ALIENS, MERCHANTS AND ENGLISHNESS
It was not only with England's neighbours that tension eased during the middle years of the reign. Relations with its trading partners – Germans, Italians, Castilians – had also suffered, partly from the collateral damage of the Pirate War, partly from the upsurge of anti-alien sentiment in fifteenth-century England.1 Anti-alien feeling was broadly directed at three categories of foreigner: first and most persistently, alien merchants who came to trade, some of whom formed semi-permanent communities, predominantly in London; secondly, foreigners attached to the royal court; thirdly, foreign religious serving the dependent cells of continental monasteries, the so-called ‘alien’ priories. Except in respect to the Welsh and Irish, whose inferiority few Englishmen cared to doubt, Henry did not encourage xenophobia. It undermined commerce and thus revenues, and complicated foreign relations. On the other hand, he benefited from the widespread feeling that Richard II had been too eager to please the French and to allow foreign merchants into the London retail trade.2 Henry could certainly not be accused of Francophilia, however, and although he welcomed foreigners to his court, he presented himself from the start as first and foremost an English king, using the English language to claim the throne and reversing the legend on the great seal from Rex Francie et Anglie, as it had read since Edward III claimed the crown of France in 1340, to Rex Anglie et Francie.3 At the heart of his government lay an English affinity and an unequivocally English monarchy (Henry V was the first English king since 1066 to have four English grandparents). The unashamedly jingoistic martial combats over which the king presided also heightened nationalistic feeling, as did the enmity from across the Channel and the Welsh rebellion.
There was pressure on the king from the start of the reign to curb foreign privileges. The English staplers and Londoners won a number of concessions in the 1399 parliament, and although Henry insisted that ‘friendly’ aliens should not be disadvantaged, some Italian merchants considered relocating from London to other ports.4 That they decided to stay was certainly not due to any moderation of anti-alien sentiment. Suspected not just of enjoying preferential mercantile dispensations but also of spying, piracy, religious irregularity, treasonable conspiracy and even sexual deviance, foreigners were subjected to increasingly strict supervision, both as to where and how they spent their money and where they were permitted to reside.5 In the 1402 parliament it was enacted that what they earned from imports should not be removed from the kingdom but spent on English exports; eighteen months later a statute was passed requiring all visiting merchants to lodge in English households so that their activities could be monitored by hosts. ‘Those who want to oppose this petition’, declared its proponents, ‘know nothing of the frauds, artifices and deceptions of the alien merchants, through whom the common profit of the realm is destroyed and ruined’; the intention was not to expel all aliens, but to keep specie within the realm, ‘to the perpetual benefit of the treasury of this realm of England’.6 Yet if they did not want to expel all aliens, they certainly wished to be rid of some of them: supporters of the ‘antipope’ (the Avignon papacy) were to depart forthwith, as were all aliens in the households of the king or queen apart from a few named exceptions; Scotsmen who declined to swear an oath of allegiance to Henry were also to leave, and all Welshmen were to be kept away from the king's person. The January 1404 parliament also passed a statute expelling almost all French monks from their dependent priories in England.7
By this time, with Breton raiding and piracy at its height, attention had come to focus on the court, with Queen Joan falling under particular scrutiny, and although Henry did his best to mitigate the effect of the 1404 statute for his queen, the virulently anti-alien parliament which met two years later, much influenced by the London mercantile lobby, maintained the pressure. In March, during the first session, the king was asked to remove all Frenchmen and Bretons from the realm. He replied that this would be done as soon as possible, but on 8 May he was required to name a date for their expulsion, which he duly did, first 15 May and then, to allow them time to pay their debts, 24 May. He did, however, exempt any aliens who were lieges of the English crown (Gascons, for example, or those who had sworn allegiance) and it was agreed that certain aliens who were prepared to pay a fine to remain should be allowed to do so; by mid-August more than a hundred such licences had been issued.8 The commons remained wary, however, and when parliament reconvened in October they insisted that this concession should not extend to those named on a schedule of forty-four persons (mostly Bretons in the queen's service) submitted to the steward of the king's household. The thirty-one articles of December further stipulated that any aliens who were still in England contrary to the ordinance must pay a fine by Easter 1407, or suffer imprisonment and forfeiture of all their goods and chattels.9
