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Introduction: London in European perspective ‘London is the capital of England and so superior to other English towns that London is not said to be in England, but rather England to be in London, for England's most resplendent objects may be seen in and around London; so that he who sightsees London and the royal courts in its immediate vicinity may assert, without impertinence that he is properly acquainted with England.’ (Thomas Platter, Travels in England in 1599) London's growth was a phenomenon of European importance in our period. At the start, London was already a major capital city, ranking sixth in terms of size in mid-sixteenth-century Europe (see Table 10.1). It was dwarfed by the Italian city of Naples and was much smaller than either Venice (ranked second) or Paris (ranked third); and it was outnumbered by the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and London's principal trading partner, Antwerp. Within fifty years all this had changed. By 1600 London was ranked third in Europe after Naples and Paris, and its neighbour and erstwhile trading partner, Antwerp, was nowhere. Continued growth meant that London came second only to Paris by 1650 and by the end of the seventeenth century was the biggest European city containing some half a million people. London then developed from a modest capital city, with an economy largely dependent on the export of woollen cloth, to a metropolis at the heart of the European economy. Over our period its population spilled out from the original relatively densely populated districts of the City within and without the Walls (see Plate 1) to form an urban conurbation stretching from Wapping and Poplar in the east to Westminster in the west. Its economic impact on the nation expanded from the immediately adjacent counties to the entire nation, including its overseas colonies. The task of this chapter is to provide some idea of how this extraordinary growth was accomplished and what kind of economy and society it produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Were the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the first to define, for British people, ‘the urban experience’? In broad terms, the answer to this would have to be in the negative, since the pattern of major towns, at least in England and Scotland, was already long-established, and the sixteenth century's increase in population can be seen as a phase of recovery as much as of expansion. On the other hand, it is in this period that London emerges as a European metropolis and as England's capital city, that urbanisation becomes linked with national identity and centralised government, and that the proportion of those resident in towns, or sharing in the experience of towns in some phase of life, begins to accelerate. In this chapter, urbanisation will first be examined in demographic terms, with reference to migration, fertility, marriage and mortality, especially in relation to subsistence and the shift from epidemic to endemic causes of death. The second section explores contemporary sensibilities and social structure as affected by changes in the pattern of disease and in the urban environment, touching on gender, work and poverty, and contemporary ideas about population, crowding and urban life. By ‘environment’ we mean, in particular, factors affecting townspeople's sense of the presence of others. The final section analyses the ambivalent character of two staple sources of reassurance, household and neighbourhood, which provided continuity but which can be shown to be open to challenge and renegotiation from within and without as urban pressures intensified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An understanding of the rural world of early modern England must start with the activity that occupied most of the population: the practical business of farming. This chapter begins with a description of farming operations and considers the constraints farmers faced in attempting to maintain or increase their output of crops and livestock. Farming was not a uniform activity, so some of the differences between farming enterprises are discussed in terms of their products, labour requirements, income flows and relations with the market. The chapter then investigates the land being farmed in terms of patterns of ownership and rights to property. The next section moves from farms to farmers, looking at their social status, and at their social and economic relationships within the local community. Finally, the chapter explores the relationships between these various elements of the rural economy within the context of a framework of rural regions. Farming Five hundred years ago English farmers grew four major cereal crops: wheat, rye, barley and oats, together with the pulse crops of peas and beans; they also kept cattle, sheep, pigs and poultry. Although these crops and livestock are kept by farmers today, cereal crops have been changed dramatically by plant breeding during the twentieth century, and livestock characteristics have been transformed by selective breeding. During the last five centuries sugar beet, potatoes, rape, turnips and swedes amongst others have been added to the sixteenth-century list of crops, although all but sugar beet were introduced in the three centuries before 1850. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]