Early Modern Arrivals, c1500–c1700
A New Kind of Migrant Story
Between c1500 and c1700, England changed in ways that reshaped who came and why. The country became a Protestant nation after Henry VIII’s break with Rome (1534), the cloth industry pulled in skilled labour, and global trading companies and privateering tied English ports to Africa, the Americas and Asia. New types of migrant arrived: Protestant religious refugees from Catholic Europe, and small but real numbers of Africans — some free, some unfree — in Tudor and Stuart parishes. The continuity matters too: the legal label of ‘alien’ carried over from medieval England, and most migrants still arrived through the south-east ports.
Three early modern migrant groups dominate this period: Flemish and Walloon Protestant refugees from the 1560s, Huguenots fleeing France after 1685, and Africans — including the trumpeter John Blanke at the Tudor court — documented in parish, court and household records.
Flemish and Walloon Refugees: Sandwich and Canterbury
In the 1560s, Protestant Flemings and Walloons fleeing Spanish Catholic persecution in the Low Countries became the first wave of religious refugees in Protestant England. Elizabeth I and the Privy Council encouraged the arrivals because they brought valuable cloth-making skills the English economy needed. In 1561, Sandwich (Kent) was authorised to take in twenty-five master weavers and their families. Canterbury followed soon after. By the 1580s, Sandwich’s migrant population numbered several thousand — perhaps a third of the town. The arrivals founded their own stranger churches, ran their own poor relief, and used the chancel of St Peter’s in Sandwich for Walloon-language services.
Their economic impact was disproportionate to their numbers. Flemish weavers introduced the ‘new draperies’ — lighter, brighter, more fashionable cloths — which Sandwich and Canterbury exported across northern Europe. They drained marshland for market gardens around Sandwich, growing celery, carrots and cauliflowers on a commercial scale for the first time in England. Local guilds sometimes resented the competition, but corporation records show town authorities defending the strangers’ right to trade because of the customs revenue and tax they generated. The Flemish and Walloon experience set a pattern: religious refugees could be welcomed when their skills met an English economic need.
Huguenots: Spitalfields after 1685
A century later, France produced its own wave of Protestant refugees. In 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, ending the limited religious tolerance French Protestants had enjoyed since 1598. Around 50,000 Huguenots came to England, the largest single religious migration of the period. Many settled in Spitalfields on the eastern edge of London, where the silk-weaving trade was already established. Charles II had already offered French Protestants denization by proclamation in 1681 — a partial legal status that let migrants own property and trade without becoming full subjects. He died in February 1685, eight months before the revocation, so the crown’s response to the main wave came under James II, who authorised a nationwide church collection for the refugees. Public collections in parish churches raised funds for the most destitute new arrivals.
In Spitalfields, Huguenot weavers transformed silk production. They built tall houses with broad upper-floor windows to let in the light needed to work the patterned brocades and damasks they specialised in. By 1700, around 25,000 Huguenots lived in Spitalfields and its surrounding parishes. Beyond silk, Huguenot migrants reshaped finance (founding members of the Bank of England in 1694 included Huguenot families), the army (officers serving William III), and clock-making, gunsmithing and jewellery in London’s West End. Within two generations the community had largely assimilated, leaving stranger churches, family names and skilled trades as their lasting mark.
A common error is to describe the Huguenots after 1685 as the first religious refugees in England. The Flemings and Walloons preceded them by more than a century, with Sandwich’s 1561 charter explicitly naming them as religious refugees. The Huguenots were the largest single wave (around 50,000), but they arrived into communities — and a stranger-church model — already shaped by earlier Protestant arrivals from the Low Countries.
Africans in Tudor and Stuart Britain
Far smaller in number, but historically important, was the African presence in Tudor and Stuart Britain. The historian Miranda Kaufmann’s work on parish registers and household accounts has identified more than 360 Africans in England between 1500 and 1640, recorded as servants, court entertainers, divers, sailors and household members. They include John Blanke, a royal trumpeter at the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII, who appears in payment rolls and the 1511 Westminster Tournament Roll. The presence of these Africans in 1500–1640 dismantles the older idea that Black British history begins with Windrush in 1948.
Other named individuals include Diego, an African mariner who sailed with Francis Drake during the 1577–80 circumnavigation, and Cattelena of Almondsbury, an independent Black woman living just outside Bristol who in 1625 owned her own cow and small property — a rare snapshot of an ordinary working life. Status was uneven: some Africans were enslaved, but courts in this period (notably the 1569 Cartwright case) accepted the principle that England had no laws sanctioning slavery on its own soil. The picture was contradictory — English merchants were beginning to profit from the Atlantic slave trade abroad, while parish registers in England were treating individual Africans as full members of their communities.
A strong answer on this period sets out continuity and change side by side. Continuity: the legal label of ‘alien’ survived from medieval England; the south-east remained the main entry route; economic skills (weaving, finance) drew migrants in. Change: religion now defined who was welcome — Protestant refugees fleeing Catholic regimes were given church charters and royal proclamations, where their medieval predecessors had no such religious framing; Africans appeared in parish registers in numbers larger than was once believed; and, by the 17th century, English involvement in transatlantic slavery added a darker dimension to migration that had no medieval equivalent.
In 1685, Louis XIV’s revocation of the Edict of Nantes triggered the largest single religious migration to England before the 20th century — around 50,000 Huguenots, most settling in Spitalfields and reshaping silk-weaving, finance and skilled trades.