London: the Corrupted City

Abstract

If there was any one place that could be confidently singled out as the focus of iniquity in the kingdom that place was London. The sheer size of London made it an unprecedented and altogether overwhelming phenomenon. With a population of some 200,000 inhabitants in 1600, London was thirteen times greater than Norwich, its closest rival, yet the rapidity of urban growth was such that Norwich with a population of 15,000 was rapidly approaching the size that had made Cologne, with its 20,000 inhabitants, by far the largest city in Germany in the fifteenth century. Fernand Braudel suggests that ‘Before 1500, 90% to 95% of the towns known in the West had fewer than 2000 inhabitants’,¹ yet A. L. Beier has estimated that the population of London rose from approximately 120,000 in 1550 to no less than 375,000 in 1650.² London was the only place in England with an unquestionable right to be called a city, yet this might well have seemed a dubious honour to some contemporaries since it would tend to rank it with all those places of ill-repute in the Bible, from Babylon to Tyre, which had mostly met with some disastrous fate. London was a place of bewildering diversity, which acted like a magnet to attract people into its orbit from all parts of the country, whether they were gentry bent on legal business, place-seeking or pleasure, or the hordes of migrants, beggars and vagabonds who came thronging there seeking work, alms or easy money.