Popery and arbitrary power with unmitigated hostility. Growth of Great as has been the change in the rural life of England since the the towns. Revolution, the change which has come to pass in the cities is still more amazing. At present above a sixth part of the nation is crowded into provincial towns of more than thirty thousand inhabitants. In the reign of Charles the Second no provincial town in the kingdom contained thirty thousand inhabitants; and only four provincial towns contained so many as ten thousand inhabitants. Bristol. the city was widely renowned, and especially the collations with which the sugar refiners regaled their visitors. The repast was dressed in the furnace, and was accompanied by a rich beverage made of the best Spanish wine, and celebrated over the whole kingdom as Bristol milk. This luxury was supported by a thriving trade with the North American plantations and with the West Indies. The passion for colonial traffic was so strong that there was scarcely a small shopkeeper in Bristol who had not a venture on board of some ship bound for Virginia or the Next to the capital, but next at an Antilles. Some of these ventures inimmense distance, stood Bris-deed were not of the most honourable tol, then the first English sea-kind. There was, in the Transatlantic port, and Norwich, then the first English possessions of the crown, a great demanufacturing town. Both have since mand for labour; and this demand was that time been far outstripped by partly supplied by a system of crimping younger rivals; yet both have made and kidnapping at the principal Enggreat positive advances. The population lish seaports. Nowhere was this system of Bristol has quadrupled. The popula- in such active and extensive operation tion of Norwich has more than doubled. as at Bristol. Even the first magisPepys, who visited Bristol eight years trates of that city were not ashamed to after the Restoration, was struck by the enrich themselves by so odious a comsplendour of the city. But his standard merce. The number of houses appears, was not high; for he noted down as a from the returns of the hearth money, wonder the circumstance that, in Bristol, to have been, in the year 1685, just a man might look round him and see five thousand three hundred. We can nothing but houses. It seems that, in hardly suppose the number of persons no other place with which he was ac- in a house to have been greater than quainted, except London, did the build- in the city of London; and in the city ings completely shut out the woods and of London we learn from the best aufields. Large as Bristol might then thority that there were then fifty-five appear, it occupied but a very small persons to ten houses. The population portion of the area on which it now of Bristol must therefore have been stands. A few churches of eminent about twenty-nine thousand souls.* beauty rose out of a labyrinth of narrow lanes built upon vaults of no great solidity. If a coach or a cart entered those alleys, there was danger that it would be wedged between the houses, and danger also that it would break in the cellars. Goods were therefore conveyed about the town almost exclusively in trucks drawn by dogs; and the richest inhabitants exhibited their wealth, not by riding in gilded carriages, but by walking the streets with trains of servants in rich liveries, and by keeping tables loaded with good cheer. The pomp of the christenings and burials far exceeded what was seen at any other place in England. The hospitality of Norwich was the capital of a large and fruitful province. It was the Norwich. residence of a Bishop and of a Chapter. It was the chief seat of the Diary, June 13. 1668; Roger North's Lives of *Evelyn's Diary, June 27. 1654; Pepys's Lord Keeper Guildford, and of Sir Dudley North; Petty's Political Arithmetic. I have taken Petty's facts, but, in drawing inferences Davenant, who, though not abler men than from them, I have been guided by King and he, had the advantage of coming after him. As to the kidnapping for which Bristol was 216., and the harangue of Jeffreys on the subinfamous, see North's Life of Guildford, 121. ject, in the Impartial History of his Life and Death, printed with the Bloody Assizes. His style was, as usual, coarse; but I cannot reckon the reprimand which he gave to the magistrates of Bristol among his crimes. chief manufacture of the realm. Some! Far below Norwich, but still high in dignity and importance, were some other ancient capitals of shires. In that age it was seldom that a country gentleman went up with his family to London. The county town was his metropolis. He sometimes made it his residence during part of the year. At all events, he was often attracted thither by business and pleasure, by assizes, quarter sessions, elections, musters of militia, festivals, and races. There were the men distinguished by learning and science had recently dwelt there; and no place in the kingdom, except the capital and the Universities, had more attractions for the curious. The library, the museum, the aviary, and the botanical garden of Sir Thomas Browne, were thought by Fellows of the Royal Society well