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Elizabethan London: a multicultural melting pot
00:44:18
John Gallagher delves into the multicultural and multilingual world of early modern London
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Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. London today is known for being a multicultural city. But what about in the past? Well, for today's episode, Emily Brifitt spoke to the historian Dr. John Gallagher about his research into the vibrant and exciting melting pot of language and culture that was Elizabethan London, revealing what life looked like for the migrant population and those around them. So I was wondering if we can go back in time a little bit. Today we live in a multicultural society here in the uk. If we were to go back to early modern England, how would it compare?
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A
I think people are often surprised at the extent to which a city like London in the 16th century was multicultural and was diverse. That wasn't a new thing in the 16th century. We have great records of migration and multinational populations living in London from the medieval period onwards, or way back into Roman Britain, of course. But in the 16th century, there are a couple of things that are making London diverse in really interesting ways. One of those things is growing migration that you are seeing people, in many cases religious refugees fleeing political and religious conflict on the continent. So a lot of French speakers, Dutch speakers, some Italian, Spanish and Portuguese speakers as well. There's also growing English contacts with the wider world, so in the Atlantic as well. And there's been fantastic work recently on indigenous Americans in England in this period as well. You also see the beginnings of England's involvement in the slave trade and growing contacts with Africa. So you've got a black population, as we know, in London at the same time. So it's maybe more diverse than people would traditionally think.
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B
That's a completely fascinating picture that you've given us today. We use the term migrants often. What was the 16th century early modern equivalent?
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A
So the one you find most often in the sources that I use is stranger. Stranger, you'll sometimes find alien is another very common term as well. And a stranger generally means someone who's come into the realm from outside. So lots of these populations that I'm researching at the moment, so these French speakers, Dutch speakers and Italian speakers will generally be known as being strangers.
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You gave us A glimpse in your first answer there. But where were people migrating from and why? You know, how far were they traveling and what was that experience like?
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Yeah, so the big reasons for what I call this kind of migration moment in the latter half of the 16th century, so under Elizabeth I, is that you see two parallel conflicts coming out of the Reformation that has kind of torn Western Christendom apart in the early 16th century. And one of those is the French wars of religion. And one of those, some people will say the Dutch revolt, it's generally known as the 80 Years War. So these kind of political and religious conflicts that result in significant displacement of people and in many cases result in Protestants fleeing to England. So the majority of strangers that are arriving in London in this period are from French and Dutch speaking areas in modern day France, Belgium, the Netherlands. You also have people coming from other spaces further afield. There are, you know, Protestants from Italy or Spain fleeing the Inquisition. And we know as well that London is also. We've got kind of a much broader set of arrivals. In the records that I'm looking at, we find Swedes and Greeks and people from the Ottoman Empire and much further afield as well, including North Africa. So, you know, there's a lot of different points of departure. In many cases, people are making migrant crossings here. We talk today a lot about small boats in the Channel. People are coming across the Channel and the North Sea to England. We know that in many cases that's a difficult journey. It requires money, it requires knowledge. So of the routes of, you know, contacts who will help you to make the journ. We know that it can be fraught with danger as well, from shipwreck to assault to arrest by the authorities and, you know, potential for Protestant migrants, potential punishment at the hands of the Catholic authorities as well. So it's by no means a kind of simple or easy journey to make, but it is one that thousands of people make in this period.
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B
Do we get an insight into some of the personal stories from this? Or is that kind of lost to time?
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A
It's really interesting because I'm not aware for this period of much by way of, you know, where we would look for accounts like that. So diaries, for instance, or someone writing up their experience of making that kind of journey in a travel book or something like that. We do have kind of more elite travelers and tourists who keep diaries. We know a little bit more about that. But what I found when I've been looking at records of the churches that are set up for migrants in London in this period is that people sometimes told stories about their experience of taking that journey in the course of their dealings with the church. So, you know, maybe they were making a claim, maybe they were part of a kind of dispute. And we find women and men actually telling stories about their experiences of travel. So I've been writing recently about women's testimony of their experiences of travel, because, again, in the early modern period, when we read writing about travel, particularly when it's in print, it's overwhelmingly by men. And we have very, very little sense, despite the fact that women were migrants, women were mobile throughout the early modern period, 16th, 17th century and beyond. We have very little kind of eyewitness testimony. But I think if we look away from sources like a kind of printed book and into these kind of maybe more legal or religious sources, we sometimes find women's voices telling us more about what their experiences were like.
