13 - Immigrants

Summary

Only the wanderer

Knows England's graces,

Or can anew see clear

Familiar faces.

Cirencester's customs incorporated guarded but necessary hospitality to strangers. ‘Passingers’ – people passing through – were welcome. The town needed immigrants to maintain the number of inhabitants required to perform its traditional functions. Every death, of a gentleman-merchant, yeoman-clothier, artisan, butcher, shepherd, bookbinder, papermaker, even of its one, symbolic, ‘loyterer’, was an opening to be filled. If Cirencester's weavers failed to keep up their numbers, or the quality of the cloth and knowledge of markets, the clothiers of Painswick, Stroud and Bisley would soon take their place. Recollect the custom declared by the twelfth-century elders:

that if a stranger coming hither slept in Cirencester on midsummer night, and afterwards stayed there till the king or his fee-farmer had his corn reaped, then, whosoever he might be, whether freeman or bondman, male or female, he (sic) must do three bederipes to the king, or to his fee-farmer, for the fellowship that is of the town, which the said man had used and had enjoyed up till that day.

Travellers, sojourners and immigrants are constants in Cirencester's history, from the testimony of the elders of the town in 1209 to the ‘passingers’ recorded in the vestry minutes and parish registers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Evidence illustrating what might be termed the quotidian mobility of relatively settled inhabitants of the town's hinterlands is indirect.