Foreign beasts and serpents

John Florio, a language teacher in Tudor England, was a fluent bilingual speaker of English and Italian, although he probably never went to Italy. One of the strands in Florio’s work is his dislike of England. This seems to have been caused by the hostility shown to him and other foreigners by the local population. A general grievance was that most successful language textbook writeres were foreigners: La Motte, Holyband, Bellot, Mason, Florio himself, and others. Holyband’s French Schoolmaster was in constant demand, so much so that a special tax for the benefit of the poor was imposed on it in 1600! A particulary fierce attack on the foreign language teachers was launched by John Eliot in 1593. He reviled them as ‘beasts and serpents’ and accused them of having poisoned England with the works of Macchiavelli and other ‘devilish writers’. However, for all the complaints, when the political situation improved in France and many of the language teachers went back, their place was not filled by native textbook writers. Language teaching rather went into some decline afterwards. (Howatt, A.P.R.: A History of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984: 25-9)