Early Modern Migration 1500–1700: Huguenots, Dutch, Jews and the Wider Atlantic

The two centuries between 1500 and 1700 brought a distinct new character to migration into Britain. The Reformation of the 1530s, both in England and on the Continent, produced confessional divisions that turned religion into a major driver of migration for the first time at European scale. The rise of the Dutch Republic and of specialist Dutch and Walloon skills in weaving, drainage and market gardening pulled settlers to the eastern and southern counties. The readmission of the Jews in 1656 ended the 366-year prohibition inherited from Edward I. Roma arrived for the first time in the early sixteenth century and faced immediate hostile legislation. Small communities of Africans formed in London, Bristol and Liverpool. And the Irish, under the pressure of English conquest and repeated dearths, began a pattern of seasonal labour migration across the Irish Sea that would intensify dramatically in the nineteenth century.

Religion as a driver: the European context

To understand early modern migration you need the European religious story in brief. Martin Luther's ninety-five theses of 1517 began a decades-long split in Western Christianity. Calvinism, a second Protestant strand, took root in the Netherlands, in parts of France (where its adherents were known as Huguenots), in Scotland and in small English networks. Catholic monarchs in France, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands used the state against Protestants; Protestant states, England included, harboured the persecuted. Religious refugees thus crossed and recrossed Europe for the whole period.

Event	Year	Migration effect
English Reformation begins	1533–34	England becomes a Protestant destination
Spanish repression in Netherlands	1567+	Dutch/Walloon Protestants flee to England
St Bartholomew's Day Massacre	24 August 1572	First significant Huguenot wave to England
Edict of Nantes	1598	Pause in French persecution
English Civil War	1642–51	Exile of royalists and parliamentarians abroad, not inward migration
Readmission of the Jews	1656	Cromwell permits Jewish settlement
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes	18 October 1685	50,000–80,000 Huguenots to England

The shape of early modern migration into Britain cannot be understood without this confessional context.

Huguenots: the major Protestant refuge

Huguenots were French Calvinist Protestants. A small Huguenot community was present in London from the mid-sixteenth century, and a first significant movement followed the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 24 August 1572, when Catholic mobs in Paris and across France killed thousands of Protestants. The Edict of Nantes in 1598 granted limited toleration, and the flow to England slowed.

The decisive moment is the revocation of the Edict of Nantes on 18 October 1685 by Louis XIV. Protestant worship was banned, Protestant clergy were exiled, and Huguenot lay people who refused to convert faced imprisonment or enforced military quartering (the dragonnades). Between 1681 and 1700 around 200,000 Huguenots left France, of whom roughly 50,000–80,000 came to England, with smaller numbers to Scotland, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, Prussia and the American colonies.

In England the Huguenots settled particularly in:

• Spitalfields, east of the City of London — silk weaving, the foundation of an industry that employed thousands and made Spitalfields one of Europe's great silk centres.
• Soho — goldsmithing, watch-making, printing and a distinct French-speaking quarter.
• Canterbury — silk weaving in the crypt of the cathedral.
• Bristol, Plymouth and Southampton — port communities.

They brought capital, technical skills and international networks. English silk, paper-making, gunsmithing, watch-making, fine bookbinding and the early Bank of England (one of the original directors, Sir John Houblon, was of Huguenot descent; the first Governor, Sir John Houblon, had Huguenot family) drew on Huguenot expertise. Huguenot loanwords entered English in the areas where they worked: chignon, corsage, ragout, rendezvous, routine are part of a broader wave of early modern French vocabulary reinforced by Huguenot presence.

The Huguenots are the most examinable migrant group of this period. For Q4, the factor is religious persecution; for Q5/6 they support arguments about economic impact, cultural impact, or government policy (Charles II's 1681 Royal Declaration welcoming them).

flowchart LR
  A[Revocation of Edict of Nantes 1685] --> B[200,000 Huguenots leave France]
  B --> C[50,000-80,000 to England]
  C --> D[Spitalfields silk]
  C --> E[Soho trades]
  C --> F[Canterbury weaving]
  C --> G[Bank of England 1694]

Walloons, Dutch and the draining of the Fens

Alongside the Huguenots a second Protestant group, the Walloons and Dutch, arrived across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Spanish reconquest of the southern Netherlands from 1567 pushed Protestants north and across the North Sea. Walloon and Dutch refugees settled in Norwich, Colchester, Sandwich, Canterbury and London. By the 1580s Norwich had a Dutch-speaking population of several thousand, sustaining a Dutch Church (the Strangers' Hall in Norwich preserves the memory). They were often known collectively as "the Strangers".

Their economic contribution was threefold:

1. New draperies — lighter woollen cloths (bays, says, serges) which transformed the English textile industry for warmer markets in southern Europe and the colonies.
2. Market gardening — Walloons and Dutch introduced intensive vegetable cultivation around London and in Essex, improving the urban food supply.
3. Drainage engineering — the most famous case is Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer engaged by Charles I in the 1620s–30s to drain Hatfield Chase in Yorkshire and later the Great Level of the Fens in Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire. Thousands of acres of peat fen were turned into arable land, though at serious cost to the livelihood of Fenland commoners, producing the "Fen Riots" and a lasting argument over the environmental ethics of the project.

These Dutch and Walloon projects make an excellent comparison with later Irish labour migration and Caribbean NHS labour: small skilled migrant groups whose economic impact was disproportionate to their numbers.

The readmission of the Jews, 1656

For 366 years after Edward I's Expulsion of 1290 there was no legal Jewish community in England. Small numbers of Sephardic Jews, nominally Christian conversos from Spain and Portugal, lived discreetly in London. A resident community began to take shape in the 1650s around the merchant Antonio Fernandez Carvajal.