Henry IV (71 page)

The government was well aware of this, and Henry did his best to protect foreign trade. Despite this, his reign witnessed an unmistakable hardening of attitudes towards aliens, building on the sharper definition of English nationality which had emerged during the second half of the fourteenth century and encompassing a wider range of restrictions on aliens'
freedom to live and trade as they wished while in England.
⁵⁶
Commercial, collective or personal concessions, which increasingly included denization, gave foreigners a degree of protection at law, but made little headway against the popular xenophobia of the time. In 1411, a petition was presented to parliament from Gascons who had been driven out of their land by war and forced to resettle in England. Some had married Englishwomen, others had bought property or established businesses, but the English continued to call them aliens ‘and many other undesirable names’, poor reward for their constant allegiance to the crown. Having nowhere else to go, they begged the king to have their loyalty publicly proclaimed in towns and elsewhere, and to be able to live and work ‘as fully as your other lieges born within your said realm of England’. Henry granted their request and ordered letters patent to be issued to them, but this did not make them English, which by common consent was a matter of birthplace and parentage.
⁵⁷

Yet compared to the Welsh or Irish, the Gascons could count themselves fortunate. They had not been degraded by the ethnic duality erected in Wales and Ireland during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which built on ideas of ‘barbarism’ and was now enshrined in national legislation.
⁵⁸
The statutes of 1401–2 proscribed Welshmen not just in Wales but also in England, where they were forbidden to purchase property, carry arms or enjoy borough privileges, while Welsh tenants wishing to remain in England had to provide sureties for good behaviour and swear allegiance to the crown (as, later, did Scots residing in England). Letters from the king demanded enforcement of these laws, and the stalled career of Adam Usk as well as the petition presented by Rees ap Thomas to the parliament of
1413 are evidence of their efficacy. In the summer of 1402, random slayings of Welshmen were being reported at Oxford and in the border counties.
⁵⁹

The racist laws against the Welsh and Irish went much further than the hosting or commercial restrictions imposed on foreign merchants in the fifteenth century, but even the latter moved well beyond protectionism to tap into a more consciously articulated rhetoric of nationalism. The McCarthyite mentality of Henry's early years contributed to this, especially in the case of Bretons and Frenchmen, but it was the Pirate War that really threatened to undermine England's commercial relations. Fortunately, Henry's personal contacts helped to counteract the bad feeling that followed. It is not a little ironic that it was during the reign of the most widely travelled English king of the later Middle Ages that the ‘rampant new Englishness’ of the fifteenth century acquired its statutory cutting edge.
⁶⁰

¹
This anti-alien sentiment reached a crescendo in the 1450s:
The Views of the Hosts of Alien Merchants 1440–1444
, ed. H. Bradley (London Record Society 46, London, 2012), xi–xvi; A. Ruddock,
Italian Merchants and Shipping in Southampton 1270–1600
(Southampton, 1951), 162–86.

²
C. Barron, ‘Richard II and London’, in
Richard II: The Art of Kingship
, 129–54, at pp. 140–2.

³
W. M. Ormrod, ‘A Problem of Precedence’, in
The Age of Edward III
, ed. J. Bothwell (Woodbridge, 2001), 133–53, at p. 153.

⁴
PROME
, viii.39–40 (staplers exempted from having to deposit an ounce of gold at the Mint for each sack of wool exported), 74 (preference to be given to English ships in carrying cargoes. For Henry's general confirmation of privileges to alien merchants see E 28/7, no. 17 (15 Nov. 1399).

⁵
The Views of the Hosts
, xiv–xx. For spying, see below, pp. 411–14. There were rumours that Italians were involved in the 1403 Percy rebellion (Bradley, ‘The Datini Factors’, 69).

⁶
Nine months later, a consolidated petition from ‘the merchants of Italy’ managed to secure the repeal of some of the more irksome commercial regulations, but their request to have the Hosting Law rescinded met with refusal; the Genoese had also succeeded in 1402 in winning exemption from ‘scavage’, the subsidy paid for goods brought from Southampton to London (
PROME
, viii.171–2, 213–15, 274–5, 303–5).

⁷
PROME
, viii, 233, 239–40, 243;
SAC II
, 392–3.

⁸
C 49/48, no. 8 (template writ for an alien to remain, agreed in the council on 1 July and proclaimed on 9 July; licensees were to be allowed to keep their goods and chattels in England for life and not to be molested by royal officials); E 401/638, 14 August 1406, records 105 fines from aliens, the largest of £33 from the Genoese Matthew Spicer; no one else paid more than £10 and most ten shillings or less; six cobblers paid twenty pence each.

