Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps and tables
- Preface: ‘A phoenix in flames’
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Commune at the crossroads
- 1 A domination of abbots
- 2 The crisis of the early fourteenth century
- 3 Classes of the commune before the Black Death
- 4 The struggle continues, 1335–99
- 5 A turning-point: the generation of 1400
- 6 Highpoint of vernacular religion: building a church, 1400–1548
- 7 Classes of the commune in 1522
- 8 Surviving Reformation: the rule of Robert Strange, 1539–70
- 9 ‘The tyranny of infected members called papists’: the Strange regime under challenge, c.1551–80
- 10 Phoenix arising: crises and growth, 1550–1650
- 11 Only the poor will be saved: the preacher and the artisans
- 12 Gentlemen and commons of the Seven Hundreds
- 13 Immigrants
- 14 The revival of the parish
- 15 ‘More than freeholders ought to have voices’: parliamentarianism in one ‘countrey’, 1571–1643
- 16 ‘Moments of decision’, August 1642 to February 1643
- Afterword: Rural sunrise
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Immigrants
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of maps and tables
- Preface: ‘A phoenix in flames’
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Commune at the crossroads
- 1 A domination of abbots
- 2 The crisis of the early fourteenth century
- 3 Classes of the commune before the Black Death
- 4 The struggle continues, 1335–99
- 5 A turning-point: the generation of 1400
- 6 Highpoint of vernacular religion: building a church, 1400–1548
- 7 Classes of the commune in 1522
- 8 Surviving Reformation: the rule of Robert Strange, 1539–70
- 9 ‘The tyranny of infected members called papists’: the Strange regime under challenge, c.1551–80
- 10 Phoenix arising: crises and growth, 1550–1650
- 11 Only the poor will be saved: the preacher and the artisans
- 12 Gentlemen and commons of the Seven Hundreds
- 13 Immigrants
- 14 The revival of the parish
- 15 ‘More than freeholders ought to have voices’: parliamentarianism in one ‘countrey’, 1571–1643
- 16 ‘Moments of decision’, August 1642 to February 1643
- Afterword: Rural sunrise
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Only the wanderer
Knows England's graces,
Or can anew see clear
Familiar faces.
Cirencester's customs incorporated guarded but necessary hospitality to strangers. ‘Passingers’ – people passing through – were welcome. The town needed immigrants to maintain the number of inhabitants required to perform its traditional functions. Every death, of a gentleman-merchant, yeoman-clothier, artisan, butcher, shepherd, bookbinder, papermaker, even of its one, symbolic, ‘loyterer’, was an opening to be filled. If Cirencester's weavers failed to keep up their numbers, or the quality of the cloth and knowledge of markets, the clothiers of Painswick, Stroud and Bisley would soon take their place. Recollect the custom declared by the twelfth-century elders:
that if a stranger coming hither slept in Cirencester on midsummer night, and afterwards stayed there till the king or his fee-farmer had his corn reaped, then, whosoever he might be, whether freeman or bondman, male or female, he (sic) must do three bederipes to the king, or to his fee-farmer, for the fellowship that is of the town, which the said man had used and had enjoyed up till that day.
Travellers, sojourners and immigrants are constants in Cirencester's history, from the testimony of the elders of the town in 1209 to the ‘passingers’ recorded in the vestry minutes and parish registers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Evidence illustrating what might be termed the quotidian mobility of relatively settled inhabitants of the town's hinterlands is indirect.
- Type
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- Information
- Commune, Country and CommonwealthThe People of Cirencester, 1117-1643, pp. 171 - 188Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011