What can reconstructing the legal status – and experiences – of migrants in early modern England tell us about the development of citizenship? And does it have relevance for today’s debates about British citizenship and migration? This thesis argues that English subjects in early modern England held a citizenlike status, in that belonging through being born “in allegiance” conferred rights, enumerated in and enforced through the common law. This status was predicated on the exclusion of migrants, born “out of allegiance” and thus rendered functionally rightsless in the common law.
This complicates the existing historiography of early modern English citizenship, which has primarily focused on citizenship as a participatory status as well as the historiography of migration to early modern England, which tends to ignore the legal status of migrants.
English subjects’ citizenlike status – and its corollary, migrants’ rightslessness – was not static.
This thesis will first outline the legal principles and practices that established belonging, rights, and participation for subjects and migrants. It will then trace the ways that the rights-bearing status of English subjects, and the rightslessness of migrants, were developed, negotiated, and contested in seventeenth-century England: from the establishment of “natural allegiance” under James I and VI, to the emergence of new theories of rights-bearing during the civil wars and Commonwealth, and the challenge to natural allegiance after the Restoration.
