While much has been written about immigrants, especially religious refugees, to England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, far less has been said about the presence of immigrants in pre-Reformation England. Building on Keechang Kim's Aliens in Medieval Law (2010) and W. Mark Ormrod, Nicholas McDonald, and Craig Taylor's edited collection Resident Aliens in Late Medieval England (2017), Immigrant England, 1300–1550 provides readers with a well-written, clearly organized book that systematically establishes the presence, diversity, and distribution of immigrants in medieval England. The book might usefully be thought of as moving from demographic, to economic, and, finally, to social history: the first several chapters focus on where medieval immigrants to England came from and where they settled. Chapters 6 and 7 examine the occupations of immigrants in medieval England (with an important section on immigrant women), and the final chapters cover the dynamics of cross-cultural contact.

Mark Ormrod, Bart Lambert, and Jonathan Mackman base their study primarily on England's alien subsidies spanning from 1440 to 1487. The focus on the alien subsidies allows for both a broad macrohistorical overview of immigration into England in the late Middle Ages as well as prosopographic occasions to zoom in on particular names, at times tracing an individual's movements and social relations over time. Although the alien subsidies do not include a country of origin for each name listed, the authors nonetheless manage to deduce other places of origin so that the study includes a broad sense of who was considered alien in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries: those hailing from Continental Europe, to be sure, but also migrants from the British Isles, Iceland, Africa, and the Middle East. In addition to the great diversity of England's medieval immigrants, Immigrant England also finds a surprising distribution of immigrants: the assumption has been that immigrants to England primarily clustered around London and a handful of other urban centers and key port towns. While this is largely confirmed, the authors also find immigrants in rural England, albeit in much lower concentrations than in more urban settings. In all, the authors estimate that England was host to some thirty thousand immigrants in the late fifteenth century.

Among the large claims of Immigrant England is that the category of alien really came into being in fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as economic pressures led to formal regulations of immigrants throughout the realm, and that this developed in tandem with a growing sense of English national identity. That being said, while the authors enumerate small- and large-scale acts of violence against immigrants, they are reluctant to describe medieval English people as especially or uniformly xenophobic. Most of the anti-alien activity described in the archives involved specific grievances aimed narrowly at certain occupational groups of immigrants. Only very rarely was anti-alien violence indiscriminately aimed at immigrants for their foreignness alone. Thus, even during moments of international tensions with France, French immigrants to England went largely unmolested by native antipathies. Here the challenge is what constitutes xenophobia: organized violence is likely to appear in the historical record, whereas daily affronts and systematic discrimination is harder to discern a half a millennium after the fact. And as the authors make clear, a good deal depended on the immigrant's specific ethnic group or birthplace. While the English might differentiate between French migrants among them and the French as military enemy abroad, the treatment of Jews, Romani, and Black people was markedly hostile.

Immigrant England is a well-written, meticulously researched book that productively connects immigration into late medieval England to early modern and modern studies of immigration. While certainly not the dominant themes of the book, the discussions of race and gender will spark specialized interest, while the book as a whole provides a stable foundation for further studies on pre- and early modern immigration.