‘Also, I am sending you two cheeses’: Dutch Strangers, c. 1470–c. 1550

The coming of the Dutch Strangers, religious refugees from the Southern Netherlands, to various cities in England – specifically London and Norwich – in the middle of the sixteenth century, is a new stage in the history of the presence of Dutch speakers in Britain; Dutch- speaking churches were founded, and printers in England became involved in printing Dutch texts. Christopher Joby has charted these developments from 1550 onwards. The ease with which these new communities established themselves, however, depended on a pre- existing existence of communities of Dutch speakers, and a long history of Anglo-Dutch cultural, mercantile and political interactions. Filling in gaps in the existing scholarship, this paper examines evidence for the existence of Dutch-speaking communities throughout the sixteenth century.