'Immigration and the Common Profit: Native Cloth Workers, Flemish Exiles and Royal Policy in Fourteenth-Century London

This article reconstructs a crucial episode in the relationship between the English crown, its subjects and the kingdom's immigrant population. It links the murder of about forty Flemings in London during the Peasants’ Revolt in June 1381 to the capital's native cloth workers’ dissatisfaction with the government's economic immigration policy. We argue that, in the course of the fourteenth century, the crown developed a new policy aimed at attracting skilled workers from abroad. Convinced that their activities benefited the common profit of the realm, the crown remained deaf to the concerns of... Mehr ...