When is a refugee not a refugee?
England’s ‘proud history’ of welcoming refugees is regularly invoked by both sides in contemporary debates about refugees in Britain. Public and academic histories of pre-modern migration to England support this notion of continuity, habitually describing migrants to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England as ‘refugees’. But what do we actually mean when we call some migrants ‘refugees’? And is a ‘refugee’ five hundred years ago the same as a refugee today?
Historians of pre-modern migration to England rarely, if ever, interrogate why they use this term. Yet thinking more carefully about why, and how, some migrants become ‘refugees’ is crucial not just to writing better histories of migration to Britain, but to critically appraising Britain’s ‘proud history’.
One way to define a refugee is as a person forced to flee their home due to conflict or persecution. However, the act of flight from persecution implies a destination: in a very real sense, it is not just the fact of flight from persecution, but the response of the country of destination that creates the ‘refugee’. Refugees today are, theoretically at least, a recognised class of migrants: in recognition of their experience of persecution, they have an enhanced capacity to cross borders to claim asylum. Once their claim to asylum is recognised, they are granted protection. In its most basic form, this is a commitment by the country of destination not to send the refugee back to the situation they fled (known as the principle of non-refoulement). However, refugee protection often also entails rights to settlement, through access to work, housing, and welfare benefits, although in practice of course the reception of refugees varies wildly. States are important in this process, in granting refugee status - but so are refugees, in asserting their claims to this status.
If, as some historians, sociologists, and theorists have asserted, the pre-modern world was essentially borderless, then we can speak of there being ‘refugees’ in the sense of a group of migrants privileged by the state due to their experience of persecution. However, in this context, migrants fleeing persecution would not need to assert their right to protection if migrants were able to freely enter and settle any country they chose. The use of ‘refugees’ then in histories of pre-modern migration to England could be a simple recognition of the fact that some migrants arrived due to persecution, although historians do not explicitly state this. This lack of clarity is compounded when historians state that migrants in seventeenth-century England ‘claimed asylum’ or separate out ‘economic migrants’ and ‘refugees’. Doing so implies systems of refugee protection that did not exist at the time.
The actual position of migrants in early modern England was far more complex - and more interesting. Carefully reconstructing the reception of those who arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries after fleeing persecution - and the ways that migrants themselves advocated for settlement - shows that migrants and the state were in the process of negotiating a form of refugee protection. However, they were not necessarily yet ‘refugees’.
It is true that there were no meaningful border controls in sixteenth-century England. However, a careful examination of English law and policy shows that immigrants were subject to significant ‘internal bordering’. This did not just take the form of discriminatory laws, such as the 1540 ‘Acte concerning Strangers’, which restricted migrants’ rights to work and housing. Legal texts and caselaw made it clear that migrants were different from, and disadvantaged with respect to, English subjects: born out of “the kynges protection”, they were therefore “out of helpe & protect by the kynges lawe or by the kynges writ”. Calvin’s Case (1608), which established the difference in law between migrants and English subjects, was clear that migrants had no rights, while subjects were rights-bearing. The case did not outline any special privileges for migrants fleeing persecution in their country of origin, differentiating only between those from countries “in amity” with the crown, and those from enemy states.
At the same time, the English crown did clearly recognise that at least some of the thousands of migrants who arrived from France and the Low Countries had experienced persecution, asking the mayor of London to gather information about whether migrants had arrived “uppon pretence of fleeing for persequcon for ye cause of relligon”. Gathering information is not, however, the same as extending protection. Historians, and public histories, have interpreted the fact that the crown granted patents to settle migrants in towns such as Norwich as a form of welcome to these persecuted migrants. However, patents such as the 1565 grant to Norwich and the 1561 grant to Sandwich make no mention of persecution, but focus on the economic benefits to the towns of foreign settlement. As judges in a 1613 dispute between Norwich and its migrant community concluded, these grants had been sought by the town “principally for the benifite and inriching of the cittie it self” rather than to offer protection to persecuted migrants.
Moreover, migrants fleeing persecution in sixteenth-century England understood that they were rightsless. In fact, they advocated for a form of refugee protection before such a right was recognised by the state. Migrants argued that a difference should be made between migrants “here only for Merchandize; and those who have for Conscience sake only, may again (the fire being quenched) safely return into their own Countries”, and complained that although the “most parte of them bee fledd hether for their conscience sake” and yet “sundry time heertofore, the said Tradesmen haue beene molested for vsing of their seuerall occupacions” due to the general prohibition on migrants’ trading.
Migrants to sixteenth-century England then were not straightforwardly refugees: not because they moved in a borderless world, but because, although the crown understood that new arrivals had fled persecution, it did not extend protection. Understanding this does not just improve our knowledge of the pre-history of refugee protection in Britain, but also goes some way to reinscribing migrants’ agency.
When the Huguenots began to arrive in the late seventeenth century, fleeing persecution for their faith, Charles II welcomed them in a 1681 proclamation that promised a bill for a ‘general naturalisation’ of the new arrivals. General naturalisation would enable the Huguenots to easily and cheaply access the rights of English subjects: it was offered explicitly in recognition of their persecution. Yet although this brings us closer to a regime of refugee protection, the bill did not pass until 1709. Moreover, the Act was repealed two years later in the midst of a moral panic about whether a new group of migrants, the ‘Poor Palatines’ were fraudulently seeking refuge, highlighting that there is no teleology of refugee protection. In fact, the unedifying debates that surround the passage of the general naturalisation bill through parliament, its fitful progress and its abrupt repeal, highlight that protections for refugees were always contested in England.
Philip Marfleet has cautioned against finding “false continuities” between ancient traditions of sanctuary and regimes of refugee protection. Others have argued the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees was a sharp break, ‘creating’ the refugee. A careful reconstruction of the ways that states and migrants negotiated settlement in early modernity is an important corrective to both teleological narratives and to those that assert the essential modernity of the ‘refugee’, creating a more rigorous history of refugee protection which can provide much needed nuance to narratives of Britain’s ‘proud history’ of welcome.
