Historians are now more aware of England's immigrant past, of the degree to which immigration accompanied the development of empire, rather than just its end.Footnote 1 And while the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw both the literary creation of Englishness and the beginnings of imperialism, they also witnessed settlement from abroad.Footnote 2 The early modern period was not just a time in which English people went “out there,” into the wider non-European world, forging an empire that became a defining factor of nationhood. Immigration from beyond the British Isles, not just incipient empire, shaped national identity. Early modern multiculturalism played a crucial role in the development of Englishness.
In July 1621, a group of cloth workers and merchants, the English-born sons of strangers, petitioned the king, complaining of taxation at the higher rate to which aliens were liable.Footnote 3 Arguing that they “do truly strive for the good of the country,” the petitioners stated that their “trade being dead and our gains so small … we would be glad to get but the one half of those rates which are demanded of us to maintain ourselves, our wives and families, and to save ourselves at the year's end.”Footnote 4 We do not know whether the crown subsequently eased the rate of taxation. However, it is clear that the authors of the petition had cause for complaint, not least because the Company of Dyers, by demanding payment of “a double tax” from the petitioners, sought “to suppress … men of their trade and living to their utter overthrow and undoing for ever.”Footnote 5 The higher taxation of which the petitioners complained was due to the fact that their “fathers were born out of England.” The progeny of immigrants sought redress for discrimination. Although “English born” and hence subjects of the king (with all the rights, privileges, and obligations that such birth entailed), the petitioners were also “denizens who are reputed strangers” by London guild and civic officials and were consequently accorded a second-class status.Footnote 6 By the first decades of the seventeenth century in London's merchant circles, it was no longer clear who was English.
The children of aliens, I will argue, were caught between two competing notions of difference, one defined by birth and the other by descent. According to the 1608 court ruling known as Calvin's Case, birth under the sovereignty of the king of England made one a subject, indeed to all intents and purposes English.Footnote 7 Yet to the guild of their own trade these same men were foreigners by virtue of descent.Footnote 8 These two forms of difference denote divergence not just between Londoners of English birth but between the City of London and the central government. For the guild and civic authorities, Londoners of foreign descent were almost always defined as strangers or aliens in conflicts over taxation, customs, and civic citizenship. Although sometimes in agreement with the city, the institutions of central government—whether crown, Privy Council, or the interregnum Council of State—largely sided with immigrants and their offspring in rejecting such characterizations. Such a pattern is in evidence throughout the seventeenth century, even under the Commonwealth, when the issue of allegiance to the monarch no longer applied. And when, in the final decades of the century, civic authorities raised concerns about the naturalization of strangers, they rearticulated their fears of the English-born children of immigrants in a new guise. Both the offspring of strangers and the naturalized were different manifestations of an identical threat, that of people who were legally English but who, for some in London at least, remained obviously alien.
Practice defined and enforced the meaning of descent. Indeed, actions in such diverse and prosaic areas as taxation, civic citizenship, guild membership, and the manufacturing of cloth or the refining of sugar created an idiosyncratic civic Englishness, defined along narrow lines and very different from that which emerged from the actions of central government. The City of London's motivation in excluding the children of strangers from belonging lay as much in the defense of tradition, precedent, and the collection of revenue as in overt antipathy toward those of alien background. And like the city, the crown's motives were as much expedient as they were idealistic, rooted in the vicissitudes of patronage and the need to enhance the treasury. As with the city, the crown defined belonging in the course of its day-to-day affairs rather than by recourse to legal theory. When the king and Privy Council pressured the city in support of the sons of strangers, they undermined the civic vision of descent as the defining marker of Englishness with their own vision of birthplace as the key to nationality. Both articulations, birth and descent, arose less from a conscious decision to narrow or widen the goalposts of belonging than from the need for money, the exigencies of patronage, and the call of tradition. Yet the results were as powerful as any programmatic statement.
BIRTH AND DESCENT: THE LEGAL CONTEXT
During the final decades of the sixteenth century, both civic and parliamentary legislators took a number of measures to ensure the alien status of the children of strangers. These built upon an ambiguous legal inheritance that combined an emphasis on place of birth under the sovereignty of the monarch (jus soli) with the consideration of parental descent (jus sanguinis).Footnote 9 The most far-reaching of these took place in 1574, when London's Court of Common Council passed an act restricting the access of the sons of strangers to apprenticeship. This included what Laura Hunt Yungblut has aptly characterized as “a virtual ‘grandfather clause.’”Footnote 10 The bill prohibited taking as apprentice “any person whose father being not the child of an Englishman born is not or shall not be born within the Queen's dominions or … whose father hath been is or shall be of the allegiance of any foreign prince or state.”Footnote 11 Both birth and descent were thus present as markers of belonging, the former because birth in England granted legitimacy to the grandfather in question and the latter because it was one's descent from the grandfather that conferred Englishness. However, the Common Council's bill, by excluding strangers’ progeny from apprenticeship, ultimately emphasized the importance of descent over birth, justifying this emphasis in terms of the immediacy of the threat posed by those of alien parentage.Footnote 12 The offspring of immigrants, the council argued, remained alien in allegiance, even if they happened to have been born under the sovereignty of an English queen. The bill stated that “such children born of … strangers [have] and do retain an inclination and kind affection to the countries of their parents.” Partly because of this “natural disposition” and partly because of “the examples of their fathers whose steps they follow,” many had shown themselves to be “very hurtful members to the common weal of this realm and specially to this honourable city.”Footnote 13 The threat posed by the children of strangers was thus an extension of the inability of aliens to belong.
Such measures against the children of strangers met with opposition at the national level. The Court of Common Council's 1574 bill may, in fact, have been rescinded at the behest of the crown.Footnote 14 Parliament certainly felt the need to take new measures during the following decade. In 1581 the Commons heard a bill that attempted to place restrictions on the children of nondenizen strangers. The legislation proposed that “children of aliens, not being denizens, and born in England, should not be accounted English.”Footnote 15 It reached the Lords, where it died.Footnote 16 Measures against the children of strangers continued in later years, although success was limited at best. In 1589 MPs added a provision to the Subsidy Acts declaring that “no child of an alien … to whom land or goods had been consigned to avoid payment of double rates was to benefit from the arrangement.” Instead, such property “was liable for payment at the higher rate of taxation to which an alien was subject.”Footnote 17 In 1604 the Commons debated a measure to define the status of the English-born progeny of aliens, granting those “of ‘the first birth or descent only’ and born within the realm the limited position of a ‘denizen.’” The house failed to pass the measure.Footnote 18 Such moves indicate a dispute over who strangers actually were, implying a lack of consensus over basic markers of Englishness. By the first decade of the seventeenth century, then, the children of strangers remained in an ambiguous position.
A 1608 court case finally settled the issue in common law, though not, as we will see, in practice. Calvin's Case revolved around whether Robert Calvin, a Scottish-born three-year-old child, could inherit lands in England.Footnote 19 The ruling decreed that Scots born after the accession of James VI to the throne of England—the so-called postnati—were effectively English subjects. The antenati, born prior to the union of the two crowns, retained the alien status previously accorded to all Scots.Footnote 20Calvin's Case not only applied to those north of the border; from then on all nationality was based on allegiance to the sovereign in whose territory one was born.Footnote 21 Such allegiance was bestowed at birth, cementing a subject-monarch bond that could never be broken, “an incident inseparable to every subject.”Footnote 22 And because nationality followed from the obligation to one's sovereign, anyone born under the reign of a king of England was in effect English, even if that birth took place in the king's non-English territories.Footnote 23
Calvin's Case secured the importance of jus soli in English common law, over and above jus sanguinis, the emphasis on parental descent.Footnote 24 The children of strangers born in England were, like Robert Calvin, born into an indissoluble subject-monarch bond and owed allegiance to the sovereign of the land of their birth.Footnote 25 This status of naturalization by birth could not be taken away. Yet although no one could remove the subject status of an English-born alien's child, one could simply fail to recognize it in the first place. As we will see, this was the case for London's civic and guild authorities, who persistently excluded the children (and, at times, the grandchildren) of aliens from the full privileges of English subjecthood. In doing so, they often explicitly denied their Englishness. Calvin's Case had not, in fact, settled the boundaries of nationality; the law was only one arena for the creation of difference, not the final word. When viewed through the lens of practice, the sheer irrelevance of the 1608 ruling is striking, an irrelevance that continued at least until the end of the seventeenth century.
EXCLUSION BY DESCENT IN THE CITY
Civic authorities practiced a notion of belonging grounded in descent by treating the English-born children of strangers as if they were themselves aliens. They did so by exclusion in two areas, civic citizenship and taxation, both traditional arenas for prohibitions against immigrants. The freedom of the city was in many ways the defining marker of belonging in early modern London. Access by aliens was limited: unlike subjects, strangers did not automatically receive freedom of the city upon completion of apprenticeship.Footnote 26 They were also officially prohibited from purchasing freedom by redemption, although in practice a small proportion of London's aliens did become citizens in this way.Footnote 27 As I will show, their English-born children faced similar hurdles, many closely tied to the occupational hierarchy. Both civic and guild officials sought to deny the sons of strangers access to apprenticeship, the lowest rung on the vocational ladder, for if freedom was the defining marker of belonging, so apprenticeship was its gateway. The other prime area of exclusion was taxation, particularly in the form of customs duties such as package, scavage, and bailage.Footnote 28 Aliens were liable for payment at a higher rate, a rate to which the authorities also subjected their English-born children, despite the protestations of the latter. In these arenas, civic authorities treated English-born subjects of alien descent as de facto strangers. These practices bolstered a form of difference grounded in descent.
Just as city authorities had, since the sixteenth century, moved to exclude the children of strangers from a variety of roles by the passage of prohibitive legislation, so they had long taken practical actions against Londoners of non-English descent. Denial of entry to the freedom of the city was prime among these. In June 1586 the Court of Aldermen found Robert Straker, a weaver, guilty of having “wittingly made free Manasses Bloome the son of a stranger born contrary to the late act of Common Council.” The court consequently ordered that both Bloome and Straker should “be presently disfranchised from the freedom and liberties of this city for ever.”Footnote 29 In January 1611, three years after Calvin's Case, the Court of Aldermen pronounced void the freedom of Lewes Sohere, alias Sawyer, the son of an alien. As justification the court made explicit reference to the Common Council's legislation of 1574, which prohibited the taking as apprentice of anyone lacking an English-born grandfather.Footnote 30 Stating that “all such taking of apprentice[s], presentation, enrolling and admitting into the liberties of this city or of any company thereof” was against the act and hence invalid, the court moved to disenfranchise Sawyer. The wardens of the Company of Goldsmiths had complained that he had been made free of the city upon completion of his apprenticeship in their guild. Sawyer's status as a de facto alien led the court, “according to the tenor of the said act of Common Council,” to “pronounce the said enrollment … and his admission into th[e] … freedom of this city to be absolutely void.”Footnote 31
A 1624 attempt to make another stranger's son free further demonstrates the effective absence of Calvin's Case in the City of London. That year, a proposal by the lord mayor to grant citizenship to one John Casteele prompted vehement objections from the court. The aldermen had heard the nomination of Casteele “as one of the number of three persons which [his] Lordship by virtue of his prerogative” had proposed “to make free.”Footnote 32 According to the court's minutes, the lord mayor's nomination of Casteele followed “a precedence presented unto him of the names of the sons of some aliens that in former years had received from this court their freedom of the city.” It is not clear from the court's records who had provided this information. The mayor, however, seems to have considered this suggestion to have been in accordance with tradition. Yet the aldermen questioned the validity of these previous moves to give citizenship to strangers’ sons, arguing that “they were not fully informed of them at the time of their grants.”Footnote 33
The court voiced its opposition to the mayor's nomination on two grounds, objecting both to Casteele's validity as a nominee and to any wider moves to give freedom to Londoners of alien descent. The grounds for excluding Casteele are revealing. He was not a good candidate for the freedom of the city because of his status as a putative alien. The court had heard previous complaints against him “for using the trade of making of candles within this city being a stranger.” For that reason, the aldermen stated, he was “by the order of this court … prohibited and restrained from the liberty of a freedom within the city.” In this sense, Casteele's status as English born was irrelevant—the city had previously regarded him as a stranger, and a stranger he was to remain. The court had not so much dismissed his rights as a subject under Calvin's Case as ignored their existence in the first place. The aldermen, moreover, took exception to the admission of any alien's son to the freedom of the city, on the grounds both that such actions were illegal and that they were unacceptable to the public at large. Previous moves to admit “strangers and their sons” to freedom of the city were “contrary to the laws and customs of this city” and had been the cause of “a general grievance of the citizens.” Such objections were well founded, for the admission of the children of strangers was, quite simply, to the “great hurt and detriment” of legitimate freemen, those of English background.Footnote 34
In the face of these protests, the lord mayor backed down, stating that he was “pleased not to press it further.” Moreover, he reiterated previous restrictions against aliens’ children. “Upon his motion” the court “thought fit and so ordered … that no alien, son, or grandchild of an alien shall at any time hereafter be admitted into the freedom of this city.” Indeed, the aldermen resolved that, if in the future “any such person” should petition the city for his freedom, “every one of this court shall as much as in them lyeth stop and hinder the proceedings.”Footnote 35 For the court, the lord mayor's nomination had been based on erroneous information—similar actions in the past had never been valid. The mayor, in turn, responded to the aldermen's protests by moving to ensure that even Casteele's own offspring would be excluded from citizenship, backing a degree of exclusion on the basis of descent that seems to undermine his own prerogative to freely grant citizenship. The city had built upon the Common Council's 1574 legislation concerning apprenticeship by explicitly excluding two generations of strangers’ offspring from the freedom of the city.
