Well perhaps Mulitcultural Elizabethan London might be closer to the mark. London at this time was quickly becoming the largest city in Europe at this time, and as a port it was already a melting pot for different people.
Even so, as Michael Wood suggests here, whilst “most of us tend to think that black people came to Britain after the war – Caribbeans on the Empire Windrush in 1948, Bangladeshis after the 1971 war and Ugandan Asians after Idi Amin’s expulsion in 1972″, in reality ” in Shakespeare’s day, you could have met people from west Africa and even Bengal in the same London streets“.
It is perhaps just another example of how the Tudors continue to challenge our assumptions about them. More broadly, this is part of a bigger question – how much did people move about in the Elizabethan age ? Where people move, so do ideas, and this really scared them. They craved stability, and if you look at the 1598 and 1601 Poor laws they should be seen as as a reaction to other forces of change such as population increase and inflation.
Mr Kydd.
