Views of Hosts: Reporting the Alien Commodity Trade, 1440-1445

The project aimed to make widely accessible the data gathered on the alien commodity trade as a result of an act of parliament in 1439, which required the formal pairing of alien merchants with English hosts who kept registers of alien business activities. Copies of these registers (or views) were ordered to be returned to the exchequer. The original documents, in Anglo-Norman French and Latin written up in 15th century hands, are available to the public at The National Archives, but the linguistic and palaeographical skills necessary to read them have proven a considerable obstacle to their use, except by a handful of professional scholars who have used the source to provide occasional illustrations of particular points. The project was designed to make the source readily and easily available to a broader readership in the form of a full transcript, as well as an English translation, and a database. The project further examined the antecedents and context of the 1439 legislation, and sought to identify the social, political and economic forces driving this early effort to isolate and control alien communities. It explored the data in terms of the contemporary good and bad alien stereotypes. It also assessed the mechanics of the administrative system employed for data collection, its adequacy to the task, and the methods used by aliens to evade it.