This study provides the most comprehensive treatment to date of the exiled Calvinist communities who settled in southern England in general, and in London in particular, during the second half of the sixteenth century. Not only does it locate the foreign Reformed churches within their continental and English religious context, but it also analyses their relationship with the Church of England and English Puritans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Furthermore, it offers a new insight into the role and significance of immigrant Calvinist merchants in London, not only for their communities, but for the economic and cultural life of their hosts.

It also contains chapters on the educational concerns of these communities such as schooling and university education, in which the Dutch and Walloon churches played a prominent part by directing English students to the newly-founded University of Leiden, which, by the early seventeenth century, had become renowned as the greatest Reformed seat of learning.