Despite the king's reputation for generosity to foreigners, those who were attached to his, rather than to the queen's, household attracted little hostility, partly because they were seen as transient (even if in some cases they were not), partly because they were more obviously useful as well as less conspicuous at a court where so many visiting dignitaries were to be found.10 Around twenty of the king's retained knights were foreigners, and at least one party of ambassadors was usually in attendance.11 Knights errant such as Jean de Werchin or the earl of Mar hungered to joust against the best that England could offer, preferably in the king's presence, while Bertolf van der E'me from the Low Countries went one better and engaged in sword play with the king himself, getting his thumb nicked in the process. High status prisoners of war such as the king of Scotland and the earl of Douglas, or impecunious exiles such as Archambaud, count of Périgord, George Dunbar, and William, bishop of Tournai, often accompanied the king, sometimes even to the battlefield.12 Some foreigners such as the Navarrese esquire Janico Dartasso and the Bohemian knights Roger Siglem, Arnold Pallas and Nicholas Hauberk had served Richard II for many years, but slipped effortlessly into Henry's service and proved loyal and useful – Dartasso in Ireland, Hauberk as a chamber knight, Siglem and Pallas as ambassadors to the empire.13 Others were valued for their special skills, such as Richard Garner of Piedmont who managed the recoinage of 1411–12, the German gunners who designed and maintained Henry's artillery, or his French, Italian or Portuguese physicians. Two foreigners were especially favoured by the king: the Milanese Francis de Courte, whom Henry knighted and granted letters of denization, and who by 1402 had become a royal chamber knight; and Hartung von Klux from Silesia, whom he had met in 1392–3 and knighted on the Scottish campaign in 1400, and whose active diplomatic career in Henry's service culminated in 1411 with an embassy to Sigismund of Hungary. Five years later, along with Sigismund, von Klux would be elected to the Order of the Garter, but soon after this he returned to Germany where he pursued a fruitful career in the imperial service until his death in 1445.14 It would have been difficult for the commons or anyone else to gainsay the usefulness to the king of such men.
There was, moreover, one alien community that was consistently exempted from the parliamentary acts of expulsion of Henry's reign, and from the additional subsidies sometimes imposed on foreign merchants: the Germans or Hansards.15 Anglo-Hanseatic trade was at its peak around this time, and generally speaking English kings protected the Hansards; the goods they brought from the Baltic – Rhenish wine, beeswax, beer, furs and skins, timber, amber, copper and iron, grain and much else – were valued, as were their role in the cloth trade (which accounted for 90 per cent of what they exported) and the loans they provided. However, there were times when native pressure was hard to resist, for English merchants resented the privileges granted to the Hansa by Edward III, while Hanseatic merchants resented English attempts to increase their share of Baltic trade.16 The late 1380s had witnessed the seizure of several ships and the threat of a Hanseatic embargo, but since then relations had calmed. Henry made no attempt at his accession to restrict Hansa privileges, although he did appease the English merchants by reissuing a list of the conditions upon which they had been granted, which included undertakings that English merchants in Prussia would receive similar privileges and that only ‘authentic’ German merchants – those with letters of accreditation from Hansa towns – be allowed to enjoy them. Hanseatic representatives were also told to come before the king to answer complaints from their English counterparts.17 Unfortunately the Pirate War soon led to an alarming increase in the number of such cases: sixteen Hanseatic cogs suspected of carrying French or Scottish goods were captured, robbed or destroyed in 1402, a further twenty in 1403, and inevitably there were reprisals against English shipping. In June 1403 Henry wrote to Conrad von Jungingen, Grand-Master of the Teutonic Knights, to invite his ambassadors to England to negotiate a settlement.18