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How did male and female experience differ?
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Yeah, so it was definitely much more difficult in this period to travel solo as a woman. And putting that on top of all of the other difficulties of being a migrant and fleeing your home, the fact that it's a deeply patriarchal society that expects women to be subordinated, you know, to a father or to a husband, means that women are certainly under more severe surveillance and more attempts at control. But one of the things that is suggested by the sources that I'm reading, you know, and it is upsetting as well, is that there were substantial dangers for women on the route as well. We have sources like these women telling their stories of travel where they attest to things like sexual assault and abuse, so things like unscrupulous guides who are attempting to kind of leverage their position of authority and enact assaults on women who are in this kind of very precarious position as travelers trying to make these crossings. So one of ways in which these experiences of mobility, of travelling are shaped by gender, would be maybe that increased exposure to violence.
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B
You mentioned there. Also about church records. I wonder if you could touch on how we have these records, essentially.
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Yeah, I'm delighted we have these. They're very, very helpful for a historian. So the situation is that from the mid 16th century, there is a system in England, so I'm looking at London, but you find these elsewhere as well, in places like Norwich, Southampton, Canterbury, whereby strangers are allowed to have their own churches. The reason they need their own churches is because they're Protestants, like the English, but they're a different kind of Protestant. They're Calvinists, so they want to kind of worship and to live in a way that reflects that in the 16th century the state allows them to have their own churches, their own ministers. They're under the supervision and superintendence of the Church of England, but they have quite a lot of freedom to live in a manner that they kind of believe to be correct and Christian. And one of the things about Calvinists is that they are very concerned with social discipline. They want to make sure that people are behaving morally, that they are living in a Christian way. And what that means is a certain amount or really a quite significant amount of surveillance and policing by the churches themselves. So each of these churches has what's called a consistory, which is its kind of governing body. And that consistory is deeply interested in all sorts of things that today we might consider to be private matters, but which were considered to be, you know, public and important to the church in those days. And that's everything from marital problems to drunkenness to misbehavior to having arguments with your neighbors are all things that the consistory takes an interest in. And in the case of the Dutch church, the French church and the Italian church for London in this period, we have some of the surviving act books of the consistory. So that's the records that the consistory keeps of the kind of day to day cases that come in front of them. And they're in French for the French church, in Dutch for the Dutch church, and in Italian for the Italian church. And they're this amazing kind of multilingual archive of everyday life for London's migrants.
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What sort of cases are they covering here and what were considered the most damaging types of case.
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So they cover a broad range of things. And one thing I should say is that these are records which don't give us a kind of uncomplicated picture of this community life because they're disciplinary records. They're always going to show us bad behavior much more than they show us good behavior. So if you just read these sources, it's easy to think, oh my God, they're all bed hopping, they're all kind of constantly getting drunk, they're dancing at weddings, which is a big no, no. But actually we've just got kind of one side of a much bigger story here. But the biggest issue taken together is in many ways the issue of scandal. So, you know, they're very concerned about heresy. They want people to be kind of, you know, believing and behaving correctly. But for these churches, there's a really strong awareness that they have been given the legal right to exist, to live and to worship in their own way within London. But that that's precarious that they are not guaranteed the continuation of those rights. They're not guaranteed a place in England. And so these consistories, the governing bodies, show real concern with anything where they think that scandal is going to spread beyond the community and into, you know, among the English. It might get to the ears of the Bishop of London, for instance, which is a big worry. So that's something that happens. You know, there's in the French church there's a guy called Nicolas Wilbur and he gets in trouble, not least because he's been going around insulting the consistory, but because the Bishop of London has found out. And that's a really big problem. There are problems when people go out and get drunk and get into fights because they're in taverns where the English are present at one point in the French church. And there's this wonderful line in the consistory records where they describe some bad behavior by the members of the church. And they say, and the English said, you know, behold the people of the church, behold the reformed people. So you have this really strong sense of kind of being watched and being judged and anything that causes scandal is embarrassing, but it's also potentially dangerous in terms of their right to remain and to continue to worship in the way that they need to.
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Was this policing of people done within the community?
