SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



fled away out of these countries under his subjection. For it is remarkable what is set down and 

 recorded in a journal of the Dutch Church in London, written by Simon Ruytinck, one of the 

 ministers in those Times and yet preserved in their Church ' That when divers Foreigners had come 

 hither on account of Religion, and desired to be admitted in communion with the rest of the Dutch 

 Church, the Queen hearing of it, commanded the Lord Mayor to disperse them from London. Where- 

 upon they applyed to the Bishop of London, to represent their case to the Queen and Council. Who 

 did so. And the Council sent a letter in answer to the said Church June 29 I 574, in Favour, That 

 that Church should advise those new Members to depart from London [where they were more obvious 

 to be taken notice of by King Philip's spies] and to go to other parts of the kingdom, [where there 

 were also Churches of Protestant Professors] Which that Church did accordingly." 



It certainly is a curious coincidence, that information from an absolutely sure source should be 

 forthcoming that royal pressure was being brought to bear on aliens in London to induce them to 

 leave the capital and settle in more remote regions, where they would escape the eye of Spain s 

 emissaries. This supports a very circumstantial, though unauthenticated, statement made more than 

 two centuries later of the settlement of a number of aliens in Yorkshire. The Yorkshire West 

 Riding was an ideal spot for the purposes of concealment, as the physical configuration of the district 

 and the fact that it lay away from the great route to the North rendered it difficult of access and little 

 known, and the absence of any large towns with a developed gild life (for the Sheffield Cutlers' 

 Company, though in existence, was not strictly organized until 1624), rendered any policy of resist- 

 ance from civic authorities unlikely. 



The State Papers, the Privy Council Registers, the Talbot Papers, and the Belvoir Papers 

 furnish no documentary evidence to support the tradition of alien settlements in the West Riding 

 connected with the iron industry. This can be explained on the supposition that Elizabeth and 

 Burghley were both anxious to suppress all evidence and to bury the aliens in obscure districts in 

 order to avoid attracting Spanish attention. The lack of letters of denization proves nothing, for, 

 as has been pointed out, the power of granting them was not always retained by the Crown but 

 delegated to officials ^ and many that were issued might escape registration. It is a noteworthy 

 fact that of a list of more than forty aliens whose presence in Yorkshire is attested by the unim- 

 peachable authority of the Lay Subsidies,^^ only one name appears in letters of denization and acts 

 of naturalization.*^ The northern aliens were doubtless registered separately. The Council of the 

 North would be the authority to whom the right of issuing such letters and keeping the register 

 would be entrusted. The loss of these records seems to account satisfactorily for the dearth of 

 information on the subject. 



The obsolete idea that the Sheffield trade was started by aliens in the i6th century can be 

 dismissed as absolutely untenable. But the evidence brought forward leaves untouched the proposi- 

 tion that foreign influence played a part in developing the trade and raising its standard of 

 workmanship, while in support of this assertion there is much circumstantial evidence and a mass 

 of tradition and probabilities which no historian would be justified in neglecting. 



The economic life of Yorkshire was seriously affected by the destruction of monasteries ; in 

 no county of England had the Church a more tenacious hold on the life of the people. This is 

 clearly shown by the support alForded by all classes of society to the risings in the Tudor times. 

 The monks had no temptation to be hard task-masters or rack-renters, and even the most virulent 

 of their opponents have seldom attacked them in their capacity of eleemosynary agents. Even had 

 Henry VIII not desired the ecclesiastical wealth, economic revolution would have forced a change, 

 for their productive methods could not have survived the incursion of the new landlord class. The 

 change was quickened, but not initiated, by. the destruction of monasteries. 



Yorkshire sufi^ered in a twofold degree ; the agricultural classes were the hardest hit, but the 

 appropriation of the funds of the religious gilds aimed a shrewd blow at the industrial classes, for it 

 was no easy task to disentangle the religious from the craft gild ; when the right of appropriation 

 turned on the interpretation of a single word, misappropriation was inevitable. Yorkshire, promi- 

 nent alike for the wealth of its monasteries and the multiplicity of its gilds, suffered enormously. 

 Distress and poverty were excessive and universal. Speaking broadly, up to 1536 the poor depended 

 for their maintenance on the monasteries, from 1536 to 1569 the municipalities were answerable 

 for poor relief ; then, although the administration was left in their hands, the main lines of action 



" Strype, Amah of Refirmation, vol. ii, bk. I, pp. 386-7 ; W. Cunningham, .^AV« Immigrants, 157. 



'°W. Page, op. cit. p. ii. 



"Subs. R. 15 Hen. VIII [printed in the Torks. Arch. Journ. iv, 170-77]; P.R.O. Lay Subs. R., 

 bdles. 217, no. log, 121 ; 218, no. 133. 



^' W. Page, op. cit. Professor Lloyd, McGill University, Montreal, late of Sheffield University, informs 

 the writer that all the stones he saw in his investigations into the Belgian Industry revolved in the same 

 direction as the Sheffield stones, that is in the contrary direction from those employed in other continental 

 countries. 



463 



