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During the early medieval period (5th–9th century CE), the North Sea coastal societies were involved in long distance maritime trade relations, which resulted in a pronounced mobility of individuals throughout the North Sea area. This work presents the first isotope data from human remains on diet and mobility from early medieval Belgian coastal populations. A total of 23 out of 51 excavated individuals from the archaeological site of Koksijde, Belgium (7th–8th century AD), was selected for isotope and elemental analyses (δ13Ccol, δ15N, δ18OP, δ13Cap, δ18OC, 87Sr/86Sr and [Sr]). The high δ15N values of part of the individuals buried at Koksijde indicate that high trophic level ranked fish was included in their diets, suggesting an intensive exploitation of marine food sources. The δ18O values are not compatible with the predicted ‘local’ values while the strontium isotope ratios have values close to that of seawater (0.7092). Either the actual oxygen isotope values in early medieval Belgium are offset by 1 or2‰ compared to the current meteoric water predictions, or the population came from somewhere else. Whether or not this was linked to the population's mobility is difficult to assess based on their δ18O and 87Sr/86Sr values. Nonetheless, the study of the population at Koksijde provides new insights into the lives of the early medieval coastal Belgian societies.

The oeuvre of Marc Boone (Ghent, 1955) has become standard reading for specialists of medieval European towns and cities, as well as for those interested in the history of state building - most notably that of the Burgundian polity. Honoring Ghent University’s venerable tradition of medieval studies begun by Henri Pirenne and building upon the work of his Doktorvater Walter Prevenier, Marc Boone also investigated taxation and the history of government spending, popular protest, and the persecution of “deviant” sexuality. Over the course of his rich career, he served as president of the European Association of Urban History and as dean of the Faculty of Arts and Philosophy of Ghent University. For more than twenty years, he taught the introductory course on historical criticism to every first-year student of the faculty, and thus had a major impact on the pensée critique of generations of young minds. Upon the occasion of his retirement in 2021, his former students have compiled this collection of some of his best historical essays, half of which have been translated from French and Dutch into English.

This article explores the participation of immigrants, or people born outside the kingdom, in urban politics in later medieval England. It demonstrates that the nationality of these newcomers was of only secondary importance. What mattered most was whether immigrants’ economic and political interests aligned with those of the civic political elites. If they did not, aliens’ nationality could be mobilized to exclude them from urban politics. If, however, immigrants’ activities complemented those of the urban elites economically and politically, they had every chance to engage with all aspects of civic political life and be elected into the highest civic offices.

During the later Middle Ages, the presence of tens of thousands of people of foreign birth in England required royal government to consider issues of nationality and alien status. This study claims that the legal, administrative and fiscal framework for the rights and regulation of immigrants that was developed in response never created a straightforward binary between aliens (people born outside the kingdom) and denizens (those born in England). Drawing on the records of the alien subsidies and on chancery documents, it argues that the local agents of the English crown deployed national labels in very specific and purposeful ways, contingent on the vagaries of international politics and trade, rather than on a supposed generalised anti-alien sentiment.

This article focuses on the intersection between migration, gender and economic opportunity in later medieval England. Drawing on the returns of the alien subsidy, a direct tax imposed on the country’s alien residents during the second half of the fifteenth century, it argues that immigrant women encountered a medieval equivalent of the so-called ‘double disadvantage’, having fewer opportunities to work in independent occupations than immigrant men and English women. Female aliens were more likely than their male fellow-immigrants and their native counterparts to be employed in service, and significant numbers of alien women can be linked to the low-status prostitution sector. Providing little evidence of economic betterment, the alien subsidies thus suggest that the so-called ‘golden age’ thesis, which states that economic opportunities for women improved in post-Black Death England, did not apply to the country’s immigrant women. The article also wonders, however, whether the economic expectations of femalealiens were the same as those of alien men and English women. In an unusually early example of transnational life-cycle service, female immigrant servants may never have had the intention of settling permanently and building up a successful life in England, but may have come to work in the country for only a limited period of time, return home and capitalise on their foreign experience.

According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the sixteenth century saw the emergence of a capitalist world economy in which labor was organized on a global scale, and the production, distribution and use of goods and services were integrated across national boundaries. This article argues that, though exceptional, an integrated, hegemonic division of labor on an international scale did occur before 1500. Adopting one of Wallerstein’s conceptual tools, the commodity chain approach, it analyzes the production, distribution and industrial use of alum, a chemical compound, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The high-quality cloth industry of the Low Countries, the most prominent artisanal sector of the period in Europe, strongly relied on alum as a mordant to fix colors. Yet the best varieties of alum could only be won in Asia Minor until the middle of the fifteenth century and in central Italy after 1450. The combination of the inflexible demand structure and the mineral’s limited supply resulted in the creation of commodity chains that crossed national and even continental boundaries and allowed those in control of the alum mines to establish exactly those dependency relations that were particular to Wallerstein’s world economy of the sixteenth century. If the aim is to study the conditions in which economic actors lived and worked and the ways in which they organized their labor, a focus on the production contexts of specific commodities, rather than on comprehensive world systems, might therefore be more revealing.

At the end of the fifteenth century, the commercial centre of North-Western Europe shifted from the Flemish city of Bruges, which had been the area’s leading market since the beginning of the fourteenth century, to Antwerp, in Brabant. While the former metropolis had only ever functioned as a hub for European trade or even as a gateway for international merchants to the Low Countries’ domestic market, the latter established itself as the first capital of a quickly expanding global economy, spanning four different continents. Older generations of historians considered the transition from Bruges to Antwerp as sudden and definitive, completed by the early sixteenth century. More recently, however, scholars have questioned the chronology and the linearity of the shift. Some, for example, have highlighted the continuation of certain aspects of international trade in Flanders after the late fifteenth century. This paper draws on an underused source in this respect, the records of civil litigation before the city’s aldermen, to interrogate to what extent Bruges still was a centre of international commercial activity in the course of the sixteenth century.

This book provides a vivid and accessible history of first-generation immigrants to England in the later Middle Ages. Accounting for upwards of two percent of the population and coming from all parts of Europe and beyond, immigrants spread out over the kingdom, settling in the countryside as well as in towns, taking work as agricultural labourers, skilled craftspeople and professionals. Often encouraged and welcomed, sometimes vilified and victimised, immigrants were always on the social and political agenda. Immigrant England is the first book to address a phenomenon and issue of vital concern to English people at the time, to their descendants living in the United Kingdom today and to all those interested in the historical dimensions of immigration policy, attitudes to ethnicity and race and concepts of Englishness and Britishness.