one occasion.

As early as 1108, a great part of Flanders "being drowned by an exudation
or breaking in of the sea, a great number of Flemings came into the
country, beseeching the King to have some void place assigned them,
wherein they might inhabit."* (* Holinshed's Chronicle edition of 1807 2
58.) Again in the reign of Edward I we find Flemish merchants carrying on
a very large and important trade in Boston, and representatives of houses
from Ypres and Ostend acquired property in the town.* (* Pishey Thompson
Collections for a Topographical and Historical Account of Boston and the
Hundred of Skirbeck 1820 page 31.) In the middle of the sixteenth
century, when Flanders was boiling on the fire of the Reformation,
Lincolnshire and Norfolk provided an asylum for crowds of harassed
refugees. In 1569 two persons were deputed to ride from Boston to Norwich
to ascertain what means that city adopted to find employment for them;
and in the same year Mr. William Derby was directed to move Mr. Secretary
Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's great minister, to "know his pleasure whether
certain strangers may be allowed to dwell within the borough without
damage of the Queen's laws."* (*Boston Corporation manuscripts quoted in
Thompson, History and Antiquities of Boston 1856.)

During one of these peaceful and useful Flemish invasions the ancestors
of Matthew Flinders entered Lincolnshire. In the later years of his life
he devoted some attention to the history of his family, and found record
of a Flinders as early as the tenth century. He believed, also, that his
people had some connection with two men named Flinders or Flanders, who
fled from Holland during the religious persecutions, and settled, in
Queen Elizabeth's reign, in Nottinghamshire as silk stocking weavers. It
would be very interesting if it were clear that there was a link between
the family and the origins of the great Nottingham hosiery trade. A
Flinders may in that case have woven silk stockings for the Royal
termagant, and Lord Coke's pair, which were darned so often that none of
the original fabric remained, may have come from their loom.

Matthew Flinders himself wrote the note: "Ruddington near Nottingham (it
is four miles south of the town) is the place whence the Flinders came;"
and he ascertained that an ancestor was Robert Flinders, a Nottingham
stocking-weaver.

A family tradition relates that the Lincolnshire Flinders were amongst
the people taken over to England