Despite the almost competitively polite tone of the correspondence between Henry and Conrad, who had crusaded together in Livonia in the early 1390s, the resulting talks were a struggle. An agreement of October 1403 promised a review of claims and protection until Easter 1404 for merchants on each side, as long as they did not engage in unlicensed trading ventures. However, a spate of outrages in 1404 (a further twenty-two Hanseatic ships captured or robbed) led to the expulsion of English merchants from Prussia by the autumn; there was even talk of a general north European boycott of English trade, though this made little progress.19 It was thus decided at the October 1404 parliament to send as ambassadors to Marienburg Sir William Esturmy, an expert in northern European diplomacy, the chancery clerk John Kington and the Londoner and former privy councillor William Brampton.20 They managed to get the ban on English merchants lifted from October 1405, although it was made clear that this was dependent on a satisfactory agreement being reached, but settling the numerous compensation claims took longer.21 The English claimed 4,535 nobles (£1,512) for Prussian attacks on English shipping; the Prussians countered with a claim of 5,120 nobles for English attacks. This, however, was far from the full extent of Hanseatic grievances. One of the problems in negotiating with the Hansa was that although the towns leagued together when solidarity might further their interests, each also had its own agenda, and before returning the English ambassadors undertook a tour of the Baltic to discover what other claims were being pursued. The Livonians, now subject to the Grand-Master, claimed 8,027 nobles, the merchants of Hamburg 1,117, Bremen 4,414, Stralsund 7,416, Lübeck 8,690, and so forth. Some of the alleged attacks had taken place twenty or more years earlier and there was much room for debate about precise sums, the compensation payable for killings on each side, and those who were responsible. The English not only disputed the sums but also asserted that reciprocal seizures by the men of Stralsund and Greifswald easily covered their losses and that merchants from Rostock and Wismar still had English goods to the value of 32,800 nobles in their possession.
Against this background of claims, counter-claims and sanctions, a settlement was eventually drafted at a meeting held at The Hague (Holland) in August 1407. The English commissioners agreed to pay 8,957 nobles to the Prussians, 22,096 to the Livonians, and 1,372 to the merchants of Hamburg, making a total of around £10,800 sterling; during the next year Henry and Ulrich von Jungingen (the new Grand-Master, his brother having died) exchanged letters agreeing the terms.22 The money was to be paid in six instalments of £1,772 between November 1409 and Easter 1412; English claims for compensation were reduced to just £255 (766 nobles).23 Naturally matters did not end there. Not all claims had been settled, and it was suggested that, as chancellor, Archbishop Arundel might be asked to consider those still outstanding.24 Moreover, although the Grand-Master and his Livonian subjects were content with the treaty, the northern Hanseatic towns opposed it, for they stood to gain very little. To some extent, therefore, the English succeeded by playing off different powers within the fragile League against each other, but Henry had also been lucky in his timing, for the Prussians and Livonians were facing the military might of Poland-Lithuania and looking to appease potential allies. Little did it avail them. Disaster struck on 15 July 1410, when Ulrich von Jungingen was killed and hundreds of the Teutonic Order's knights were either slaughtered or captured by a Polish-Lithuanian army at the battle of Grűnwald (or Tannenberg). Reactions to this in England were mixed. Walsingham had little sympathy, pointing out that those against whom the knights waged war were themselves Christians. Henry, however, mindful no doubt of his warm reception in Prussia twenty years earlier, wrote to the pope to ask him to use his influence to mitigate the crippling financial penalties imposed by the Polish king who, he alleged, had employed ‘Saracens’ in his army, which made Henry wary of continuing his payments to the Order in case the money fell into the hands of infidels.25 This sounds disingenuous, although thus far Henry had done his best to comply with the treaty, handing over the first two instalments of £1,772 each on 3 December 1409 and 1 March 1410.26 Moreover, payments did not cease, although they slowed: the council noted in March 1411 that £1,772 was needed for ‘the men of Prussia’, and in February 1412 a further £666 was released. Thus by the time Henry died nearly half the debt had been cleared, but there were no further payments after 1413.27
It was not the king's intention that this obligation should fall on the exchequer; merchant communities were responsible for the attacks, and royal officers were directed to levy contributions from them, a task neither popular nor easy. Merchants from Scarborough had to be threatened with imprisonment to persuade them to hand over the 400 marks at which they were assessed, and a new dispute between Boston and Bergen, the Hanseatic hub in Norway, threatened another breakdown in relations and led to the detention of nine Norwegians at Boston, although following undertakings from the Norwegians their men were released in the spring of 1412.28 Nevertheless, the fact that agreement had been reached in 1407–9 was impressive considering the complexity of the matters under discussion, and Henry continued to do what he could to secure restitution of the Hansards' goods and ships and to uphold their privileges in England. The Pirate War had severely tested this relationship, but goodwill, diplomatic commitment and extrinsic pressure eventually settled a standoff that it was in the interest of neither government to prolong.
