ABSTRACT
Where did the outside world begin for the inhabitants of Elizabethan England?At their doorsteps? At the limits of their towns or parishes? Many have argued for England’s boundaries, others for the edges of Christendom, beyond which lay pagans, infidels and unknown marvels. For men and women of Elizabethan England, conceptions of the outside world were not stable but varied widely according to literacy, wealth and geographical location. There were extraordinarily well-travelled Elizabethans, whose beliefs, ambition or desire for wealth spread them across the known world. They were not the majority, however, whose insularity is well attested by contemporary sources. The Venetian Horatio Busino warned potential visitors to London that they should take care to ‘avoid any strangeness of dress in the City’. The clerks and apprentices there were ‘not well disposed to strangers, and were apt to ill-treat and rob them’. A tendency to look inward is further revealed in the common use of the term ‘foreigner’ for an unfamiliar Englishman – someone from another county – while an arrival from another country was a ‘stranger’ or ‘alien’.1
