The Growth of London in the Tudor and Stuart Periods

The accession of James I. to the English crown in 1603 corresponds in time with the pretensions of London to be the first city in Europe. “London,” says Dekker, in The Wonderfull Yeare, “was never in the highway to preferment till now. For she saw herself in better state than Jerusalem, she went more gallant than ever did Antwerp, was more courted by amorous and lustie suitors than Venice (the minion of Italy); more lofty towers stood about her temples than ever did about the beautiful forehead of Rome; Tyre and Sydon to her were like two thatcht houses to Theobals, the grand Cairo but a hogsty.” That is, of course, in Dekker’s manner; but it can be shown by figures that London took a great start in the end of Elizabeth’s reign and grew still faster under James.

From Richard I. to Henry VII., London was the medieval walled city, as Drayton says, “built on a rising bank within a vale to stand,” with a population between 40,000 and 50,000. Without the walls lay a few city parishes or parts of parishes, including the three dedicated to St Botolph outside Aldgate, Bishopsgate and Aldersgate, respectively, and St Giles’s without Cripplegate, all of these being at the gates or close to the walls. On the western side, however, lay an extensive but sparsely populated suburb, which was erected in 1393 into the Ward of Farringdon Without; it extended westward from the city wall as far as Temple Bar, Holborn Bars and West Smithfield, and was divided into the four great parishes of St Sepulchre’s without Newgate; St Andrew’s, on the other side of Holborn valley, St Dunstan’s in the West (about Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane), and St Bride’s, Fleet Street.

The earliest known bills of mortality, in 1532 and 1535, from which a population of some 62,400 might be deduced, show that the St Botolph parishes, St Giles’s without Cripplegate and the four great parishes in the western Liberties (or, more correctly, in the ward of Farringdon Without) had one-third of the whole deaths, and presumably about one-third of the whole population. In the few memoranda left of the plague-bills of 1563, we find evidence that the population had increased to some 93,276, of which about a sixth or seventh part, or some 12,000 to 15,000 was in the “out-parishes,” or in the parishes not only beyond the walls, but beyond the Bars of the Freedom. The most valuable series of statistics for Elizabethan London are those which give the christenings and burials for five years from 1578 to 1582; from those of the year 1580, which was almost free from the disturbing element of plague, a population of some 123,034 may be deduced by taking the birth-rate at 29 per 1000 living and the death-rate at 23 per 1000, or in each case at a favourable rate corresponding to the large excess of births over deaths.

There is not enough left of the introduction to these old manuscript abstracts of weekly births and deaths to show how many parishes they relate to, or what is the proportion for each division of the capital. But, as the earlier series of bills of mortality from 1563 to 1566 included the City, the Liberties and the out-parishes, it is probable that the series from 1578 to 1582 had done the same. The crowding of the Liberties with a poor class of tenements, and the extension of the out-parishes, are otherwise known from the preamble to the proclamation of 1580, which prohibited all building on new sites within three miles of the City wall. The next figures are for the years 1593, 1594, and 1595, which show a population increased to about 152,000.

From the figures of the plague-year, 1593, it appears that the mortality within the walls, both from plague and from ordinary causes, had now become the smaller half, or somewhat less than that “without the walls and in the Liberties,”—a phrase which is used loosely, even in some official bills, for both Liberties and suburbs. In 1604 we have the exact proportions of deaths in the City, in the Liberties and in the out-parishes respectively:

96 parishes
within walls 16 parishes
in Liberties 8 parishes out
of the Freedom Total

All deaths 1798 2465 956 5219

Plague deaths 280 368 248 896

Christenings — — — 5458

The sixteen parishes of the Liberties are now decidedly ahead of the ninety-six old City parishes, while the eight out-parishes have some 18 per cent. of the whole mortality. The population is best reckoned from the 6504 baptisms of the year after, 1605, by which time the disturbance of the enormous mortality in 1603 had ceased to be felt; at a birth-rate of 29 per 1000, the population would be some 224,275. The proportions in 1605, from the bills of mortality for the year, are 33·8 per cent. in the City, 50 per cent. in the Liberties, and 16·2 per cent. in the out-parishes; so that the City would have contained in that year about 76,000, the Liberties about 114,000, and the out-parishes about 37,000. To those numbers we should have to add some 20,000 or 30,000 for Westminster, Stepney, Lambeth, Newington, etc.

According to Graunt’s contemporary estimate for 1662, the population had grown to 460,000, or to rather more than double that of 1605; and whereas the proportion in 1605 was two-sixths in the City, three-sixths in the Liberties and one-sixth in the out-parishes, he makes it in 1662 to have been one-fifth in the City, three-fifths in the Liberties (including Southwark) and the out-parishes nearest to the Bars, and one-fifth in the out-parishes of Stepney, Redriff, Newington, Lambeth, Islington and Hackney, with the city of Westminster. Thus, whereas in 1535 the City had two-thirds of the whole estimated population, in 1662 it had one-fifth; but with its one-fifth in 1662 it was twice as crowded as with its two-thirds in 1535, the comparatively open appearance given to it by gardens in various localities, as on Tower Hill, having entirely gone.

As early as the plague of 1563, the Liberties were observed to be first infected, and to retain the infection longest; that is alleged of St Sepulchre’s parish by Dr John Jones, from personal knowledge. The history of the plague of 1593 is imperfectly known; but it is clear from Stow’s summation of the deaths during the year, that more died of plague in the Liberties and suburbs than in the City. Of the next plague, that of 1603, we know that it did begin in the Liberties and was prevalent in those skirts of the City for some time before it entered the gates. “Death,” says The Wonderfull Yeare, “had pitcht his tents in the sinfully polluted suburbs ... the skirts of London were pitifully pared off by little and little; which they within the gates perceiving,” etc. Then the plague, represented as an invading force, “entered within the walls and marched through Cheapside,” the wealthier inhabitants having escaped meanwhile.