Such actions by the lord mayor and the Court of Aldermen did little to settle the issue, for the children of strangers still sought the freedom. In June 1633 the Court of Aldermen heard the complaint of John Massingberd, “common packer of this city,” against John Therry, “a stranger's son born in this kingdom.” Massingberd accused Therry of “indirect shipping out of goods and refusing to pay the city duties of package and bailage.”Footnote 36 Aside from raising the issue of the infringement of customs duties (which will be dealt with below), Therry's case demonstrates the extent to which some complainants saw freedom and occupational practice as going hand in hand. The court heard further information from the London sugar refiners and merchants, who alleged that Therry “did of late take a great and spacious house in St Mary Spittle without Bishopsgate London” and that he “hath proceeded in the erecting of a sugar house there.” He committed this latter act “under pretense of being born within this kingdom and a freeman of this city,” despite orders from the Privy Council that prohibited “all strangers and the sons of strangers though born within this kingdom” from refining sugars. The court did not dispute Therry's English birth and clearly did not see it as conferring any particular benefits. Instead, the aldermen accepted the charge that he had “fraudulently and indirectly procured his freedom” (although his manner of doing so is unclear). For this they directed the common sergeant to disfranchise John Therry “of and from the freedom and liberties of this city for ever.”Footnote 37
The court was intent on making an example of Therry in order to clamp down on what it perceived to be a much wider problem. It consequently sent two aldermen to acquaint the lord keeper and the lord privy seal of the grievances against him, as well as acquainting them with “others offending in the like kind.”Footnote 38 Later that month, the merchants and refiners presented a further complaint to the Privy Council alleging that Therry and others had failed to remove their sugar house, contrary to an order that also applied to “all other the sons of strangers as well as strangers themselves.”Footnote 39 This prohibition had been confirmed by the Privy Council the previous April.Footnote 40 Thus both the Court of Aldermen and the Privy Council seemed in agreement that the children of immigrants, despite their status as subjects of the crown according to Calvin's Case, did not have the privileges of other English-born people. Therry had run afoul of civic and central government in the diverse areas of sugar refining, taxation, and freedom, all because of his non-English parentage.
Yet John Therry's case also shows the degree to which some strangers’ sons were adept at navigating their way through the barriers to belonging that the city's rules and practices placed in their way. Although the authorities denied Therry both the freedom and the right to refine sugars, he appears to have gone to tortuous lengths to secure citizenship for one of his brothers. The city's rules excluded strangers’ sons from freedom of the city. However, the same rules allowed the son of a freeman to gain citizenship by patrimony. According to a petition to the lord mayor by the sugar merchants and refiners, John Therry and his brother James had attempted to exploit the loophole provided by patrimony in order to get around the exclusion of the sons of strangers. They had “lately called home from the parts beyond the seas” their younger brother Stephen, who, “as they pretend [he] was born after their father was made a freeman of London,” would be eligible for freedom by patrimony despite being the son of an alien.Footnote 41 In this manner they could at least ensure that one of their own had the privilege of citizenship. For the petitioning sugar refiners, this scheme, if successful, would lead “to the infringing of the privileges and liberties of his Majesty's natural born subjects,” a group from which the English-born John Therry was clearly excluded.Footnote 42 It also indicated the ongoing allegiance of strangers’ sons to the “parts beyond the seas.”Footnote 43 Although, for the civic authorities, an alien father meant an alien son, the fact that a free father could also confer his citizenship to his male offspring provided an opening to belonging for the Therry brothers. In pursuing this avenue, they deftly exploited the degree to which freedom could, in some cases at least, trump descent.
The city enforced the boundaries of Englishness at the occupational level, for it was in the arena of work that the authorities believed the slippery slope to an alien-dominated London began. The status of freeman granted a measure of participation in the political life of the city, and most Londoners gained their freedom upon completion of an apprenticeship.Footnote 44 Citizenship also conferred occupational legitimacy. John Therry constructed his illegal sugar house at least in part on the basis of his “pretense of being … a freeman of this city.”Footnote 45 Similarly, Lewes Sohere, alias Sawyer, gained his freedom following an illicit apprenticeship with a goldsmith.Footnote 46 The city denied John Casteele his citizenship by redemption precisely because he had engaged in candle making while “being a stranger” (though it is not clear if he had previously trained under a master of the tallow chandlers' guild).Footnote 47 Service as an apprentice was the gateway to citizenship.Footnote 48 Thus, the best way to exclude the sons of strangers from freedom was to limit their access to training within a guild. If, after 1608, Calvin's Case ensured—at least in law—that anyone born in England was the king's subject and hence English, the practice of the civic authorities maintained pressure in the opposite direction, away from belonging by birth and in favor of those of English descent. To do otherwise, granting the Englishness of people like John Therry and Lewes Sawyer, would open the city up to the influence of foreign forces.
The city also moved to ensure that the sons of strangers paid taxes and duties at higher levels than those ascribed to English subjects. In particular, the duties of package, scavage, and bailage served as a point of friction for the boundaries of Englishness throughout the seventeenth century.Footnote 49 While aliens frequently took issue with the rates and objects of taxation, so their English-born offspring protested the payment of taxes as strangers. In doing so, they explicitly used a language of subjecthood. The civic authorities, meanwhile, persistently rejected such claims to equality, arguing vehemently for the treatment of those of non-English descent as aliens. The ongoing tendency on the part of the city to lump the children of strangers in with their alien parents, together with a general propensity to try to secure as much revenue as possible, combined to bolster a definition of belonging grounded in descent.
