ESTIMATES for the population of London in 1500 vary between 50,000 and 70,000, but it is generally agreed that in parts of the metropolis it had been rising since the late fifteenth century and continued to rise for the next fifty years. Even more importantly, London by 1530 enjoyed a greater share of the national wealth and a higher concentration of people. Pamela Nightingale estimates, for example, that whereas possibly one in 66 people in England had lived in London in 1300, one in 40 probably did so in 1500. Furthermore, over the period 1450–1550 London merchants captured an ever-growing share of the import–export trade, and by 1500 they clearly dominated the cloth trade. At the same time London was becoming a cultural as well as a political capital, with the court spending more time at palaces like Richmond and Greenwich along the Thames, and with parliament meeting regularly at Westminster. Londoners also became a major source of credit and used their own resources to buy up land in neighboring counties. The capital's influence was undoubtedly felt by all the surrounding areas, but whereas developments in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century north of the Thames have already been studied, much less is known about what was happening south of the Thames. This chapter will focus on the interaction between the metropolis and the three counties of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex in two areas: first, on the need to provision the city with basic foods and with fuel ; secondly, on its role as a distributive center for the goods that had been imported or manufactured within it.