Liberty

Abstract

This chapter examines the Blackfriars’ status as an ex-ecclesiastical liberty independent of mayoral jurisdiction. It explains how the residents governed their own affairs and how they clung tenaciously to the liberty’s special privileges. As an “exempt place,” the Blackfriars was also free from the City’s Livery Companies and the restrictions they placed on non-native workers. This situation attracted many French and Dutch refugees who came to form a distinct sub-group of residents that was successfully integrated into the neighborhood. The liberty’s privileges helped unite its disparate residents, fostering a strong collective consciousness and attachment to place. Yet those residents, for all their claims to autonomy, still depended upon the wider economic and municipal structures of the metropolis.