Aliens themselves had long been liable for payment of higher taxes, particularly in the form of package, scavage, and bailage. The collectors of these duties had often pointed to recalcitrance on the part of strangers in paying their allotted share. In June 1581, for example, the Court of Aldermen had heard the complaint of John Smythe, the collector of scavage within the city and its liberties, “touching such strangers and others being merchants which do refuse to pay scavage in such manner and form as of long time hath been used and accustomed.”Footnote 50 Similarly, in December 1595, open conflict erupted between “divers merchant strangers” and the city's packer, Richard Wright, over the payment of customs duties, when the former exhibited a petition to the Court of Aldermen.Footnote 51 Further complaints of this nature followed over subsequent decades.Footnote 52
Children of aliens resisted efforts by the civic authorities to compel them to pay strangers’ duties. In doing so, they highlighted their status as English subjects. On 19 December 1632, the Privy Council received a petition by “several merchants born within this kingdom, the sons of strangers.” The complainants alleged that “the Packer of London doth require of them as much fees for [the duties of] package, bailage and shewage [a.k.a. scavage] … as he doth of strangers which are not English born.” The petitioners argued that having been born within the kingdom, where they had always resided, “though strangers’ sons” they “ought to enjoy the same favour and benefit as natural born subjects.”Footnote 53 Summoned to meet with the Privy Council along with the packer the following month, the merchants reiterated their claim based explicitly on the grounds that “being born under the King's allegiance within this kingdom they conceive themselves to be … [his] lawful subjects.” For this reason they should “enjoy the like privileges, and liberties with the rest of his Majesty's natural born subjects.” The merchants were willing to “pay strangers’ customs” to the king himself “for such goods, and merchandize, as they export and import,” but again they took pains to point out that this was despite “the said liberty of natural born subjects.” Their complaint lay with the added burden put upon them by the packer of London, who forced them to pay “such fees, taxes and payments for their said goods and merchandize as merchant strangers born do.” The civic authorities treated them as if they were aliens.Footnote 54
The city defended its actions on the basis of tradition and precedent. The authorities of London collected only those duties granted “by ancient custom beyond the memory of man, confirmed by Charles and allowed by Parliament.” The burden was in accordance with the established tables for such rates, over which “there have been sundry trials at law” (presumably a reference to the controversy of the mid-1590s). Moreover, the sons of strangers, “though born here in England,” had always been liable for these fees, a burden that fell to “the first descent only,” lacking the “grandfather clause” of other restrictions. In short, “such sons had always paid the duties of package, bailage, and scavage, as other strangers do, and ought to do.”Footnote 55 In response, the Privy Council ordered the creation of a committee consisting of the lord keeper, lord treasurer, lord chamberlain, and others to look into the matter.Footnote 56 Its ultimate ruling remains unknown.
In 1636 the issue again came before the Privy Council. In March of that year, it had appointed a committee to “peruse the city's tables of package, scavage, bailage and portage” in order to “certify what rates are fitting according to the present times.”Footnote 57 The committee had considered the rates for commodities traditionally subject to the duties, as well as for new goods that, until then, had not been listed. On 10 May they reported back to the council, presenting tables of the applicable duties “to be taken by the City of London … of the merchants strangers and the sons of merchants strangers in the first descent.” The Privy Council gave their assent to these rates, ordering that “transcripts and duplicates of the same should be hung up in the custom house.”Footnote 58 The councilors seem to have responded to complaints of illegitimate taxation by simply incorporating the new rates into the body of traditional assessments.
Yet the Privy Council had done much more than this. In opting to confirm the City of London's established rates for “merchants strangers and the sons of merchants strangers in the first descent” they had implicitly acknowledged a double standard in the treatment of the crown's subjects.Footnote 59 The council expected English-born merchants to continue payment of package, scavage, and bailage as de facto strangers. To this degree, both the city and the crown defined them as non-English, lacking, at least in the arena of customs duties, the rights of English-born subjects of the king. Yet the sons of strangers themselves expected the same treatment as their fellow Londoners of domestic parentage, explicitly referring to their status as subjects “born under the King's allegiance within this kingdom” who should “enjoy the like privileges, and liberties with the rest of his Majesty's natural born subjects.”Footnote 60 In this sense, the city's actions (and the Privy Council's ruling) constituted nothing less than the denial of a birthright.
THE CROWN AS DEFENDER?
This was not the final word, either on the payment of duties or on the status of the English-born reputed strangers. Nor was it the final word on the position of the central government. The crown, Privy Council, and nobles influential at court had long interceded with the city in favor of the children of strangers, echoing the language of subjecthood used by the sons of strangers themselves and opposing the city's defense of Englishness founded on descent. As in the case of civic exclusion, such actions served to define difference even as they were motivated by considerations that had nothing to do with setting the boundaries of belonging. The monarch and the Privy Council distributed favors as part of an extended network of patronage. These acts of largesse took place for a myriad of reasons, from the ongoing practice of obligation and reciprocity to the exigencies of a crown in desperate need of money, willing to lean on civic authorities in return for loans or gifts from affluent strangers.Footnote 61 And just as the city bolstered a notion of difference grounded in descent, so acts of patronage and favor by the crown could lend their weight to a form of belonging defined by birth as a subject in allegiance to the sovereign.
