The pre-modern city relied upon migration in order to replenish its population, given high urban mortality rates. Mobility was thus a socio-economic necessity, and yet as social attitudes to poverty hardened after the Black Death town dwellers came to treat newcomers and the highly mobile with suspicion. Cities like London contained fringe areas which acted as staging posts between urban and rural, where such social tensions might easily come to the fore. Historians of later medieval England including Shannon McSheffrey and Sarah Rees Jones have set out the means through which civic elites enforced the ideal of the settled household and attempted to manage the mobile. This paper seeks to explore the other side of this process by examining the experiences of migrants and the highly mobile in urban society around the turn of the sixteenth century. In particular, I will focus upon neighbourhoods at the fringes of the city which, being marginal spaces in themselves, were the entry points of many to London. The paper will utilise depositions made in the London Consistory Court supplemented with evidence drawn from testamentary and property records to explore the experiences of migrants within the framework of the social space of the neighbourhood. Such a ‘bottom-up’ approach is common amongst early modern historians but much less so for the earlier period. The paper will question how far the migrant was socially marginalised in a city where most had been born elsewhere and explore the precarious line that existed between living a ‘respectable’ settled life and a ‘suspicious’ transitory one. The paper will argue that in communities on the urban fringe, the line between mobility and stability was especially blurred with consequences for community cohesion.

Charlotte Berry is a research student in the third year of a doctorate at the Institute of Historical Research (IHR), part of the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. Her PhD, entitled ‘Margins and marginality in fifteenth-century London’ is supervised by Prof. Matthew Davies and Dr. Mark Merry. She graduated with a BA in History from the University of York in 2010 and received her MA from the IHR in 2013. Her research interests centre on urban history, in particular urban social relations and the neighbourhood in the late medieval and early modern city.