⁹
Walsingham said that Joan's two daughters were expelled, but they might have returned to Brittany because their brother the duke planned to marry them; yet most of the aliens expelled in 1406 were Bretons, leaving about fifteen with the queen. These included her chamberlain, Charles of Navarre, and her secretary, John de Boyas, but she also had non-Bretons in her household: Sir Hugh Luttrell was her steward and Galvano Trenta of Lucca keeper of her jewels (
SAC II
, 392–3, 474–5; Henneman,
Olivier de Clisson
, 197–8;
Foedera
, viii.319, 429;
CGR 1402–4
, no. 157). The summer and autumn of 1407 saw further restrictions on aliens' right to engage in the London retail trade (
PROME
, viii.331, 335–7, 351–2, 373;
SAC II
, 474–5; Lloyd,
England and the German Hanse
, 110–11).

¹⁰
For Henry's generosity to foreigners, see Kingsford,
English Historical Literature
, 277 (‘Southern Chronicle’).

¹¹
Between October and December 1402, Henry entertained Byzantine, Spanish and German embassies; in the autumn of 1405, Danish, Scottish and French embassies (E 101/404/21, fos 38–40; BL Harleian MS 319, fo. 41).

¹²
E 403/573, 8 May 1402 (Henry wounded E'me's thumb –
pollice
– with a
gladio longo
and gave him an annuity of £10);
Johannis Lelandi
, vi.300. Périgord accompanied the king to Scotland in 1400 (E 403/565, 21 Feb. 1400; E 403/571, 28 Oct. 1400; E 404/16, nos. 773–4,
CDS
, iv.116); for the bishop of Tournai, see E 403, 3 Dec. 1409.

¹³
Above, pp. 250–1. (Dartasso); Siglem bought horses for the king at Frankfurt (E 404/15, no. 411; E 404/16, no. 542); for Hauberk and Pallas see E 404/15, 10 Dec. 1399; E 403/567, 5 June 1400.

¹⁴
The king gave Courte two manors in Hampshire in May 1408 to build a chapel, because he ‘has no manor or place in England in which to build it’ (
CPR 1405–8
, 406). For von Klux, see A. Reitemeier,
Aussenpolitik im Spatmittelalter: Die diplomatiken Beziehungen zwischen dem Reich und England 1377–1422
(Paderborn, 1999), 258–60, 280–3, 497–9; E 403/606, 16 Feb. 1411.

¹⁵
PROME
, viii.337, 351–2;
Giles
, 51–2;
SAC II
, 239.

¹⁶
Lloyd,
England and the German Hanse
, 109–57, 376; P. Dollinger,
The German Hansa
, trans. D. Ault and S. Steinberg (Stanford, 1970), 55–8.

¹⁷
Foedera
, viii.112;
CPR 1399–1401
, 57; J. Bolton,
The Medieval English Economy 1150–1500
(London, 1980), 306–11; M. Postan, ‘Economic and Political Relations of England and the Hanse from 1400 to 1475’, in
Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century
, ed. E. Power and M. Postan (London, 1933), 91–153.

¹⁸
Foedera
, viii.203, 269, 284, 287, 297, 305; BL Stowe 142, fos 4–5; Lloyd,
England and the German Hanse
, 112–16.

¹⁹
RHL
, i.162–6, 208, 238, 240, 242, 251, 258–64, 371–2, 382, 401; ii.354–62 (summary of the ambassadors' dealings with the Grand-Master and the Hansa);
Foedera
, viii.364; Dollinger,
German Hansa
, 390–1 (English complaints). The chief culprit in Hanseatic eyes was the merchant-pirate John Brandon of Lynn, for whom see below, p. 432.

²⁰
Foedera
, viii.395–6, 459, 466–7. Their commission was renewed in November 1406, and again in February 1407 excluding Brampton, who by then was dead; in February 1407 they were also empowered to make an alliance with King Eric of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, Henry's son-in-law.

²¹
E 403/585, 26 March 1406 (proclamation of truce); cf.
PROME
, viii.329.

²²
Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, ii.67–78 and iv.1–21; cf.
PROME
, viii.341.

²³
RHL
, ii.202, 236–46, 257, 264;
Foedera
, viii.597–9.

²⁴
This probably explains the survival of several memoranda of claims and counter-claims, relating to Stralsund in particular, surviving in Canterbury cathedral's archives:
Literae Cantuarienses
, ed. J. B. Sheppard (3 vols, RS, London, 1887–9), iii.78–107.