Influential figures had often intervened on behalf of the sons of strangers. In 1582 one Jo(seph) Hartford, presumably a person of sufficient note to gain the city's ear, asked the lord mayor to grant citizenship to the son of “John Verre a Frenchman being a free denizen.” Referring to a recent act of Common Council that “ordained that no stranger's son although born in London shall be made free,” Hartford complained that “all his father's care for the provision of his son is frustrate and of no effect.” For this reason, as well as “the good report I have heard of the father” and the fact that he was “moved with compassion for the hard condition of the son,” Hartford requested that at the expiration of his apprenticeship Verre's son “may be made free as all others of custom usually be.”Footnote 62Calvin's Case seems to have had no effect on the need for such interventions, which were ongoing. In 1614 the duke of Lennox wrote to Sir Thomas Middleton, the lord mayor, asking him to admit one Adrian Marius to the freedom of the city, previously denied because “he came of foreign parents.”Footnote 63 That same year Sir Thomas Parry also wrote to the mayor on Marius's behalf. Parry pointed out that Marius was “a Frenchman by parentage, but born here in England” and “very worthy to be admitted into the freedom of such a great city,” a “man of good capacity” and “very industrious.”Footnote 64 Although he made note of his supplicant's English birth, Parry also noted that, while lately employed in France, he had “found that nation very willing to grant unto us privileges of great consequence, as it is well known to our merchants trading in those parts. And therefore I cannot but at all occasions yield them that courtesy.”Footnote 65
In May 1628, the Privy Council relieved Sir William Courten from paying customs duties as a stranger. Courten was the son of a Dutch immigrant who had become a free denizen. He was also a knight who, in his petition, held “his case to be differing from others.” In seeking relief from being taxed as an alien, he made special appeal to his Dutch father's English credentials—his length of tenure in London, his loyal payment of taxes, and the extent to which others had viewed him as belonging in the city. The elder Courten “had been a long inhabitant here in London, paying scott and lott in the city and all other duties.” For these reasons, the petitioner's father “was reputed as an Englishman” who, at the time of his son's birth, “was a free denizen.”Footnote 66 Born in the City of London to an immigrant father with impeccable assimilationist credentials, Courten's own Englishness seemed not to have been in doubt for much of his life. He had both “enjoyed the privilege of an Englishman and paid his Majesty's customs accordingly.” He gave no sign of his alien background and exhibited no foreign ties, having both “settled himself and laid out the most part of his estate” and “planted himself and his posterity here.” He had, moreover, been an exemplary subject, holding “divers good offices” and performing “extraordinary services” to the state (lending the crown large amounts of money).Footnote 67 In short, Courten emphasized not just his English birth or his status as a native Londoner but the fact that his immigrant father's reputation and his own actions, residence, and deposits of wealth were impeccably English.
The fact that the Privy Council agreed, ruling in Courten's favor, shows how expediency could efface descent. The councilors announced that “from henceforth [he] be suffered to trade freely … paying only his customs as an Englishman doth and as formerly he hath done.” They also took pains to emphasize that they were “well assured” that he would “not make use of this liberty any way to his Majesty's disprofit,” but rather that their decision would be “an encouragement to him to trade more amply” for the good of both the crown and himself.Footnote 68 Courten was able to secure exemption from paying taxes as a stranger because he was a man of wealth and influence, not because the Privy Council had decided to put into practice a consistent philosophy of belonging based on birth.Footnote 69 The board articulated its decision as a grant of exception to an existing rule. Courten was to enjoy the “liberty” of taxation as English “without interruption or molestation” despite an order from the previous October that “the sons of strangers till the second descent” were “to pay strangers’ customs.” Yet this exception provides an example of how, in fact, jus soli worked in practice. As the son of a stranger, Courten was partly English, partly not. Yet his loyalty and, more to the point, his “extraordinary services” to the crown effaced his difference. As a result of his wealth as much as of his English birth, the agents of a cash-strapped crown were willing to see Sir William Courten as effectively English.Footnote 70
Royal patronage at times explicitly evoked a language of subjecthood, even while alluding to the ability of the children of strangers to help the crown. In September 1630, Charles I wrote to the lord mayor and aldermen requesting that they grant freedom to David Etgher, a merchant of London and the son of Joas Etgher, “late of London merchant stranger.”Footnote 71 For Charles the allegiance of the younger Etgher was not in doubt, having been accorded by his birth. The city should grant him freedom because he “is an Englishman and our subject born in that city.” Etgher's apparent Englishness was not, of course, the only reason to act. As in the case of the Privy Council's ruling on behalf of Courten, the king felt it necessary to extol his subject's character and to point out the benefits that would accrue from a grant of freedom of the city. David Etgher was “a man that will endeavour to deserve” citizenship. By “his diligence in enlarging his trade” he would be better enabled “to contribute to all public charges and to bear such offices as may hereafter be conferred on him.” The king also pointed out that Etgher's father had been made “a free denizen of the realm by Queen Elizabeth.” Although not a subject, the senior Etgher had thus also owed allegiance to the English crown.Footnote 72
Yet for the king, the real reason to give Etgher his freedom was the simple fact of his obvious Englishness. As a free man, he would certainly be able “to do us and that city your better service” (the most helpful service to the crown being, at this time, the lending of money). Although acknowledging the usefulness of his supplicant in this manner, Charles drew attention to his status as fully and unambiguously English. David Etgher was, first and foremost, “an Englishman and our subject.” It was for this reason that the king asked the lord mayor and aldermen to issue orders for Etgher to be “admitted in to the freedom desired, in as ample manner and with the same privileges, that other our subjects and freemen of that city do enjoy that have sued for the same.” Charles seems to have regarded the younger Etgher as an inheritor of all the rights implied by his English birth. In this case, patronage and allusions to service went hand in hand with a full articulation of belonging by birth.Footnote 73
A number of English-born strangers’ sons, then, benefited from intercession by influential people, from nobles such as the duke of Lennox, to the Privy Council, and, ultimately, to the king himself. These actions resulted from the practice of patronage as much as from any high-minded sentiment about the nature of belonging. None of the patrons concerned—with the possible exception of the king, and in the Etgher example only—overtly acted out the implications of Calvin's Case, fully expressing the legal fiction of jus soli. Rather, they bestowed favor upon someone who was, in his own way, of benefit, whether because of industriousness, loyalty, or a willingness to lend money. Yet all of these grants of favor did their bit to frustrate the practice of descent in the city. All sought a way around the exclusion of the English-born sons of strangers from the freedom of the city or the burden they carried of particular duties or taxes. And in this respect, all unintentionally bolstered a notion of belonging grounded in birth.
DESCENT AND NATURALIZATION
In the second half of the seventeenth century, resistance to the naturalization of strangers joined hostility to immigrants’ children as a major component of antialien antipathy. Naturalization had traditionally applied to individuals, most often the foreign-born children of English men and women, and was available only by an act of Parliament. The 1650s and 1660s saw an increase in the naturalization of small groups of strangers, together with the first proposed bill to make subjecthood available to immigrants en masse (legislation that did not actually pass until the early eighteenth century).Footnote 74 Through the course of this growing debate, the city continued to articulate a narrower notion of belonging than that espoused by the central government, while the latter—in its attitude toward both strangers’ children and naturalization—construed Englishness along more inclusive lines. The failure of the civic authorities to accept both the English-born children of strangers and the newly naturalized as full subjects points not just to the significance of descent as a marker of difference but to the degree to which Londoners privileged daily practice over legal theory.
For the civic authorities, the naturalized and the offspring of aliens posed an identical problem: legal definitions of Englishness had departed from those practiced by Londoners in their daily lives. For many in the metropolis, persons of alien parentage were obviously not English, regardless of their legal standing. The same applied to naturalized strangers. In both cases, practical definitions effaced those enshrined in law. Both groups demonstrated the paradox of legal English subjects who remained strangers in behavior and affection. Complainants voiced opposition to the naturalized in terms almost identical to those charges leveled against the English-born of alien descent. Such convergence indicates that failure to accept the naturalized and the rejection of the children of strangers were merely two sides of the same idiosyncratic, civic articulation of Englishness.
