Dutch Poetry in Early Modern Norfolk

In early modern Norfolk there were several thousand people whose mother tongue was Dutch. A number of these wrote poems. Some of the earlier poems were refereyns, a form of verse popular in the late medieval period. In the seventeenth century the Norwich-born son of immigrants from Flanders, Jan Cruso, published two volumes of poetry in which he demonstrates mastery of the Dutch epigram and a newer form of verse, the Dutch alexandrine. We also find Dutch alexandrines on a memorial to the renowned minister of the Dutch church in Norwich, Johannes Elison. Taken together these and the other poems discussed in this article demonstrate that Dutch Strangers in Norfolk continued to use the Dutch language to write poetry and thus keep their Dutch heritage alive well into the seventeenth century.