It seems some things never change. A petition for the incorporation of the minstrels guild in London in 1500 complains: "wheras the continual recourse of foreign minstrels daily resorting to this city...causing your said suppliant freemen to be brought into such poverty...because their living is taken from them by such manner of foreigns." (quoted on p10, Apollo's Swan & Lyre: Five Hundred Years of the Musicians Company, Richard Crewdson). The petition goes on to describe how sometimes 5 or 6 of these foreign minstrels would turn up uninvited at "churchholidays, dedications, Churchings, Weddings and other feasts...to the great grief displeasure of the Citizens and of their honest friends and neighbours..."
As Crewdson notes, 'foreign' in this case meant 'not a freeman of London' rather than necessarily from abroad, but the theme was common across trades, with the Skinners complaining in 1493 that they were "unable to obtain work owing to the great influx of strangers and foreign journeymen" and the Tailors in 1494 "a great number of strangers 'botchers' infested the city, each keeping daily in his house 3 or 4 strangers occupying the same handicraft, to the great prejudice of the King's liege subjects, who would gladly undertake the work if the strangers were not there".
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