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First and foremost, it's done within the community. So you have in each of these churches a group of elders and each elder will be assigned to a district of the city. And one of their jobs is to keep an eye on what people are up to and to kind of be responsible for the moral well being of their city area. And so, you know, they find out through gossip and rumor in a big way. They find out about things because people come and complain to them. People come to the consistory and they say, you know, my neighbor has been having these explosive marital rows for weeks. And the English is starting to talk. And then the consistory will call them in and question them. They hear about these things from the big public spaces of the city. So places like the Royal Exchange, where people come to trade gossip, rumors and information, often shows up as a site where this kind of information is being shared. But it's also, it is coming from within the community, it's also coming from outside. And one of the things I've been working on is how far these churches are engaging with the constables of London, the prisons of London, the courts of London and the English parish churches around them, because quite commonly, a story will come to the ears of the consistory and you'll actually get told, well, who heard it from whom? So the local constable found this person in bed with someone they shouldn't have been in bed with. They then told the elder, the elder told the consistory and so forth. So this essentially, these are not siloed communities by any means. They're kind of having to deal and to engage with the urban authorities as well. I've been really convinced by an argument made by the scholar Reingard Esser when she's talking about Norwich, about the idea that the city authorities kind of expect the churches to help them with policing, and that a lot of the kind of policing of the migrant population is a kind of collaborative affair where because the churches know their members, they're able to do a lot of the work. They have the information to do that kind of policing work that maybe the urban authorities don't. So it's not a case of they're hived off and just doing their own policing. Kind of tied into a bigger system of policing and surveillance in the city. At the same time, I was really.
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Intrigued about what you said about how it crosses public and private space. If you can get told off for marital arguments in the home, there's no sort of escape from it, almost.
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Yeah. One of the things they're really interested in debating amongst themselves is what is public and what is private. And one of the reasons that that matters to members of the church is because if your sin is a private one, you can. So one of the things we need to know is that they don't really have traditional ways of punishing people. So if you know you've been found to have been carrying on with someone, you shouldn't be. The consistories can't put you in prison. Right. They could hand you over to the authorities if it was genuinely criminal. If they can't put you in prison, what they can do is that they can bar you from being able to take communion. And in a Calvinist community, that really, really matters. So it's like being kind of excluded and shunned from the church. So one of the things they then demand is that you have to make penance. You have to kind of essentially make an apology and show your contrition for what you've done. If it is deemed to be a private sin, you can make penance just in front of the consistory. If it's public, you have to do it in front of the whole church, the whole congregation. So it becomes a really public affair. So you can imagine the shame and embarrassment and the difficulty attached to having to confess your sins in front of the whole community. So people will sometimes really try and argue, well, actually, you know, this kind of dispute which is happening, we've many cases here of domestic violence, for instance, as well. They say, well, that was a private affair that was happening within my own home. In one case that I've been researching, the Dutch church argues very strongly that a case of domestic violence is a public matter for a couple of reasons. One of them being that the violence and the kind of verbal violence that accompanies the physical violence is audible beyond the walls of the home, is that this can be heard by the neighbours. This is scandalizing the neighbours. The English are able to hear it, they're talking about it amongst themselves. And so they say, you know, at the point where this becomes so disrupt, you can't make the argument that this is a private matter anymore, that this has kind of become public. And that's really interesting because it shows that there's this kind of ways of thinking about different communities and how information crosses between communities. And it also gives us a sense of the kinds of spaces that migrants were living in. These are not hermetically sealed flats or houses where you don't know your neighbors. They're embedded in multinational communities. They have windows and doors and walls that sound travels through, where people know each other's business. And at the same time, migran immigrants are often criticized. There's a lot of kind of xenophobic attitudes in the period, and they're criticized for living in really, really cramped accommodation as well. And so there's this sense of the kind of the home as being porous somewhere where information and noise can kind of bleed out and the private can become public.
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So obviously these migrant communities are being policed. What was their reaction to this policing?
