ABSTRACT
Calais was to blame for making England a new Sodom or Gomorrah, argued the clergyman and geographer William Harrison in his Description of England (1587). Its acquisition from the French by Edward III began a process of English degeneration that started with ‘trade in divers countries’ but soon the English ‘began to wax idle … and thereupon not only left off their former painfulness and frugality but in like sort gave themselves to live in excess and vanity’. Worse, this process was accelerated by those ‘strangers’ dwelling in the realm who, ‘perceiving our sluggishness and espying that this idleness of ours might redound to their great profit, forthwith employed their endeavors to bring in the supply of such things as we lacked continually from foreign countries, which yet more augmented our idleness’. 1 The celebration and idealisation of an earlier ‘glorious isolation’ from the Continent; the denigration of the role of ‘strangers’ in the realm: in many respects, Harrison’s vision of contemporary England seems not only familiar but to confirm a ‘legendary English xenophobia’. 2
