St. Martin le Grand, a precinct within the walls of London, was both a sanctuary and a liberty: it offered asylum to accused felons, and it allowed immigrant craftsmen to work and sell within its bounds despite London’s strict restrictions on alien labor. St. Martin’s privileges had long rankled civic governors and guilds, sparking a series of legal and political skirmishes between the City and St. Martin’s in the 1520s and 1530s. This article examines St. Martin’s community of Dutch and French immigrants, who constituted the densest concentration of aliens in the metropolitan area. Living cheek by jowl with felonious sanctuary seekers, the strangers came to share both a conceptual and a physical space with the felons who sought St. Martin’s sanctuary privilege. In the reign of Henry VIII, the control of labor and retailing came to be tightly imbricated with the larger issues surrounding crime, mercy, and punishment that sanctuary inspired.
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Fall 2013
Issue Editors
Research Article|
September 01 2013
Stranger Artisans and the London Sanctuary of St. Martin le Grand in the Reign of Henry VIII
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (2013) 43 (3): 545–571.
Citation
Shannon McSheffrey; Stranger Artisans and the London Sanctuary of St. Martin le Grand in the Reign of Henry VIII. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 1 September 2013; 43 (3): 545–571. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-2338599
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