THE INTERREGNUM CONTEXT
The political and social upheaval of the 1640s and 1650s did little to alter the relationship between the City of London and the central government over the position of strangers and their offspring. While civic authorities played a significant role in the emerging hostilities between Parliament and crown during the 1640s, they continued to petition the latter in protest of the actions and liberties of both aliens and their progeny.Footnote 75 After the regicide, the city persisted in emphasizing descent, while the lord protector and Council of State, like their royal forebears, generally practiced a more expansive notion of belonging. In this sense, the relationship between the city and the Commonwealth over matters of immigration followed the patterns of previous decades. Yet the 1650s saw a significant new development in the debate over the children of strangers: an effort by the lord protector and Parliament to secure naturalization for a number of aliens and a resulting outcry from civic quarters.
In 1644, during the height of the first civil war, the city reiterated its position that the children of strangers should be taxed as aliens. The Court of Aldermen presented a proposition to Parliament demanding that “the son of an alien or denizen although born in this kingdom may trade so as he pay all customs and duties that strangers are liable to pay.” Parliament referred the proposition to the Committee of the Navy, to which a delegation of burgesses was sent that November “to insist thereupon,” although the committee's eventual ruling is not known.Footnote 76 By August 1650, war with Scotland had effectively nullified Calvin's Case for Scots, whom Parliament ordered to leave England unless explicitly granted permission to stay.Footnote 77 The legal situation of non-Scottish strangers and their children, however, seems not to have changed, and an ordinance of 12 April 1654 united England and Scotland into one commonwealth, ending Scottish alienation.Footnote 78 Meanwhile, the new republican central government—like its royal predecessor—intervened on behalf of aliens themselves.Footnote 79 The Council of State also urged broader proimmigrant measures, writing to the lord mayor and aldermen of the city in November 1655 to ask that “all proceedings against any Protestants strangers for exercising their callings and vocations within the City of London or liberties be suspended and forborne.”Footnote 80
By the late 1650s, propositions to naturalize strangers had added a new element to the immigration debate between city and central government. However, the city used the issue to reiterate previous concerns about the role of the children of aliens. In March 1657, the Court of Common Council petitioned the Parliament of the Commonwealth, expressing concern about attempts by merchant strangers “to procure themselves to be naturalized.” Yet much of the complaint concerned the familiar issue of the payment of duties by the sons of strangers. Indeed, the ease with which the city conflated the children of immigrants with aliens themselves is revealing: even by the late 1650s civic authorities defined belonging by descent.Footnote 81 The petition complained of the repeated attempts by the children of strangers to withhold their deserved rate of customs payments. In “all times heretofore not only the merchants of foreign nations but their sons also though born in England” have paid amounts “over and above the customs and duties payable by the natural subjects.” Lately, however, “the said sons of aliens have withheld … payments pretending some exemption from the same” and, consequently, the city sought some means of enforcement from Parliament.Footnote 82
In the absence of enforcement by the Commonwealth, strangers and their sons would continue to enjoy what the city saw as a privileged status, evading their rightful payments. Aliens and their offspring also profited from their foreign ties, enjoying “benefits and advantages” over and above the English “in respect of their alliances and assistances abroad” and “especially during this breach with the Spaniards.” The petitioners accused strangers and their children of draining the revenue of the state and of beggaring English merchants. By evading their rightful duties, they ensured that “not only particular cities and ports but the state most of all are hindered and deceived of the petty customs.” If “such sons of aliens themselves,” along with their immigrant parents, were to pay their rightful rates, the state would receive “considerable revenue.” Instead, the nation lost wealth, and “the merchants of this nation” were “exceedingly grieved, prejudiced and discouraged.”Footnote 83
According to the Common Council's complaint, attempts by strangers to procure naturalization were merely part of this larger pattern of alien malevolence. Although the offspring of strangers, as English subjects, did not need to be naturalized, efforts by immigrants themselves to become subjects were inseparable from the stubborn refusal of aliens’ children to pay duties as strangers. Both were deliberate attempts to undermine the nation. The Common Council's petition complained that merchant strangers, “under some specious pretenses,” sought naturalization by Parliament in order to secure their current “privileges and advantages and to become masters of what trade is yet remaining in the power of the English.” And although referring specifically to “the desires of the said merchants aliens for their naturalization,” the petitioners asked that any naturalization bill should be qualified with “cautions and provisions” protecting the collection of the “ancient and just duties” of the nation's cities and ports. The city saw the sons of strangers as the prime cause of the evasion of customs duties. To this degree it is uncertain precisely to whom the petitioners refer in their complaint, strangers, their offspring, or both.Footnote 84
On 13 June 1657, the Court of Common Council approved a further petition, this time to be forwarded to Cromwell himself. The complaint referred to “merchant strangers naturalized by a late Act of the present Parliament,” although there is no record of a general act of naturalization in the journals of the Commons for this year.Footnote 85 The council complained of the stubborn refusal of the newly naturalized to continue to pay customs as strangers. It was, they argued, provided by “several acts of Parliament” (all from the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII) that after any strangers “be admitted to the freedom of natural subjects that they shall nevertheless continue to pay to the city as well as to the state … such customs and duties as they did or ought to have done before such favour and freedom granted to them.”Footnote 86 Yet the same aliens assumed that their naturalization implied equal treatment as English subjects, refusing “to continue payment of the said duties to the petitioners, alleging that now they are to pay no duties but in common with the natural born of our own nation.”Footnote 87 The city, consequently, sought aid and enforcement from the lord protector. The naturalized were, in effect, now part of the same problem as the English-born children of strangers, people who—for the city—were obviously not English, yet who carried the legal status of English subjects. Cromwell's response is not known. However, in 1658 he wrote to the Court of Aldermen on “behalf of one Claude Vorsin an alien lately naturalized for the obtaining of his freedom of this city,” acting out a role previously played by Charles I. The aldermen determined his request “inconvenient to be granted for several considerations.”Footnote 88
Despite changes in the makeup of the city's elite, a parliamentary breach with the crown, regicide, the declaration of a republic, and the creation of a protectorate, little change is evident in the relationship between civic and central government over aliens and their offspring. The city continued to complain of the presence of strangers and of efforts by their children to be regarded as English. Instead of protesting to the Privy Council, the civic officials sought redress from the Council of State. Failing that, they petitioned the lord protector rather than the king. And these two national institutions acted much as their royalist predecessors had done, the Council of State weighing in on the side of strangers and Cromwell acting as patron for an immigrant in search of the freedom. Although war with Scotland had briefly suspended Calvin's Case for Scots themselves, notions of belonging and exclusion in relation to continental immigrants remained curiously static. The city refused to accept that birth in England conferred Englishness. In this light, that they also denied the same power to acts of naturalization is, perhaps, not surprising.