²⁵
SAC II
, 594–7; BL Cotton Cleopatra E. ii, fo. 266 (renumbered 279): Henry's letter was dated 24 Nov. 1410. In 1407 Henry was said to have remarked to the Hanseatic envoy Arndt von Dassel that he had spent his ‘gadling days’ crusading with the Knights and felt himself to be a ‘child of Prussia’ (Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, iv.7–9).

²⁶
Signet Letters
, no. 726; E 403/602, 3 Dec., 1 March. The second instalment was issued from the exchequer on 1 March 1410, though possibly not handed to the Hanseatic envoys for three months (Lloyd,
England and the German Hanse
, 120–6, who calls the Treaty ‘a diplomatic triumph for the English’).

²⁷
E 403/609, 23 Feb. 1412;
POPC
, ii.10; Lloyd,
England and the German Hanse
, 125.

²⁸
CPR 1408–13
, 62, 308, 319, 321, 383–5, 400. Relations with Bergen were often fraught: it was said that in 1407 they had bound hand and foot one hundred fishermen from Cromer and Blakeney (Norfolk) and drowned them at Vinde Fjord (Norway):
Foedera
, viii.723–4; Wylie,
Henry the Fourth
, iv.11; Lloyd,
England and the German Hanse
, 137–8.

²⁹
Barron,
London
, 15, 113. Germans lived in the Steelyard on the Thames, Italians in Langbourn and Broad Street; ‘Lombards’ was often used generically for Italians in England.

³⁰
The
Libelle of Englyshe Polycye
(1436) characterized Italian imports as ‘Apes and japes and marmysettes taylede/Nifles, trifles, that litell have avaylede’ (Barron,
London
, 113–14).

³¹
Steel,
Receipt
, 146–7; W. Childs, ‘Anglo-Italian Contacts in the Fourteenth Century’, in
Chaucer and the Italian Trecento
, ed. P. Boitani (Cambridge, 1983), 65–87.

³²
Ruddock,
Italian Merchants
, 52–9;
The Views of Hosts
, xi.

³³
In May 1404 they lent the king 1,000 marks, repaid through exemption from customs duties:
Foedera
, viii.358–9.

³⁴
CCR 1409–13
, 10, 22.

³⁵
Foedera
, viii.420, 717–18, 773–4;
CPR 1408–13
, 461–2;
CCR 1409–13
, 437 (with diatribe against the Genoese); E 403/591, 2 June 1407; Ruddock,
Italian Merchants
, 58–9.

³⁶
Calendar of State Papers Venice
, i.39, 44; E 403/565, 17 Dec. (1399);
RHL
, i.424; cf. Lloyd,
England and the German Hanse
, 119.

³⁷
Foedera
, viii.595 (August 1409), 655 (October 1410), 714 (January 1412); E 403/602, 9 Oct. 1409;
Antient Kalendars
, ii.77–8, gives this as £2,000.

³⁸
G. Holmes, ‘Florentine Merchants in England, 1346–1436’,
Economic History Review
(1960), 193–208. It was through ‘Lombard’ merchants that Henry paid Mowbray's debts in Venice (E 403/565, 17 Dec. 1399). After their conquest of Pisa in 1406 the Florentines acquired a port to send ships north, and before the end of Henry's reign some of these visited England; one of their carracks was seized by William Longe in 1411 (
CPR 1408–13
, 317). However, international exchange was their main source of profit in England. Henry did get about £3,000 in loans from the Albertini, mainly in 1406–7 (Ruddock,
Italian Merchants
, 57–8).

³⁹
PROME
, viii.170, 213–14, 436, 446–7, 464. The
Libelle
would describe the Florentine exchange brokers as ‘wiping our nose with our own sleeve’ (Harriss,
Shaping the Nation
, 270).

⁴⁰
CPR 1408–13
, 101.

⁴¹
Steel,
Receipt
, 146–7, counted around £5,000 of Italian loans to Henry, but did not include the 1,500 marks from the Genoese and Florentines in May 1404, 500 marks from the Albertini in July 1406, the 2,500 marks from two Lucchese merchants whom Henry encountered on the way to Shrewsbury in July 1403, or perhaps the 1,800 marks advanced by a consortium of Italian merchants in June 1410 (E 401/638, 28 July 1406; E 404/22, no. 278;
Foedera
, viii.358–9;
POPC
, ii.114). Loans were also received from Italians in the summer of 1400 (E 403/567, 15 July 1400). Relations with Milan cooled following the death of Henry's friend Duke Gian Galeazzo, and the eruption of his quarrel with the duke's son-in-law, Louis of Orléans, in 1402; nevertheless, they remained cordial, and Henry encouraged the marriage of the earl of Kent to Lucia Visconti in 1407 (cf.
RHL II
, 21–2).