The Demographic Reality

The most important fact about early modern London, the one about which contemporaries and historians are universally agreed, is that it was growing – from about 120,000 souls in 1550 to 675,000 in 1750 – and growing faster than England as a whole. Why did London's population grow faster than the rest of the country's? London's demographic expansion could not have been caused by the reproduction of its own population, because early modern London's death rate was higher than its birth rate: out of every 1,000 Londoners, 35 would be born each year, but 40 would die. The reasons for London's deadly demographic profile should be obvious from our tour of the city in 1550: the population density in London's core was 100 persons per acre in 1550, rising to about 200 by the time of the Great Fire in 1666. Many of these people were housed in ramshackle, multistoried, timber-frame-and-plaster constructions crammed into narrow alleys and small courtyards, with the corollaries of overcrowding, disease, crime, fire, and structural collapse. In the 1660s, the French Ambassador wrote, “People fill the cellars.” The authorities associated overcrowding with poverty and disease, specifically plague, as a royal proclamation noted in 1580: