England’s Immigrants 1330 – 1550 Resident Aliens in the Late Middle Ages

Dr. Jonathan Mackman

Jonathan Mackman is the Research Fellow on the project, and is based at The National Archives in Kew.

Jonathan was a student at York, and gained his DPhil in 1999, his thesis being a study of gentry society in Lincolnshire during the Wars of the Roses. He has since contributed to a variety of archival research and cataloguing projects for a number of British universities, most based at The National Archives. He worked for a number of years on the long-running ‘Records of Central Government Taxation in England, 1190-1690’, then run by Cambridge University and now nearing completion under the auspices of the University of York. The pioneering research undertaken by that project into English taxation and its records has in many ways enabled the establishment of the present project, and Jonathan is currently a member of that project’s advisory board. He also worked on York’s flagship ‘Medieval Petitions’ project, was a Research Officer on the ‘Londoners and the Law’ project, a study of the use of the court of Common Pleas by fifteenth-century Londoners based at the University of London’s Centre for Metropolitan History, and more recently worked for the universities of Oxford and Liverpool on their collaborative project to calendar the fourteenth and fifteenth century Gascon Rolls. He has also contributed biographies of a number of Yorkshire shire knights to the forthcoming 1422-61 section of the History of Parliament, and has undertaken specialist cataloguing work for The National Archives on series including JUST 4 (assize and eyre files), E 178 (Exchequer commissions of enquiry) and a variety of unsorted records.

Jonathan’s main research interests lie in the political and administrative history of late-medieval England, with a particular focus on the East Midlands and Yorkshire, and in the historical and political geography of that period. However, most of his work has been based on the publication, dissemination and interpretation of original sources. He has particular experience and expertise in the identification and interpretation of English medieval place names, and has acted as a consultant in this area in many of his earlier roles and also for a number of other editorial and publication projects, most notably for the recent ‘Fine Rolls of Henry III’ project, for which he also contributed a short article highlighting the importance and pitfalls of this aspect of editorial work.

Jonathan’s role as Research Fellow on the project involves co-ordinating the work carried out at The National Archives, and leading the research into the original documents kept there, particularly those of the fifteenth-century alien subsidies. He also has overall responsibility for managing the prosopographical database of individual immigrants being constructed by the research team, which will be available for public consultation at the end of the project. He also leads the research into the ‘People’ strand of the project, which will investigate the identities and nature of medieval immigrants into Britain, most notably their national origins, the places they chose to settle, the occupations they followed, their position within the existing structures of medieval English society, and their interactions and relationships with the native population and other immigrant communities.

Website articles:

Alien Subsidies, Essex, Hertfordshire, Norfolk, Northumberland, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Cumberland, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Rutland, Kent and the Cinque Ports, Lucia Visconti, Countess of Kent, Leicestershire, Devon, Warwickshire, Dorset & Somerset, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Gloucestershire & Bristol, Northamptonshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire

Selected publications:
‘Grave Stuff: Litigation with a London Tomb Maker in 1421’ (with Prof. N. Saul and Mr C. Whittick), Historical Research, 84 (2011), 572-85.

‘“To theire grete hurte and finall destruction”: Lord Welles’s attacks on Spalding and Pinchbeck, 1449-50’, in P. Brand & S. Cunningham (eds), Foundations of Medieval Scholarship: records edited in honour of David Crook (York, 2008), pp.183-95.

‘‘Hidden Gems’ in the Records of the Common Pleas: New Evidence on the Legacy of Lucy Visconti’, in L. Clark (ed.), The Fifteenth Century VIII: Rule, Redemption and Representations in Late Medieval England and France (Woodbridge, 2008), pp.59-72.

‘The E 179 (Lay Taxation) Project: The Records and the Database’ (with Ms E.H. Watt), Genealogists’ Magazine, 28:1 (2004), pp.3-15.

Cite this page:

England’s Immigrants 1330 – 1550 (www.englandsimmigrants.com, version 1.0, 19 March 2024), http://www.englandsimmigrants.com/page/archive/personnel/dr-jonathan-mackman