The number of Germans who resided continuously in London was around thirty, roughly half the size of the Italian – or ‘Lombard’ – community in the capital.29 A hundred years earlier, the Italians had enjoyed great economic power in England, controlling much of the wool trade and acting as bankers to the crown and aristocracy, but with the crash of the major Italian banks in the mid-fourteenth century and the decline of wool exports their influence was much diminished. Even so, they were still both prominent and unpopular: their share of the import market to London was around 30 per cent in the early fifteenth century, and they were second only to the Hansa as exporters of English cloth, in return for which they imported spices, delicacies and fine textiles from the eastern Mediterranean – one of the reasons for their unpopularity, for such luxuries were the preserve of the rich and seen by some as superfluous.30 Moreover, as recently as the 1380s some 90 per cent of loans to the crown from aliens (£45,800) had come from Italians.31 Most of this was advanced by Genoese and Florentine merchants, but from the mid-1390s Anglo-Genoese relations deteriorated. In 1395, encouraged by Philip of Burgundy, Genoa moved its north European staple from Southampton to Bruges; in the following year, the city fell under French domination (Henry's old friend Marshal Boucicault became governor in 1401), and during the Pirate War Genoese carracks and galleys were suspected of aiding the French.32 Yet there were still Genoese merchants in England, who could be tapped for loans,33 and in 1405 a Genoese ambassador visited. Perhaps as a result of this, in April 1407 the Genoese were granted the right to sail to England, unload, pick up new cargoes, cross to Flanders and then return to England to unload and reload before sailing back to the Mediterranean, a valuable privilege given the jealousy with which English merchants guarded the cross-Channel trade.34 Soon after this, however, Anglo-Genoese relations turned sour. In June 1407 a royal sergeant-at-arms was sent to Southampton, the Genoese port of choice, to stop any carrack or galley from Genoa leaving without special licence, and in early 1412 orders were issued not to allow any person to send money or goods out of the country if they were for the use or profit of any Genoese. Behind this lay the complaint of a powerful group of London merchants, who claimed they had been deceived into sailing into Genoa only to find their ships and goods – valued by them at £24,000 – seized. Despite remonstrations from Henry, the Genoese prevaricated, and a month before his death the king gave the Londoners letters of reprisal against any Genoese merchandise they could find up to a limit of £10,000. By this time, they were ‘the king's enemies of Genoa’.35
Genoese irritation stemmed not merely from the fact that the Londoners were trying to break into the Mediterranean market; they also resented the favours shown by the king to their rivals, the Venetians and Florentines. Henry encouraged Venetian commerce, writing to the Doge four days after his accession to assure him that his subjects would be treated ‘like our own lieges’ in England, and two months later sent £1,000 to Venice to cover the debts left by Thomas Mowbray, who had died there. In 1407, the Venetian Senate noted that the English king was ‘most friendly’ towards them and voted to allocate two hundred ducats to buy presents for him and Queen Joan.36 Two years later the Venetians received a licence to bring their ‘Flanders Galleys’ to compete with the Genoese in the lucrative cross-Channel traffic, although their access to this was only permitted for a year at a time and at the special request of the Doge. Nevertheless, during the last few years of Henry's reign it was renewed annually, although probably not freely, for in October 1409 Venetian merchants paid 2,000 marks to the exchequer as a ‘concord’ for having evaded customs in the past; the simultaneous receipt of their licence was probably not coincidental.37 The Venetian presence in London increased markedly during the first third of the fifteenth century.
