THE HUGUENOT SOCIETY OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Founded 1885 – Registered Charity No. 214726
The Huguenot Society of London, later to become the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, was founded in 1885 as a learned society concerned with the publication and interchange of knowledge about these early protestant refugees, the Huguenots. 50,000, it is estimated, fled France at the risk of their lives to settle in the British Isles between the mid 16th and late 18th centuries. The main influx arrived around 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, thus denying them freedom of worship. As a result of this exodus and resettlement many British people are descended from refugee Huguenot artisans, pastors, soldiers and aristocrats, and in its early days much of the work of the Huguenot Society consisted of transcribing, annotating and publishing the surviving English and Irish Huguenot temple registers, as well as the registers of poor relief institutions, such as the Spitalfields’ soup kitchen and the French Protestant Hospital. In addition all surviving naturalisation and denization records of aliens were published by the Society. All these volumes form part of the Quarto Series, a full list of which appears on the Huguenot Society’s website, under Publications. In 2004-5, many of the Quarto Series, by then out of print, were digitised onto fully searchable CD Rom, as were the first fifteen issues of Huguenot Families, the Society’s genealogical journal, which appears twice a year.
The Huguenot Society has since 1885 also published an annual learned journal, Proceedings, concentrating on the history of the Huguenots; these journals contain much of interest for the family historian, whether it be in the form of lists or historical detail about a particular Huguenot community, institution or individual. The more recent New Series volumes are monographs, two of which are vivid accounts of dramatic escapes from France by Huguenot refugees the Reverend Jacques Fontaine and Isaac Dumont de Bostaquet, a nobleman from Normandy. Other publications, such as From Strangers to Citizens, are the published papers of Huguenot Society conferences.
Please note that all Huguenot Society publications and CD-ROM offered for sale on this site have the prefix HUG.