Introduction

‘Where shall I find you about twelve a clocke?’ asks a speaker in John Eliot's French–English manual, the Ortho-epia Gallica (1593). ‘I will be below in the Change’, is the proffered reply, ‘either walking among the Italians, or truking with the French, or pratling amongst our English, or carousing with the Flemings at the Cardinal's Hat’. ¹ The conversation directs the reader's attention to the buzz of the Royal Exchange, opened in 1571, whose novelty as England's first major commercial centre and multi-cultural trading bourse had not yet faded. The space that it signals is elusively mobile, and almost disconcertingly multicultural and multilingual. It is exaggerated, as one might expect from a semi-satiric bilingual manual, but not entirely unfounded. The radically transformative impact of human mobility and displacement on virtually all aspects of life and society in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe – from politics and economy to everyday practices of consumption and habit – is well established. Nowhere was its transformative effect felt as substantially in the shaping of the nation as among the English, deeply conscious of their identity as an island nation, ‘penitus toto divisos orbe’ (‘quite sundered from the rest of the world’, Virgil, Eclogue 1, 67).