3 - Separations and Intersections: The Norwich Strangers

Summary

Yes While I this describe

And in green dales

I walk beside the Yare

To take a little air

And to the city

Through thick woods do turn

How I am there regaled

By the choir of Nightingales!

Jan (John) Cruso, a Dutch poet and writer who had lived in seventeenth-century Norwich, penned the verse above, his words quite clearly expressing his pleasure at the verdant urban hinterlands of the Yare Valley that had become his new home. Cruso was one of the many migrants who came to East Anglia during the early-modern period and his story is revealing of how the so-called ‘strangers’ managed the remarkable transition of starting afresh, often as refugees, into a land that was in parts hostile and welcoming to the newcomers.In leaving their home countries, many strangers found that legal discrimination made their lives problematic and they relied on their own church and congregation to provide them with the stability, familiarity and support that they could not achieve by other means. By so doing, they maintained a distinct identity and close community ties that connected them more with their homeland than with their new city. From the records pertaining to the strangers’ communities – which differentiate their people at every step in language and in law – it is easy to assume that they lived sequestered lives but this would be to ignore the ways in which social networks crossed conventional boundaries of belonging.

Cruso, for instance, had managed to maintain close links with his homeland at the same time as he settled into East Anglian life. He was the son of a cloth merchant in Flanders who had fled the country with his family during the 1570s or 1580s. Jan, as the eldest son, took over his father’s Norwich-based business in the early 1600s and his brothers, Aquila and Timotheus, became a minister in the Church of England and a merchant in London respectively. Jan’s son, John, went to Cambridge and became a Church of England chancellor.Jan Cruso was a respected and successful member of Norwich’s community of inhabitants and had fully integrated into English life but he did not do this to the detriment of his own community identity.