University of Leeds scientists studying the relationship between 16th century England’s government and the waves of religiously persecuted Protestant migrants who gathered at so-called ‘Stranger Churches’ have found compelling evidence that the state wanted ‘eyes everywhere’ to spy on these groups in their native languages.
According to the scientists behind these revelations, the English state had spies tasked with monitoring the private communications of strangers (the term used to describe people who came from countries that spoke French, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish) who were often fleeing religious persecution in their home countries.
Since these spies needed to be fluent in the languages of these mostly illiterate communities, their clandestine monitoring of communications within Stranger Church allowed the state to ‘maintain control’ by spreading and dispelling gossip across numerous languages.
“England’s history is much more multilingual than we might imagine, and even the state had to learn multiple languages in the Elizabethan area to have ‘eyes everywhere’ and maintain control,” explained Dr. John Gallagher, an Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds and the study’s lead author.
Evidence Shows How State Monitored Stranger Churches
While studying the relationship between England’s state and its multilingual migrant community, Gallagher says he found a vibrant community of migrants speaking an array of languages in England’s public spaces.
“Languages other than English could be heard in the streets and the public spaces of the city, through the walls of homes and the doors of shops,” Gallagher said.
Because most of these migrants living in and around London could not read, the spoken word was vital to maintaining the group’s culture and traditions, especially in a foreign environment. Fortunately, the researcher says that religious scribes of the era did an excellent job of preserving the evidence for this complex, multilingual migrant community.
“The average person would have come across multiple languages every day, and we can hear the voices of regular people because of the extensive records kept by churches at the time,” Gallagher explained.
Those records and other documents allowed the team to trace the Stranger Churches back to their origins in 1550 when London saw the establishment of its first Dutch church. As more churches were added, they also began to provide services to their followers in French, Dutch, and Italian.
According to the study authors, the church elders quickly realized the precarious nature of their burgeoning, multilingual community and the complexities associated with keeping track of many different groups speaking in many different tongues. According to the press release announcing the team’s study, these church elders “began to monitor scandal across languages to avoid bringing their communities into disrepute” as counter-espionage against the state.
One example of this active counter-espionage comes from the archives of ‘consistories,’ which were the all-male governing bodies of the Stranger Churches. According to Gallagher’s research, a minister of the French church in London wrote that churches “aimed to have eyes everywhere.”
Another example cited by Gallagher comes from a Dutch church’s efforts to manage suspicions over a child’s parentage and the rumors the lack of clarity was causing. In that case, church records show its leaders consulted with a “woman from overseas,” an “Englishman,” and another woman present at the birth, all to get to the bottom of the potentially damaging rumors before they caused any more damage.
London’s Royal Exchange and England’s ‘Third Universitie’
In their conclusion, the study authors highlight the pivotal role of London’s Royal Exchange in the evolution of the Stranger Church phenomenon. Completed in 1568, the exchange quickly evolved into a center of commerce and multilingual communication, where people openly communicated in a wide array of foreign dialects.
The researchers say the London Royal Exchange, fueled by the open, multilingual repartee, “helped news, gossip, and slander spread through the city” by functioning as a sort of 16th-century social media network.
One example cited by the authors comes from the recorded account of an English bookseller, Thomas Harris. According to the story they unearthed, Harris stopped his French neighbor, Jehan de Savoye, in the street one day and asked him to translate a French language “row” he’d previously overheard. This encounter, and numerous other examples unearthed during the team’s research, show how the people living in these communities actively participated in the multilingual, multicultural exchange of thoughts and ideas.
As Gallagher explained, “It wasn’t necessary to speak or understand another language to be part of this multilingual urban culture: your rowing neighbours might switch languages to ensure the cause of the trouble was made clear, or the offender might show up on your doorstep in the presence of an elder of their church to explain and apologise.”
The researchers say that these accounts and others show how the prevalence of these multilingual exchanges brought on by the advent of Stranger Churches concerned officials enough that they employed spies to monitor and, ideally, thwart any disreputable gossip. They also show how the churches reacted with their intelligence gathering and disinformation activities.
Still, for the people living in these communities, the multilingual nature of the exchange provided them a sort of international public square where they could find a ready audience for “arrests, arguments, and accusations in multiple languages.” According to the researchers, this dynamic even caused one of the local commentators to describe London as England’s “third universitie,” where one could learn languages as diverse as Polish, Russian, Persian, Chaldean, Arabic, and Syriac.
The study, “Migrant Voices in Multilingual London, 1560–1600,” was published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.