In fact London has always been a hungry city; for many centuries it needed a permanent influx of foreign settlers in order to compensate for its high death-rate. They were also good for business, since immigration has characteristically been associated with the imperatives of London trade. Foreign merchants mingled here, and intermarried, because it was one of the principal markets of the world. On another level, immigrants came here to pursue their trades when denied commercial freedom in their native regions. And, again, other immigrants arrived in the city ready and able to take on any kind of employment and to perform those tasks which “native Londoners” (given the relative nature of that phrase) were unwilling to perform. In all instances immigration corresponded to employment and profit; that is why it would be sentimental and sanctimonious to describe London as an “open city” in some idealistic sense. It has acquiesced in waves of immigration because, essentially, they helped it to prosper.
There were, however, occasions of criticism. “I do not at all like that city,” Richard of Devizes complained in 1185. “All sorts of men crowd there from every country under the heavens. Each brings its own vices and its own customs to the city.” In 1255 the monkish chronicler Matthew Paris was bemoaning the fact that London was “overflowing” with “Poitevins, Provençals, Italians and Spaniards.” It is an anticipation of late twentieth-century complaints that London was being “swamped” by people from Africa, the Caribbean, or Asia. In the case of the thirteenth-century chronicler there is an atavistic and incorrect notion of some original native race which is being displaced by others. Yet other forces are at work in his attack upon the foreigners; he was not wholly sympathetic to the commercial instincts of the capital, and felt himself alienated or removed from its heterogeneous life. Thus to single out foreign merchants was a way of neutralising or challenging the city’s commercial nature. Those who attacked immigrants were in effect attacking the business ethic which required the constant influx of new trade and new labour. The attack did not succeed; it never has succeeded.
The immigrant rolls of 1440-1 provide an absorbing study in ethnicity and cultural contrast. An essay by Sylvia L. Thrupp in Studies in London History, “Aliens in and around London in the Fifteenth Century,” offers interesting parallels with other periods. Some 90 per cent were classified as Doche; this was a generic term including Flemish, Dane and German, but more than half in fact came from Holland. The evidence of their wills suggests that their common characteristics were “a striving towards piety and economic advancement through honest work and mutual help within the group,” an observation which could equally be applied to more recent immigrants from, for example, South Asia. These fifteenth-century immigrants tended to settle into defined trades such as goldsmithery, tailory, haberdashery, clock-making and brewing. They were also celebrated as printers. Others mingled within the broader urban community as beer-sellers, basket-makers, joiners, caterers and servants within London households or at London inns. Evidence from the guilds and from extant wills also “indicates that English became the means of communication within this group,” again a characteristic and often instinctive response of any immigrant community. In the city wards the Italians comprised “a commercial and financial aristocracy,” although there were differences within the group. There were Frenchmen, and a number of Jews; and “Greek, Italian, and Spanish physicians,” but the underclass of that period seems to have been Icelanders who were commonly employed as servants.
There was a period of sustained suspicion in the 1450s, when Italian merchants and bankers were condemned for usury. But the imbroglio passed, leaving only its rumours as confirmation of the fact that Londoners were particularly sensitive to commercial double-dealing. The “Evil May Day” riots of 1517, when the shops and houses of foreigners were attacked by a mob of apprentices, were dispelled with equal speed and without any permanent effect upon the alien population. This has been the custom of the city over many centuries; despite violent acts inspired by demagoguery and financial panic, the immigrant communities of the city have generally been permitted to settle down, engage with their neighbours in trade and parish work, adopt English as their native language, intermarry and bring up their children as Londoners.
A wave of immigration in the mid-1560s, however, when the Huguenots sought refuge from Catholic persecution, provoked a general alarm. On 17 February 1567, there was “a great watch in the City of London … for fear of an insurrection against the strangers which were in great number in and about the city.” The Huguenots were accused of trading secretly among themselves and of engaging in illicit commercial practices such as hoarding. They “take up the fairest houses in the city, divide and fit them for their several uses [and] take into them several lodgers and dwellers”; thus they were held directly responsible for London’s overcrowding. Even if the children of these immigrants “born within this realm are by law accounted English,” they remained foreigners by “inclination and kind affection.” Once more it is a familiar language, adopted by those who were uneasy at the presence of “aliens” in their midst. There were also charges that they pushed up the prices of London properties.
It was perhaps inevitable that, at times of financial recession or depression, the onus fell upon the supposedly unfair or restrictive commercial practices of the “aliens.” In similar manner, at times of growth and expansion, the presence of the same traders was greeted as an indication of the city’s munificence and varied wealth. Addison, on viewing the polyglot assembly at the Royal Exchange, remarked that it “gratifies my Vanity, as I am an Englishman, to see so much an Assembly of Country-men and Foreigners consulting together upon the private Business of Mankind, and making this Metropolis a kind of Emporium for the whole Earth.” There is no Jew-baiting or Francophobia in this account.
In 1850 William Wordsworth, writing of his earlier residence in London, reflected upon the fact that within the city crowd he had found
every character of form and face:
The Swede, the Russian; from the genial south,
The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote
America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascars, the Tartar and Chinese
And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.
He also mentions the “Italian … the Turk … the Jew” and can thus be said to provide a comprehensive survey of the immigrant population. It provides a now familiar insight into the character of a city which contains many nations within itself, but in the nineteenth century there came a fresh movement of political as opposed to religious refugees. Carlyle noticed their presence in London when he observed that “one might mark the years and epochs by the successive kinds of exiles that walk London streets and, in grim silent manner, demand pity from us and reflections from us.” The Russian revolutionary Kropotkin celebrated London as the haven for political refugees from all over the world, and indeed it has been claimed that by the close of the nineteenth century the city had become the most significant arena for the dissemination of political ideas, for the creation of political ideologies, and for the promulgation of political causes. So there were Spanish refugees in Somers Town-“you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare coats; perambulating, mostly with closed lips, the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St. Pancras New Church.” They became conspicuous in 1825 and then, like many other such groups, vanished almost as suddenly as they had first arrived. In the spring of 1829, according to a diarist of the period, “there was an abrupt increase in the numbers of French in London”; as political agitation and civic uprisings fluctuated in intensity, so did the numbers of the French. London became the political barometer for the whole of Europe. Garibaldi and Mazzini came, as did Marx and Engels; in 1851 Herzen and Kossuth arrived, the one a Russian, the other a Hungarian; so did political refugees from Poland and Germany. England, and in particular London, was the place most welcoming to exiles.