RESTORATION: NATURALIZED ALIENS AS STRANGERS’ SONS
The gulf between the city and the central government over immigration, naturalization, and the sons of strangers continued after the Restoration. As in prior decades, actions by the City of London against strangers and their children stemming from economic issues made powerful articulations about who belonged and who did not. Objections to the naturalization of strangers, like complaints against the equal treatment of aliens’ sons, articulated the loss of trade and revenue as prime concerns. Naturalized strangers, like immigrants’ children, were dangerous insofar as they might be treated as English, evading aliens’ customs duties and trading on an equal footing with the true subjects of the realm. Equal taxation meant a loss of revenue. The right to trade as English meant that trade fell into the hands of strangers, for it was a given that aliens, once naturalized, would remain tied in affection to their brethren at home and abroad. Such objections to naturalization implied that true subjecthood could never be granted. Seen hand in hand with the rejection of equality for the children of strangers, it also confirmed the primacy of English descent as the sole means of granting true belonging.
As in the later years of the Commonwealth, the city continued to protest any possible favors for strangers or their children, as well as further moves on the part of the new government in the direction of naturalization. In July 1660, the lord mayor and aldermen, assembled in the Court of Common Council, petitioned Parliament asking the House of Commons to ignore further requests on the part of strangers for their naturalization. The petitioners asked that the house might continue to protect the “birth rights and privileges” of the king's subjects, granted them “by the providence and tender care of so many successors of generations,” and to ensure that “the strangers who are now petitioners for it may not share in them, by an act of naturalization.” The consequences of inaction, they argued, would be many and dire, not least of which would include a catastrophic loss of trade for the natural-born English. Once naturalized, strangers “may export our manufactures on equal terms with us the natives.” As a result, “their relations beyond the seas in all parts, who formerly bought them of our English factors will now have them wholly from these new English men.” The true English, and the kingdom as a whole, “shall lose all the benefit of the foreign trade.”Footnote 89
The 1660s were, in fact, a mixed bag, bringing new measures for the naturalization of strangers together with the ongoing exclusion of their English-born children. A 1662 statute for “preventing frauds and regulating abuses in his Majesty's customs” contained a provision that “no children of aliens under the age of twenty-one years be permitted to be traders or any goods or merchandizes to be entered in their names.”Footnote 90 The full rights of all English-born were, it seems, open to question in Westminster, too, and in a manner that received royal assent. An act of 1663 granted effective naturalization to hemp and flax dressers, net makers, and tapestry weavers who legally exercised their trades for three years.Footnote 91 Meanwhile, a general naturalization bill was abortively introduced into Parliament, probably in 1664.Footnote 92
At least some aliens saw Charles II's accession as an opportunity to build upon the Commonwealth's moves to protect them, as well as to make appeals to royal precedent in the name of Charles I's prostranger position. In 1663 the elders of the Dutch and French Churches wrote to the king asking for protection. Since the death of Charles I, they wrote, many handicraftsmen of their churches “have been and daily are disturbed and vexed by information, arrests and other troubles contrary to their said Majesty's royal letters and princely favours.” Such actions resulted in “their great grief” and the “destruction of themselves and [their] families.” Just as “your royal Majesty's father of blessed memory and your royal grandfather” had been “unwilling to diminish any former favors and privileges granted by their predecessors,” so they asked that the current king confirm their protection from the actions of the city.Footnote 93 Charles II in turn obliged, asking the judges and justices of the courts and all of his subjects in London and elsewhere “to permit and suffer the said strangers … and their children quietly to enjoy … such privileges and immunities as have been formerly granted unto them without any further suits, troubles, arrests or proceedings.”Footnote 94 Similar favorable measures by the crown followed in the 1670s.Footnote 95
The status of the English-born of non-English descent remained a source of contention to the end of the century. In 1670 the Company of Weavers was still proposing special clauses and restrictions on the sons of strangers as part of a simmering dispute with immigrant weavers.Footnote 96 In May of that year, the Privy Council heard a list of suggestions from the weavers’ guild concerning strangers, including a clause that “no son of an alien here residing” should exercise the “trade of weaving for his own profit, unless he hath been bound, or served as an apprentice” for seven years. Civic institutions were still making distinctions between English subjects of domestic and foreign descent. And, despite its record of support for the sons of strangers, the Privy Council was willing to go along with such moves: the clause was one of those “approved by their Lordships.”Footnote 97 As late as the 1690s, the English-born children of strangers found themselves targets for exclusion from freedom as aliens. In 1693 Richard Pierce, the collector of the duties of package, scavage, bailage, and portage, petitioned the City of London to exclude the sons of strangers, together with aliens “endenized only and not naturalized,” from gaining the freedom by redemption without “especial reasons first given.” The city concurred, ruling “that no such alien endenized, or alien's son be presented unto this court to be made free without particular notice given thereof.”Footnote 98
Richard Pierce opposed the move toward “populationism” that emerged in the final decades of the seventeenth century.Footnote 99 For Daniel Statt, this foreshadows the naturalization debates of the eighteenth century. The plague of 1665 and the economic woes of the following decade produced a fear of demographic collapse that spawned calls for settlement from abroad. The City of London first organized a coherent opposition to these calls in the 1680s, with Richard Pierce playing a key role.Footnote 100 The Privy Council's removal of fees for denization between 1681 and 1688 were a sign of the success of this new proimmigration movement, which culminated in legislation in 1709 granting general naturalization for the cost of a shilling.Footnote 101 Although this Whig act was undone by opposition to immigration from the Palatine, populationism continued to exert influence well into the middle of the eighteenth century, with further attempts to pass bills of general naturalization.Footnote 102
Yet civic opposition to naturalization after the Restoration should also be seen within the context of a century of hostility toward strangers and their offspring, a sign that even by the end of the century the foreignness of persons deemed subjects under Calvin's Case was axiomatic. Both Pierce's antistranger rhetoric and the Restoration crown's proimmigration policies fit squarely within the crown-city friction over difference that began under Elizabeth. The threat posed by naturalized strangers was nothing new; it was simply a manifestation of the same problem embodied by the English-born of alien parentage. Aliens, according to one 1690 pamphlet, engaged in the “impoverishing of English subjects,” “exhausting the treasure of the nation, and remitting the same to foreign nations.” They lessened the customs and revenue of the realm, while selling the “goods and merchandizes of other strangers.” Naturalization, although a novel development, simply provided a new weapon in an old battle to subvert natural-born English subjects, allowing “aliens naturalized” to bypass the Navigation Acts and evade customs duties as strangers. The problem presented by the naturalized was identical to that of the English-born of alien descent.Footnote 103 To the civic authorities, both groups posed the same threat because both, though legal subjects, were clearly strangers.
