In the summer of 1544, the English monarch Henry VIII (1491–1547) invaded France with an army of almost 40,000 men and launched a brutal campaign against the civilian population of the Boulonnais. By the end of 1544 the region had been almost entirely depopulated. Many civilians were killed in direct attacks, though the bulk of the population was driven out of the Boulonnais by a scorched earth policy which was designed to transform the region into an artificial desert – devoid of people, buildings and sustenance. Initially taken for defensive considerations to protect his conquest of the town of Boulogne, with the conclusion of the war in the summer of 1546 Henry VIII introduced a colonial policy into these conquered lands and sought to re-settle them with his English subjects. This chapter focuses on fates of the tens of thousands of refugees who were driven out of the Boulonnais as a result of the Tudor monarch's ambitions in France. It concludes with some reflections on the wider significance of this material for later colonial projects.

While a large body of literature examines the links between war and forced migration in the ‘Century of Refugees’ which followed the First World War in Europe, comparatively little work has been done on this topic for the pre-modern period. The bulk of the works on the links between war and early modern refugees focus on religious exiles, including the forced expulsions of groups such as the Sephardi Jews and Moriscos from Spanish Habsburg lands and the flight of religious groups such as the Huguenots and Anabaptists.