1250 and c.1400, of an official policy towards lay foreigners that sought to minimise the disruptions arising in moments of national emergency and to accord rights of denizen equivalence to foreigners whose presence was profitable to the realm. In certain exceptional conditions during the 1270s and 1340s, alien residents with good connections at court could secure more developed statements of their rights as denizens. However, it was a series of events set off by the announcement of an intention to expel all French residents in 1377–78 that generated letters of protection containing specific reference to a change of allegiance, and thus established the principle that the recipient should renounce his former commitment and became a subject of the English Crown. Applied to other nationalities and outside the immediate context of war, these developments would give rise to the form known as letters of denization during the decades that followed.

Highlights

At the end of the fourteenth century the English Chancery developed a new form of royal grant, letters patent of denization, which bestowed on the recipients certain characteristic rights and responsibilities
The most recent study, by Keechang Kim, traces the emergence during the 1380s and 1390s of the specific forms used in letters of denization, and assumes that these were the consequence of the increasing influence of Roman law upon English Chancery
Campaign by ordering another of its periodic censuses of alien clergy holding benefices in the realm.[85] A number of foreign monks resident in the alien priories certainly withdrew from England in the winter of 1377–8, either voluntarily or under duress.[86] Detailed records of the confiscations of property from these and other persons leaving the realm have not survived, though a commission to receive goods and chattels taken at Dover and Calais by Sir Thomas Percy and others suggests that the proceeds of the expulsion might have been put towards the special war chest being administered by the London merchant John Philpot.[87] The absence of any further detailed information is, telling

Summary

Introduction

John Thoresby, the keeper of the privy seal from 1344 to 1347 and chancellor from 1349 to 1356, was the first notary public known to have operated in the English royal secretariat; under his influence, the English royal writing offices experimented in the middle of the fourteenth century with a number of diplomatic forms that had direct parallels in the well-established notarial practices of the French royal Chancery.[69] Did the le Monniers, with their links to the city of Amiens and awareness of the rights that domiciled aliens could enjoy in France, apply to the English Crown with the conscious intention of being accorded the special privileges allowed in their native land under lettres du bourgeois du roi?

Results

Conclusion