One role in which the Venetians showed little interest was that of bankers. This niche was occupied by the Florentines, as it had been during the first half of the fourteenth century, although on a much reduced scale. The leading Florentine firm in London comprised the Albertini family, who had been exiled from Florence in 1401 but reacted by setting up profitable businesses in France, Spain and England as well as in several Italian towns. They had acted as Henry's bankers in 1393 and Archbishop Arundel's during his exile in Florence in 1398. However, it was not by lending to kings that they made their money, as the Frescobaldi, Bardi and Peruzzi had done in earlier times, but by acting as agents for Englishmen wishing to transfer money abroad, in particular clerics who needed to make payments to Rome.38 The commons criticized this traffic, regarding the resulting outflow of specie as scarcely less injurious to the realm than the removal of the profits made by foreign merchants, but as long as England remained a Catholic country Englishmen would continue to seek papal provisions, go on pilgrimage and engage in litigation at the papal court.39 In 1409, following the Council of Pisa, it was Filippo Alberti who, along with Richard Whittington, was responsible for collecting nearly £1,000 for the payment of Peter's Pence and procurations to the newly elected Pope Alexander V.40
Henry's favourable treatment of the Venetians and Florentines reflected the changing balance of power in Italy: Florence's conquest of Pisa in 1406 and Venice's defeat of Genoa in the War of Chioggia (1378–81) helped to shape the political map of Italy in the fifteenth century, with Venice, Florence and Milan emerging as the great territorial powers in the northern half of the peninsula. Personal contacts – the favourable impression Henry had created at Venice in 1392–3; his and Arundel's prior dealings with the Albertini – strengthened these political bonds, although none of this could mask the decline in Italian influence in England as either bankers or traders since the first half of the fourteenth century.41
Iberian merchants also suffered during the Pirate War, although Henry's personal contacts once again helped to limit the fallout, for his sister Philippa was married to João I, king of Portugal (1385–1433), and his half-sister Catherine to Enrique II, king of Castile (1390–1406). Diplomacy with Castile needed to circumvent the Franco-Castilian alliance of 1369 (primarily an anti-English compact) as well as the Schism, for Castile, like France, adhered to the Avignon papacy. Nevertheless, an exchange of embassies in 1400 augured well, and by July 1402 Enrique was addressing Henry as his ‘dear and beloved brother, the king of England’.42 Relations with England's ally Portugal were more straightforward, though not entirely so, since for the Portuguese to welcome Henry's usurpation with too much enthusiasm would have risked antagonizing France and Castile. Yet welcome it they did, and Queen Philippa, to a greater extent than her half-sister, took seriously her role as a bridge between her native and adopted kingdoms.43 Her husband, the victor of Aljubarrotta, was a forceful and cultured monarch whose friendship Henry cultivated, nominating him in 1400 as the first foreign king to become a Knight of the Garter. By 1403 João was prepared to risk French wrath by recognizing his brother-in-law as king, not just of England but of France as well.44
Three years later Enrique of Castile also became a Knight of the Garter. By this time goodwill was sorely needed, for between 1401 and 1403 the Castilians counted around fifty incidents in which their ships or cargoes had been seized by the English.45 Portugal suffered much less from the Pirate War, although at times English customs officials seized Portuguese goods on the pretext that João had outstanding debts to the English crown dating back to the 1380s.46 The latter was true, although Henry did not press him for these, and was quick both to forbid such seizures and to help secure restitution of ships and cargoes, as he did with Castilian ships; it was perhaps in recognition of his efforts, as well as to remove any pretext for seizures, that in December 1403 Enrique and João offered to include England in the ten-year truce which they had recently concluded.47 Henry accepted the offer with alacrity. Not surprisingly, this did not please the French. In the spring of 1404, envoys from Paris reminded Enrique of his treaty obligations and requested ships and men to attack English fleets and ports, but, according to the monk of Saint-Denis, the Castilian king was persuaded by his wife to limit the extent of his aid; in the following year he allowed the adventurer Don Pero Niño to man three galleys to assist the French, but the main Castilian fleet sent north appears to have been under orders simply to trade, despite Niño's attempts to persuade the admiral otherwise.48 Undaunted, Niño teamed up with the Orléanist Charles de Savoisy, with whom he spent the summer and autumn raiding the English coast, taking particular pleasure in firing Poole (Dorset), the home of that scourge of French and Castilian shipping, Henry Pay. Yet when the Castilian–Portuguese truce was renewed in December 1405, England was still included.49
