THE NORWICH STRANGERS: what do we really know about them?

Frank Meeres, former archivist at the Norfolk Record Office and author of ‘The Welcome Stranger’ (Poppyland Publishing 2022) looks at the sources for our knowledge of the refugees from the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. How many were there? What were their occupations and social status and what were their daily lives like? What were their relations to the local community? What happened to them? A wide range of original documents that help us give answers to these questions, which in many ways are as relevant today as they were four centuries ago.