It seems likely that historians in the past have seriously underestimated the number of English townsmen in the early fourteenth century. In London alone there may have been 80–100,000 around 1300. The population of Norwich in the early fourteenth century was higher than used to be thought, and it was growing: Rutledge proposes 17,000 for 1311 and 25,000 for 1333. Keene's estimate of about 10,000 for Winchester in the early fourteenth century can serve as a basis for estimating the population of other towns in the same period. Those whose taxable value in 1334, and whose contribution to the poll tax of 1377, was at least as great as Winchester's, probably had a population equal to Winchester's or greater around 1300. By this argument about fifteen towns, including London, are likely to have had 10,000 or more people at the beginning of the fourteenth century, and perhaps 5 per cent of England's population lived in towns of this rank. Estimates taking account of smaller towns are much more precarious, but it is possible that all told 10 per cent of England's population lived in towns of over 2,000 inhabitants and that a further 5 per cent lived in small boroughs, some with as few as 300 people. Even this estimate does not take account of many small market towns, not described as boroughs, that had elementary urban characteristics.

Historians have long recognized the central role of debt and credit for producers, retailers and consumers in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Against a background characterized by persistent shortages of specie, limited banking facilities and erratic transport mechanisms, the speculative impulse that fed the expanding economy drew sustenance from a proliferation of instruments of private credit — notably bills of exchange, promissory notes, and accommodation bills — which, together with an increase of trade credit to retailers and their customers, served to promote and intertwine the industrial, commercial and consumer revolutions. ‘At any one time any business owed and was owed many goods caught up in the process of exchange’, Julian Hoppit observes of the later decades of the eighteenth century. ‘All businessmen were creditors and all businessmen were debtors.’ As trade and manufacture increased in English towns and cities, extended chains of indebtedness multiplied the economic links both between individual producers, retailers or consumers and among these sectors of the economy. Thus in Lancashire innkeepers were the debtors of maltsters, brewers and wine merchants, but were the creditors of shopkeepers, who in turn extended webs of consumer credit to sawyers and carpenters, artisans typically indebted (in their capacity as producers) to the master builders for whom they laboured in Liverpool's shipyards. Based on personal faith rather than tangible securities, these varied forms of private credit were notoriously unstable. Broad-based financial crises fuelled by the failure of private credit became commonplace in the last three decades of the century, and persistently disrupted economic life into the Victorian period.

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

Altogether, as a place of education Adelaide falls far short of the mark; as a place of amusement it is hopeless; and as a village — well, it is tolerably clean, and comparatively healthy.

Thistle Anderson (1905)

For over thirty years demography has featured prominently on the urban history agenda. As long ago as 1963, in an article subtitled ‘On broadening the relevance and scope of urban history’, Eric Lampard emphasized that ‘An autonomous social history ought to begin with a study of population: its changing distribution in time and space’. In 1968 Leo Schnore suggested concentration upon ‘the demographic and ecological aspects of urban life’, according demography the number one priority. Leading British urban historians and historical geographers repeated such injunctions in the 1970s, emphasizing how little was known about even the most basic aspects of pre-industrial urban populations and how far British researchers lagged behind their continental colleagues in the field of urban demography. Unfortunately the response of the last generation of researchers to these precepts has been decidedly muted, and pre-industrial urban demography in England remains in its infancy.