Medieval Migrants: Hanseatic Merchants, Jews & Lombards
Britain Was Never Just Anglo-Saxon
Between the Norman Conquest and the end of the Hundred Years’ War, Britain was tied into a network of European trade and finance that pulled in merchants, bankers and craftsmen from far beyond its shores. Three groups stand out: the medieval Jewish communities invited in by William the Conqueror, the German Hanseatic League merchants who ran the London Steelyard, and the Italian (especially Lombard) bankers of Lombard Street. None of these communities is named in a single spec bullet, but the spec opens in c790 and the question of who came to Britain in the medieval period sits between Part 1 (Conquered and Conquerors) and Part 2 (Looking West). Knowing these groups gives you ready-made comparisons for the 8-mark comparison question.
William the Conqueror invited Jews to England from Rouen around 1070; Edward I expelled them in 1290 with the Edict of Expulsion. The community lasted in England for around 220 years before becoming the first Jewish population in Europe to be permanently banished from a whole kingdom by royal decree.
Medieval Jews in England, c1070-1290
After 1066, William brought Jewish merchants and moneylenders from Rouen to provide credit for the Norman elite. Christian doctrine forbade Christians from charging interest on loans (usury), but the new Norman state needed cash to build castles, fund crusades and run government. Jewish lenders filled that gap. Communities grew in London, York, Lincoln, Norwich and Oxford. Jews were technically the king’s personal property — the Crown taxed them heavily and could seize their property at will.
This protection was fragile. The 1190 York Massacre, in which around 150 Jews died after taking refuge in Clifford’s Tower, showed that royal protection collapsed under crusade-era anti-Jewish violence. By the 1270s Edward I had already taxed Jewish wealth past the point of usefulness, and richer Italian bankers were arriving from the south. The 1290 Edict of Expulsion ordered every Jew out of England by All Saints’ Day. Around 2,000-3,000 left. England was officially without a Jewish community for 366 years, until Cromwell quietly readmitted them in 1656.
The first recorded blood libel in Europe — the false accusation that Jews killed Christian children for ritual purposes — was the case of William of Norwich in 1144. The libel spread from England to the rest of Christian Europe and was used to justify centuries of violence. The 1255 case of Hugh of Lincoln saw 19 Jews hanged on the same charge despite no evidence; Henry III seized their property. By the time of the 1290 expulsion, English Jewish communities had been pauperised by royal taxation and brutalised by mob violence. The story of medieval English Jews is therefore not a story of comfortable migration but of conditional toleration that finally turned to expulsion.
The Hanseatic Merchants and the London Steelyard
Across the same period, German merchants from Lübeck, Hamburg, Cologne, Danzig and other Baltic and North Sea ports formed the Hanseatic League. From the 1200s they operated the Steelyard, a walled compound on the north bank of the Thames near modern Cannon Street station. They imported timber, wax, fur, grain, pitch and tar from the Baltic and exported English wool and (later) finished cloth. The Steelyard had its own warehouse, dormitory, chapel and even rules — resident merchants were celibate while they lived there.
English kings granted the Hanseatic merchants generous privileges — lower tolls than English merchants paid, freedom from many local taxes — in return for credit and guaranteed supply of Baltic goods. By the fifteenth century English merchants resented this. Hostility built up across the sixteenth century: in 1597 Elizabeth I revoked the league’s privileges and expelled the merchants from the Steelyard. The site was kept by the Crown and eventually demolished in the nineteenth century to build Cannon Street station.
Lombard Bankers and Italian Finance
From the late 1200s, Italian bankers — especially from Lucca, Florence and Genoa — replaced the Jewish moneylenders Edward I had expelled. They were Christian, so the usury ban was a problem, but they invented techniques (bills of exchange, partnerships, complicated currency-conversion contracts) that worked around it. The London street where their counting-houses clustered is still called Lombard Street; the symbol of their guild, three golden balls, became the modern pawnshop sign.
The Italians financed Edward III’s opening campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War. When the king stopped paying his debts around 1340, two of the great Florentine banking houses collapsed: the Peruzzi in 1343 and the Bardi in 1346. The crash devastated Florentine finance and left a long memory of English royal unreliability. By the fifteenth century, English merchant banks were starting to take over from the Italians, but the techniques (and Lombard Street itself) stayed.
For the 8-mark comparison question, these three medieval migrations give you sharp contrasts. Jews were brought in by William the Conqueror specifically as moneylenders and were expelled when the Crown no longer needed them — their position depended on royal economic interest. The Hanseatic merchants were not invited but tolerated for the goods and credit they brought; Elizabeth I expelled them when their privileges had become politically embarrassing. Italian bankers came as private operators chasing royal-debt profits and stayed because their techniques outlasted the families who first practised them. All three groups show the same pattern: medieval kings used migrants when economic resources demanded it, and removed them when politics changed.
Three medieval migrations show three different drivers. Jewish migration into England (c1070-1290) was driven by royal demand for credit. The Hanseatic Steelyard (c1200-1597) was driven by Baltic trade. Italian banking (from c1280) was driven by the gap left after the 1290 expulsion. Each ended when the political mood turned: 1290, 1597 and gradually through the fifteenth century.