The later years of Henry's reign were a fruitful time in Anglo-Iberian relations. João did his best to promote good relations with his ‘most beloved and most esteemed brother and friend’ the English king, and English merchants were welcomed in Lisbon. Philippa's influence was crucial, and it is with justification that she is sometimes seen as instrumental in forging the Anglo-Portuguese alliance which has endured continuously for more than six centuries.50 In Castile, meanwhile, the death of King Enrique in December 1406 left his infant son Juan as his heir, and for the next decade Queen Catherine and the late king's brother Fernando of Antequera exercised joint regency in the kingdom. Under their influence relations with England continued to improve, and when the Franco-Castilian treaty was renegotiated in 1408 the French, no longer in a position to dictate terms following Louis of Orléans's assassination, recognized Castile's right to make truces for up to a year with the English. Pilgrim traffic to Santiago de Compostella grew, as did trade and friendly intercourse between the two countries, characteristic of which was Henry's suggestion to his sister in 1411 that they exchange sixty letters of safe-conduct to be used by those wishing to visit each other's countries.51 At one point Catherine also offered herself as a mediator between England and France. This did not happen, nor did the lasting peace sought by both sides, but the truce was renewed without difficulty on an annual basis and further complaints by merchants on each side were dealt with in a cordial fashion.52 In 1412, Fernando also became king of Aragon. Henry had had few dealings with the Aragonese – a sign in itself of good Anglo-Castilian relations – but Fernando's record of cooperation allowed Henry V to open a diplomatic dialogue with him almost as soon as he came to the throne.53 Yet the more tangible benefit accruing to Henry V from his father's Iberian policy was the slackening of ties between France and Castile which, despite occasional rumours of hostile intent, played little part in the renewed Anglo-French conflict after 1415.
No single factor accounted for the fluctuations in trade patterns during Henry's reign. Taxation policy, money supply, the state of the foreign markets, industrial growth and decline, weather and disease all played their part. Even so, it is hard not to be struck by the correlation between slump and boom and war and truce. Taxable exports fell by 50 per cent in 1402–3, from an annual average of 15,000 sacks of wool and 43,000 cloths during the first three years of the reign to 10,000 and 27,000, respectively. This was the time when the Pirate War was at its most intense. Two years later exports were still sluggish (12,000 sacks of wool and 22,000 cloths), but in 1405–6, when the Pirate War more or less ended, the numbers rose sharply, to 16,500 and 37,000, respectively. The following year saw another slump, but between 1407 and 1409 recovery resumed, reaching 17,000 sacks of wool in 1408–9 and 36,000 cloths in 1409–10.54 This was the period which saw the most productive efforts to agree political and mercantile truces, and England's shipping and ports were more secure, as was the revenue accruing to the exchequer. Including tunnage and poundage, the revenue differential between years such as 1402–3 or 1404–5 and 1405–6 or 1408–9 was around £20,000 – between £60,000 and £70,000 in the good years, £40,000 or £50,000 in the bad.55 Peace meant more money to spend and fewer wars to spend it on; the easing of hostilities and financial recovery were mutually supportive during the middle years of the reign, each feeding off the other.
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).
42 RHL I, 108.
43 Although she never returned to England after 1386, she corresponded regularly with her brother and others in England, at times letting her wishes be known with some vigour, as when she helped to secure a pardon for her old friend Bishop Henry Despenser in 1401 (Russell, English Intervention, 541–6; J. Geouge, ‘Anglo-Portuguese Trade during the Reign of João I of Portugal, 1385–1433’, in England and Iberia in the Late Middle Ages, 12th to 15th Centuries, ed. Maria Bullon-Fernandez (London, 2007), 121–33, at p. 127; Tiago Faria, ‘Court Culture and the Politics of Anglo-Portuguese Interaction in the Letters of Philippa Plantagenet, Queen of Portugal’, in John Gower in Late Medieval Iberia: Manuscripts, Influences, Reception, ed. A. Saez-Hidalgo and R. F. Yeager (Woodbridge, 2013). Philippa's hand in arranging the earl of Arundel's marriage to her step-daughter Beatrix was also an attempt to strengthen relations (below, p. 449).