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Well, you do sometimes get people who have clearly gotten fed off up and had enough. And there are repeat offenders in the consistory records. But there are also people who. There's a lot of criticism of the consistories themselves. And as you can imagine, the consistories don't take this well. They get attacked by people who kind of come to see them, but they also kind of get attacked in public, whether in taverns or at the Royal Exchange, in these big kind of public spaces. A brief but not complete list of things. They get criticized for being. They get called Turks, which considered to be very bad. Right. So being compared with, you know, what's believed to be kind of the despotic Muslims of the Ottoman Empire in the. They get called even worse than that Pope. So there's someone who shouts Pope, Pope at the consistory. And that's really one of the worst things you can say to a Calvinist. There are people who call them drunkards. There are people who claim that they're secretly in the pay of the Spanish is another thing as well. So there is pushback from people who have a real objection to being told what to do by the elders of the church. So that's absolutely the case. And we see some times when people make a point of separating themselves. So there's a chap in the French church who's a teacher and he rejects their authority. They've kind of brought in all of the teachers in the congregation to examine them, to check their faith. And this guy gets so angry about it that he says, you know, well, hang on, I'm already paying tax on my English parish. Why should I be paying you anything? But also he says, I speak English, you know, just as well as I need to, so what am I doing essentially? And the French church is the implication. And he storms out. And it's really interesting because in this big French language record, it says that as he leaves, he says goodbye and it gives it in English. So this idea that he's not just kind of separating himself, he's having a strop. But he's also kind of switched language to indicate that I'm having no more of this. I'm identifying myself from here on with the English. And you do get people leaving, joining the English parishes near them as well. There are big disputes over theological and political matters at different points that see people kind of walk out of their churches as well. So there's plenty of conflict and plenty of resistance and critique of this kind of policing at the same time time as people do submit to it and do live within it as well.
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B
Now, obviously these churches are multilingual. Did this isolate them at all from English speaking churches and English speaking peoples?
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So the stranger churches themselves are open to other people in interesting ways. So, you know, we have accounts of English people going to the Italian church or the French church literally to practice their Italian or their French. So when you couldn't kind of watch YouTube videos or something like that, where are you going to go to hear it spoken correctly? Well, you can rock up and you can hear a sermon and you can follow along in your Bible and that's a good way to kind of practice your Italian. So we know that they're kind of spaces that the English do show up in. In some cases, we know there's loads of intermarriage. You know, if you look at the Dutch church, for instance, they're often giving permission to people to be married elsewhere. Or they're kind of presiding over marriages where one of the people is English. And there are some cases where people come to the church and they say, you know, the person I want to marry doesn't speak Dutch, so we need to get married in the English church. And they'll, you know, generally, if all is kind of kosher, they'll approve of that. So you get that sense of kind of communities mix mixing around that time. But, you know, I don't want to overstate it. It's really hard to tell from the sources we have. We know that lots of people learn English at some point, but we don't always know how much they learned, how effective that English was. I've been doing some work recently with the wills that are made by strangers. And in many cases, even people who we know probably spoke pretty good English. Many of those people will still make their will in their native language and have it translated. And in some cases it's clear that people maybe don't even have. Have English that kind of require their will to be translated as well. So there definitely is a kind of linguistic back and forth. There are mixed households, mixed marriages, mixed workshops, and even the churches themselves are mixed spaces. But, yeah, they're certainly not siloed off in that way.
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B
People seem to really be living cheek by jowl, don't they? Did you have to speak multiple languages to participate in this multilingual community? Or were there any efforts to impose a sort of. Of linguistic homogeneity on the communities?
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A
Yeah, it's a great question. They're much more linguistically diverse than we would even get a sense of from the names of these churches. So, for instance, the Italian church in Elizabethan London has loads of members who are not Italians. And in part because there's a split in the Dutch church and a load of Dutch people come along, but they have elders who are Dutch, they have elders who are English. And even I've just been using the term Dutch as though that's kind of unproblematic. But one of the things is, you know, the Netherlands as we have it today doesn't exist in that period. Dutch gets used for a lot of people who speak. Speak the Dutch language, speak Flemish also, confusingly for people who speak German, that's a problem as well. There's a lot of variation there. One of the things that these churches do is that they agree to kind of split new arrivals by language. And they say, you know, if they speak French, you can come here. They speak Dutch or Flemish or German, they can go to you. And they make rulings at other points where they say so for instance, I think when London's Spanish church, which exists for a brief period isn't able to continue, they don't have a minister. The other stranger churches said, okay, well the members of the Spanish church should go to whichever church is kind of most fitting for them linguistically. So, you know, if they're going to be able to understand French better, then they should go there, otherwise they should go to the Dutch one. So they're linguistically diverse communities even at the same time as they're kind of, in theory, the French church is carried on entirely through French, the Dutch church is entirely through Dutch. There may be more linguistically diverse on the ground and particularly as you know, people start to intermarry and things like that as well. Oh, and they've got Latin as well. That's the other thing is, you know, you've got sermons being given in Latin as well as in kind of vernacular, everyday languages. And the early records of the Dutch church are kept in a mixture of Latin and Dutch. There's a body in which all the stranger churches meet together. They keep their records in French which presumes that, you know, there's some ability to read French across the different groups. So there's a lot more linguistic flexibility there than we might presume today.
