Tudor England's French Frontier: The Laws of Guînes (1529) and the Defence of the Calais Pale

In 1525, the English monarch Henry VIII appointed a commission to look to the settlement and security of the county of Guînes, the highly militarised zone located which lay on the very frontier with France in the Calais Pale. The laws the commission devised were designed to encourage English settlers to come to these disputed lands to assert English control over them. They directly addressed the problems of living on a highly militarised frontier and provided incentives to encourage settlers –particularly arable farmers – to relocate there. As well as expelling non-English tenant farmers, the laws also contained a series of highly restrictive measures against the native French and Flemish populations as part of a particularly strident form of anglicisation, which including marriage restrictions and stipulations that all residents of these lands had to learn English. This chapter will examine these important laws in detail and explore notions of border control and identity. It will compare the laws of Guînes with similar measures introduced in other parts of the frontiers as part of a much wider concern to anglicise the frontiers of kingdom under the Tudor monarchs, while also considering the role these laws played in the re-emergence of English colonialism.