44 RHL I, 191.
45 W. Childs, Anglo-Castilian Trade in the Late Middle Ages (Manchester, 1978), 43–6.
46 CPR 1408–13, 234; cf. Signet Letters, nos. 691–3.
47 Foedera, viii.312, 345, 351–2; RHL I, 191.
48 Gutierre Diaz de Gamez, The Unconquered Knight: A Chronicle of the Deeds of Don Pero Niño, Count of Buelna, ed. J. Evans (Woodbridge, 2004 reprint), 100, 110, 131; Saint-Denys, iii.159.
49 Diaz de Gamez, The Unconquered Knight, 122–3; Foedera, viii.425–6.
50 She and João also fathered the ‘Illustrious Generation’, which included King Henry the Navigator: Russell, English Intervention, 526–48; A. Goodman, ‘Philippa of Lancaster, Queen of Portugal’, ODNB, 44.38–9.
51 Foedera, viii.561–7; Ana Echevarria Arsuaga, ‘The Shrine as Mediator’, in England and Iberia in the Late Middle Ages, 12th to 15th Centuries, ed. Maria Bullón-Fernández (London, 2007), 47–65; RHL II, 287; POPC, ii.24–6, 118.
52 Foedera, viii.593, 617–21, 703, 705, 721, 770, 772; RHL II, 309, 311–12, 318, 326. See C 49/48, no. 12 and CPR 1408–13, 474, for a case involving a Spanish cargo seized by John Hauley junior of Dartmouth.
53 Foedera, ix.12; in the past England had allied with Aragon at times of tension with Castile.
54 Carus-Wilson and Coleman, England's Export Trade, 122–3, 138.
55 J. Ramsay, Lancaster and York (2 vols, Oxford, 1892), i.150–1, notionally adjusted in line with the comments of M. Ormrod, ‘Finance and Trade under Richard II’, in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. J. Gillespie and A. Goodman (Oxford, 1999), 155–86, at pp. 176–8.
56 A. Ruddick, English Identity and Political Culture in the Fourteenth Century (Cambridge, 2013), 104–7, 129–30.
57 PROME, viii.536; Foedera, viii.719. The later years of Henry's reign saw many letters of denization granted (R. Griffiths, ‘The English Realm and Dominions and the King's Subjects in the Later Middle Ages’, in Aspects of Late Medieval Government and Society, ed. J. Rowe (Toronto, 1986), 83–105, at p. 101).
58 For anti-Welsh legislation see Davies, Revolt, 282–4, and above, p. 188. The 1366 Statute of Kilkenny erecting a cordon sanitaire between English colonists and native Irish was reissued in 1402 and 1409, and the first parliament of Henry V's reign ordered a general expulsion of the Irish from England, although Irish graduates, lawyers, professed religious, ‘merchants of good repute’ and those who had inheritances in England were excepted: CIRCLE PR 1401–2, no. 255; PR 1402–3, no. 247 (a man of Irish blood ‘freed from all Irish servitude’); CR 1405–6, no. 3 (a ‘mere Irishman’); Ancient Irish Histories, 19, 22; PROME, ix.28. See also A. Ruddick, ‘English Identity and Political Language in the King of England's Dominions: a Fourteenth-Century Perspective’, in Fifteenth-Century England VI, ed. L. Clark (Woodbridge, 2006); J. Gillingham, ‘Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Britain and Ireland’, The Haskins Society Journal 4 (1992), 67–84.
59 PROME, viii.136–7, 145 (legislation), and ix.11 (Rees ap Thomas); Usk, xxi–xxix; BL Add. MS 24,062, fo. 71r (royal letter for enforcement of laws); SC 1/43/61 (slaying of Welshmen).
60 The Views of Hosts, xii (quote).