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B
And I was intrigued by what you said about the use of language to kind of better your arguments earlier. Now could you tell us a little bit more about that side of things?
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A
Yeah, I think this material is really amazing and it's something I've been writing a lot about recently. I got very excited when I found it. There are a bunch of records in the consistories of the different churches about arguments where people are explicitly arguing multilingually. And they're doing that because they've got listeners, they're doing it in public and they want to make sure that everyone around them understands what is being said. So I've got one between, you know, a woman and her daughter in law where they're screaming at each other in the street, one of them is saying to the other that she should be hanged. It's a really verbally violent argument, but that these words are being exchanged in English and French. And we hear from witnesses, one of whom is Flemish, one of whom is English. We hear them say, oh yeah, they were speaking in both languages. I've got a physical altercation in the Royal Exchange again where a guy comes up to someone and accuses him of owing him money. But seeing that he's speaking to an Englishman, he switches to English and he makes his accusations in English so he knows he's going to be understood. And I've got one that I'm particularly fond of. It's obviously not very pleasant, but I'm very fond of it. It's between two couples where there's clearly a kind of long running incident or a set of arguments that have led up to this. But one couple arrives at the home and workshop of another couple and stages this absolutely massive row. There are accusations flying back and forth. There's an English gentleman listening in. They switch languages so that they're arguing in English as well as in Dutch. But not only do they switch languages, they also use a bunch of accusations which seem to me to be really calculated to really hit home any English listeners. So for instance, one member of one of the couples is shouting at the others that the others are, you know, that they're not good Christians, that they don't deserve to be tolerated in England. They're kind of saying, you know, we're the good immigrants, they're the bad immigrants. And they even say that they should be punished. And not just that they should be punished, they should be punished at Tyburn, the really famous London execution site. So kind of showing off their cultural knowledge as well. And so they've clearly got this kind of incredible scene where they're trying to make English women witnesses part of the argument as well. We know that it worked the other way. We know that we've got a great moment where a French bookseller is approached to the street and asked by his English neighbor, hey, that argument that was happening in the street yesterday, what was going on there? It was in French, so I didn't understand. So, you know, there's a real interest in, you know, translating these things either in the moment or afterwards. I think, you know, a big public argument, and lots of these arguments are big and public can engage a multilingual audience.
- [24:27]
B
Now, aside from the more argumentative side, I wanted to ask you about the day to day life experience of migrants, of these strangers. Were people's customs or practices accepted?
- [24:41]
A
Yeah, well, we know that cultural difference is kind of on the minds of Londoners in this period. So for instance, there are a whole load of plays, city comedies, people like Thomas Dacre and others where where we see kind of comedy stereotypes of, you know, the Dutchman who loves butter and beer, or, you know, the Frenchman or the Italian, the foppish Italian, things like that. And so it's clear that people in London in this period have a sense of, you know, cultural difference, even if it's being made fun of rather than kind of straightly described in these plays. One of the things that I've been really interested in is kind of small differences because, and particularly because I'm very interested in the history of food and drink and a lot of our understanding of food and drink in this period. A lot of the focus of scholarship in the past was on kind of extraordinary changes in food culture. So, you know, kind of Italians bringing in, you know, beautiful wines and exotic fruits and things like that into England. And I got interested in, you know, well, what's happening when you've got much poorer, often illiterate migrants in London. You know, are they very different themselves? And we've got some really interesting stuff in the sources from the period where we've got letters from migrants in Norwich saying things like, you know, can you bring over a trough for me to knead bread in because I want to do it our way and not the way the English do it. Can you bring over paddles for making butter? Because here they only use lard, these very everyday things. There's clearly still a sense of difference there, even though, you know, it's not about kind of the exotic, it's just about bread and butter, quite literally, bread and butter. So those are ways in which those kind of cultural differences, I think are felt. So language is one, food is another.