CONCLUSION
The City of London had long resisted immigration, just as the central government had acted to foster the presence of strangers. Following Calvin's Case, which deemed anyone born under the sovereignty of the monarch an English subject, that resistance continued, bolstering a long-standing emphasis on descent as a marker of belonging. The city's hunger for revenue drove attempts to make the English-born children of strangers pay the higher taxes and duties accorded to aliens as much as did animosity. From the Common Council's “grandfather clause” of 1574, restricting access to apprenticeship, through to Richard Pierce's 1693 request to deny stranger's sons access to freedom by redemption, civic authorities persisted in their belief that Londoners with immigrant parents could not fully belong in the city.
In the City of London, at least, Calvin's Case was no watershed. As I have shown, metropolitan attitudes concerning immigrants and their offspring were primarily conservative. The crown's own assertion of the importance of birth within the realm was itself curiously independent of the 1608 ruling. In both cases, prevailing attitudes toward belonging and exclusion changed only as quickly as the practices that produced them. Even the addition of a new ingredient into the equation, that of naturalization, indicates continuity as much as disjuncture, with the newly naturalized presenting a problem to civic authorities identical to that posed by the children of strangers.
As the case of Sir William Courten shows, support by the crown for the English-born of alien descent received its impetus as much from the need for revenue as from any high-minded articulation of the sovereignty of English subjecthood. Yet in this respect the crown was not much different from the city. Both acted to enforce and define belonging for tangential reasons, ranging from the defense of privilege and tradition to the need to collect money. In both cases, expedient practices defined who belonged and who was to be excluded. When Charles I asserted the full Englishness of David Etgher, “an Englishman and our subject” who nevertheless had an alien father, he may have simply had his eyes on Etgher's purse.Footnote 104 However, acting for financial reasons still undermined the City of London's unflinching resistance to the idea that an alien's son could be taxed as English or included in the freedom of the city. And conversely, when the packer of London and the Court of Aldermen sought to protect their sources of revenue by resisting the naturalization of strangers and the Englishness of strangers’ sons, they in turn defined difference by descent. In doing so, they ensured that the full range of stereotypes that applied to aliens themselves—as avaricious, greedy, and above all loyal only to foreign realms—carried over to people legally regarded as subjects of the crown.
That the crown and the city practiced divergent notions of belonging should not obscure the instances where immigrants were able to succeed at both national and civic levels. I have argued that the practice of excluding the children of aliens in the city amounted to a definition of Englishness grounded in descent. Yet many immigrants and their children attained civic citizenship, economic prosperity, and even high office. No less than London's Lord Mayor Sir John Leman was the grandson of a Flemish refugee and “one of the richest Londoners of his time.”Footnote 105 And although Leman's grandfather had arrived in England in 1485, first-generation immigrants also thrived.Footnote 106 Gideon Delaune arrived from Nimes in 1572–73, achieving recognition from both the crown and the city. He served as apothecary to Anne of Denmark (James I's queen), was instrumental in the formation of the Apothecaries’ Company, and became free of the city in 1623 (although he also resigned as an alderman in 1626 because he was a stranger). His children succeeded in integrating into the English gentry.Footnote 107
Yet such immigrant success stories simply highlight the primacy of practice in producing divergent notions of belonging. Sir William Courten's status as both knight and creditor to the crown did not protect him from an initial attempt by the civic authorities to collect aliens’ duties. Even the wealthy, titled son of an assimilated immigrant could fall prey to descent. Sir John Leman was lord mayor from 1616 to 1617, a period that both followed and preceded metropolitan measures against the children of strangers. Clearly having a mayor of alien lineage had little effect on the city's actions. Leman's tenure as lord mayor failed to ameliorate civic actions against the sons of strangers because such actions were motivated by expediency rather than by law, ideology, or intention. The same can be said of city companies where aliens and their descendants thrived.Footnote 108 Many immigrants attained a high measure of belonging; many immigrants’ children presumably disappeared into the anonymity of assimilation. Yet the striking consistency of the city's rejection of others of alien parentage should caution us against viewing these “success stories” as signs of uncontested consensus in matters of both difference and English identity.
Both in the case of birth and in that of descent, a host of day-to-day actions, many ostensibly unrelated to conscious pronouncements about belonging or exclusion, defined who was a Londoner, who was English, and who did not fit in. The practice of difference eclipsed legal definitions of subjecthood such as that elaborated by Calvin's Case or by various proposed bills of general naturalization. For the civic authorities and many other Londoners, being English meant to have been born in the realm of indigenous descent. The rejection of the children of strangers and of the naturalized were simply two sides of the same coin; it was perfectly obvious who was English and who was not, regardless of common law or statute. The importance of practice in creating difference helps to explain the sheer irrelevance of Calvin's Case, a case that supposedly defined the boundaries of subjecthood in 1608 but that was still ignored in London as late as the 1690s. Common law was never, of course, implemented as if it were policy. However, Calvin's Case seems not just to have been neglected but to have been entirely beside the point. Even the crown's own articulation of subjecthood, though consistent with the 1608 ruling, arose from the practice of patronage and the exigencies of financial pressure rather than from the law. The crown and the city articulated divergent notions of difference because they had differing practical interests, resulting in a gulf in notions of belonging that prevailed through monarchy, Commonwealth, and Restoration alike.
Yet while the seventeenth century was clearly not a period of rapid change in attitudes concerning difference in London, changes did eventually take place. Historians must now ask how, when, and where such transformations happened and in response to which elements of daily life. And what of the relative weight of everyday activities in other areas where legal cases have been cited as key moments of transition? If the law matters less than was previously thought in an area as apparently fraught with legal tension as immigration, attention to practice could prove fruitful beyond the streets of early modern London.
