This book provides a vivid and accessible history of first-generation immigrants to England in the later Middle Ages. Accounting for upwards of two percent of the population and coming from all parts of Europe and beyond, immigrants spread out over the kingdom, settling in the countryside as well as in towns, taking work as agricultural labourers, skilled craftspeople and professionals. Often encouraged and welcomed, sometimes vilified and victimised, immigrants were always on the social and political agenda. Immigrant England is the first book to address a phenomenon and issue of vital concern to English people at the time, to their descendants living in the United Kingdom today and to all those interested in the historical dimensions of immigration policy, attitudes to ethnicity and race and concepts of Englishness and Britishness.

The essays collected in this volume identify and analyse the presence of immigrants in late medieval England. Drawing on unique evidence from the alien subsidies collected in England between 1440 and 1487 and other newly accessible archival resources, and deploying a wide range of historical and cultural methods, they reveal the considerable contribution of foreign-born people to the economy, society and culture of England in the age of the Black Death, the Hundred Years War and the Wars of the Roses.

The controversial, bestselling book (37,500 hardcover copies sold) that helps define the debate about one of the most important and hotly contested issues facing America: immigration.

Using both canonical and underappreciated texts, Alien Albion argues that early modern England was far less unified and xenophobic than literary critics have previously suggested. Juxtaposing literary texts from the period with legal, religious, and economic documents, Scott Oldenburg uncovers how immigrants to England forged ties with their English hosts and how those relationships were reflected in literature that imagined inclusive, multicultural communities. Through discussions of civic pageantry, the plays of dramatists including William Shakespeare, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton, the poetry of Anne Dowriche, and the prose of Thomas Deloney, Alien Albion challenges assumptions about the origins of English national identity and the importance of religious, class, and local identities in the early modern era.