- [26:21]
B
It's a really nice take on things because we look so often at the big changes, the big differences, but it's nice to see the smaller ones there too. We've obviously spoken about stranger churches. Were there other places that were hubs of learning and multinationalism?
- [26:38]
A
Yeah, some of these are semi public spaces like those kind of stranger churches. We should also be thinking about places like work. So many of these strangers who are arriving are artisans and in particular a lot of them are working in the cloth trade as dyers, as weavers, things like that. And we see in industries like glass making, which in the early days is dominated by migrants, I've come across some evidence of, you know, glassworks as sites where people learnt some Italian. Because one of the things that, you know, when people come in with a new technology and the ability, ability to make things the English can't currently make, it's usually stipulated that they can't keep it to themselves. So they have to take on English apprentices as well as, for instance, the Italian apprentices they brought with them. And so these kind of workshops become spaces for language learning. Problem is, it's very, very hard to see that from the sources we can infer it. But very few people, except in this case, one person says, oh, I learned my Italian when I was working at a glass house, which is, you know, nice for me, but another place, and I've mentioned it a little bit, but it's the Royal Exchange. And this is kind of a big Elizabethan foundation. It's kind of of the hub of London's commerce in this period. It's where kind of merchants and traders come together and do kind of international deals. But it's also a big public space where people go to have arguments and have a few drinks and do their shopping. And so this becomes a place that is famous for the exchange of news and the exchange of gossip. There are lots of different sites that are kind of famous for this kind of chat, but two big ones are the royal exchange and St. Paul's Cathedral. Cathedral. St. Paul's Cathedral, Paul's Walk, the area around it, and the churchyard, which is the hub of the Elizabethan book trade, is another place that's known for being kind of international and multilingual. You can take French classes with a French teacher who's selling his books. St. Paul's Churchyard as well, but also towards the east of the city, where you've got a larger set of migrant populations, and a denser migrant population, I think, would have felt. Felt more multilingual than some other parts of the city in this period?
- [28:40]
B
And what impact did this multinationalism, but also multilingualism, have in transforming the urban space, the city, the town?
- [28:48]
A
Yeah, I think. I mean, I think this is something we don't understand very well, and I'm hoping that we're moving towards that. My sense is that we don't really have a strong understanding for the early modern period, at least the 16th and 17th century, of how. How linguistic diversity shaped life in the city. And it seems to me that it must have done in really significant ways. The major global cities of this period, and this is a really important point for the development of the modern city anyway. But going from, you know, Lima to Manila to Antwerp to Lisbon, all of these are. So, to pick four, just almost at random, these are profoundly multilingual spaces. And when we've thought about them as being multilingual, we've often kind of focused on print on the page, and less so on the kind of day to day of people speaking multiple languages to and around each other. So one of the arguments I'm trying to make in my work is we need a better way of understanding in the way that sociolinguists for the modern world are already thinking about in a big way. We need a way of understanding how that kind of linguistic diversity shaped urban life. For me in London, there's a couple of impacts that I think we can. One is that I think that people experienced London as multilingual, even if they weren't multilingual themselves and they were listening in on other people's arguments, they were having them translated for them. They were witnesses and participants in really interesting ways. The other thing which to me is I think really important is that this is a period which sees huge linguistic debate in English about reforming how English is spelt, about worrying about, you know, the power of English alone, about worrying about English as the language of the state. Lots of worrying in this period about importing of foreign words into English. This is a period there's loads of borrowing from Latin, Greek, French, Italian into English and there's a lot of concern about that as well, that English is losing its Englishness, that with the loss of language comes a loss of identity and national power. So this huge anxiety, we think of it as a literary linguistic golden age. It's actually a moment of extreme linguistic anxiety society. And for me, one of the things that's often been missed by treating these as debates that are happening in and about what's written on a page. What's missing is the kind of very everyday, oral kind of multilingualism of life in a place like London where these arguments are actually going on. And so what I'm trying to do with my work is to say, well, one of the big contexts for all of these worries about language is changing. It's all getting confusing and we're a bit worried is living in a profoundly multilingual space. The reality of walking your front door and hearing languages that aren't English.
- [31:22]
B
Why was the spoken word itself so important?
- [31:25]
A
I think for a couple of reasons. One is that many people in the stranger communities and beyond were illiterate. We are looking at majority illiterate societies in early modern Europe. Illiterate or partially literate, even people might be able to read, but not able to write and so forth. So there is a big issue there with the spoken word is much more important when you don't have access or you don't have unmediated access to print and to text. The other reason that it really matters is because, and we've seen this in the path breaking work of Laura Gowing and many other scholars since her the link between the spoken word and reputation. It really matters how you are spoken about. The reason the spoken word really matters is because that is how people decide whether you're a decent person or a person of bad credit. And if you're a person of bad credit, they might not want to lend you money. Money. They might not want to let you say, I'll pay for my shopping next week. And in a cash poor society, that really matters. Reputation is not an abstract thing. It is something that has a real bearing on your ability to live from week to week and to provide for your family. So there's a real power attached to the spoken word. It has the power to make or break reputations and to make or break lives. And much more broadly, these are societies in which speech crimes are really heavily policed because the authorities see things like, like treasonous or seditious speech or blasphemous or heretical speech, not just as bad things, but also as genuinely dangerous. The idea that they could disrupt the fabric of the community, of the society, out of the polity. So people are listening to what's being said in this period and taking it extremely seriously for a lot of different reasons.
- [33:05]
B
We've spoken a good deal about London. Was London unique in is multilingualism, multinationalism?
- [33:13]
A
Definitely not. And actually it's not even the most important city for multilingualism in England at this period. And that crown absolutely has to go to Norwich because Norwich is the second biggest city in England in the 16th century. But it is also one where the proportion of migrants is much higher than the proportion of migrants in London. So that kind of presence of other languages is much more ordinary and much more a part of kind of urban life. In Norwich you see the appointment of a group known as the homme politique or the politique mane as the politic men whose job it is to kind of intercede between the stranger communities and the urban authorities. There's kind of whole structures to make sure that everyone is comprehensible to each other. You have urban regulations being translated between Dutch and English, for instance, to make sure that they can be understood by the workers of Norwich as well. So Norwich would be even more profoundly multilingual. But one of the reasons I think that I'm interested in in London is because, you know, there are many more Multilingual cities in the early modern period. You'd think of, you know, think of somewhere like Constantinople as kind of an extraordinary example. You know, so many different languages are being spoken. But one of the things that's interesting to me is that even in a place that is traditionally considered to be fairly monoclosh, to be kind of fairly dominated by English, there is such a presence and such a role for different languages. So for me, it's an interesting test case, in part because multilingualism isn't necessarily saturating every aspect of urban experience, but there's still loads to say about how it's kind of shaping urban life.
- [34:45]
B
It really seems that we're not just looking at an Anglophone past here. So as a final point, personally, why do you think this is so interesting and why should we be studying this?
- [34:57]
A
I get very worked up about this. So I'm very lucky in that I was educated through Irish until I was 12 and then was very lucky in getting to study other languages, particularly French and German at school. And so language learning has always kind of been part of my life. I've been very lucky in that and continue to be then part of my training as a historian. And I think, you know, multilingual training for historians is something that makes it possible to take new perspectives on past society. But I also think that this kind of history of a multilingual England is really, really important today because the kind of unquestioning attitude that we can use, and I feel it myself sometimes, to kind of the usability and comprehensibility of English around the world can make us forget that this is historically contingent and that historically, this is very, very new. So the idea of having a nation state where everyone speaks the same language is a modern invention anyway. But also the idea that English would be a global language is very, very recent too, in historical terms. So I think there's a real value to looking back at a past where people had to learn other languages, where English speakers had to engage linguistically in order to be able to kind of communicate, to trade, to travel, to learn. And it's a reminder of, I suppose, the importance of language learning today, the historical contingency of the situation in which we as English speakers find ourselves, but also the importance of learning languages to understand the past as well, and the importance, importance of training in languages. If you don't have the ability to train people in languages that aren't English, then you really restrict yourself in terms of the kinds of history and the history of the places that you can write about, but even about the kinds of British history that you can write. So I think that doing work that is multilingual is important. It's important to flag it today, because if we don't, the histories that we can write about will be such a narrow slice of human experience, and I think that would be tragic.
- [36:55]
B
That was Dr. John Gallagher, associate professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leeds and a former BBC Radio 3 new generation thinker. John's research can be found in a new academic paper, Migrant Voices in Multilingual London, 1560-1600, which is published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Thanks for listening. This podcast was produced by Daniel Kramer Arden.