worthy of a long pilgrimage. Norwich had also a court in miniature. In the heart of the city stood an old palace of the Dukes of Norfolk, said halls where the judges, robed in scarlet to be the largest town house in the and escorted by javelins and trumpets, kingdom out of London. In this man-opened the King's commission twice a sion, to which were annexed a tennis year. There were the markets at which court, a bowling green, and a wilderness, the corn, the cattle, the wool, and the stretching along the banks of the hops of the surrounding country were Wansum, the noble family of Howard exposed to sale. There were the great frequently resided, and kept a state fairs to which merchants came down resembling that of petty sovereigns. from London, and where the rural Drink was served to guests in goblets dealer laid in his annual stores of sugar, of pure gold. The very tongs and stationery, cutlery, and muslin. There shovels were of silver. Pictures by were the shops at which the best Italian masters adorned the walls. The families of the neighbourhood bought cabinets were filled with a fine collec- grocery and millinery. Some of these tion of gems purchased by that Earl of places derived dignity from interesting Arundel whose marbles are now among historical recollections, from cathedrals the ornaments of Oxford. Here, in the decorated by all the art and magnifiyear 1671, Charles and his court were cence of the middle ages, from palaces sumptuously entertained. Here, too, where a long succession of prelates had all comers were annually welcomed, from dwelt, from closes surrounded by the Christmas to Twelfth Night. Ale venerable abodes of deans and canons, flowed in oceans for the populace. and from castles which had in the old Three coaches, one of which had been time repelled the Nevilles or De Veres, built at a cost of five hundred pounds and which bore more recent traces of the to contain fourteen persons, were sent vengeance of Rupert or of Cromwell. every afternoon round the city to bring Conspicuous amongst these interesting ladies to the festivities: and the dances cities, were York, the capital of Other were always followed by a luxurious the north, and Exeter, the capi- country banquet. When the Duke of Norfolk tal of the west. Neither can have came to Norwich, he was greeted like a contained much more than ten thousand King returning to his capital. The inhabitants. Worcester, the queen of bells of the Cathedral and of Saint the cider land, had but eight thousand; Peter Mancroft were rung: the guns of Nottingham probably as many. Glouthe castle were fired; and the Mayorcester, renowned for that resolute deand Aldermen waited on their illustri- fence which had been fatal to Charles ous fellow citizen with complimentary the First, had certainly between four addresses. In the year 1693 the population of Norwich was found, by actual enumeration, to be between twentyeight and twenty-nine thousand souls.* *Fuller's Worthies; Evelyn's Diary, Oct. 17. 1671; Journal of E. Browne, son of Sir Thomas Browne, Jan. 1663; Blomefield's His tory of Norfolk; History of the City and County of Norwich, 2 vols. 1768. VOL. I. towns. and five thousand; Derby not quite four thousand. Shrewsbury was the chief place of an extensive and fertile district. The Court of the Marches of Wales was held there. In the language of the gentry many miles round the Wrekin, to go to Shrewsbury was to go to town. The provincial wits and M beauties imitated, as well as they could, the fashions of Saint James's Park, in the walks along the side of the Severn. The inhabitants were about seven thousand.* chester. most populous and prosperous among The population of every one of these places has, since the Revolution, much more than doubled. The population | Cotton had, during half a century, been of some has multiplied sevenfold. The brought thither from Cyprus and Smyrstreets have been almost entirely re- na; but the manufacture was in its built. Slate has succeeded to thatch, infancy. Whitney had not yet taught and brick to timber. The pavements how the raw material might be furand the lamps, the display of wealth in nished in quantities almost fabulous. the principal shops, and the luxurious Arkwright had yet not taught how it neatness of the dwellings occupied by might be worked up with a speed and the gentry would, in the seventeenth precision which seem magical. The century, have seemed miraculous. Yet whole annual import did not, at the is the relative importance of the old end of the seventeenth century, amount capitals of counties by no means what to two millions of pounds, a quantity it was. Younger towns, towns which which would now hardly supply the are rarely or never mentioned in our demand of forty-eight hours. early history and which sent no repre- wonderful emporium, which in populasentatives to our early Parliaments, tion and wealth far surpasses capitals have, within the memory of persons so much renowned as Berlin, Madrid, still living, grown to a greatness which and Lisbon, was then a mean and ill this generation contemplates with won-built market town, containing under der and pride, not unaccompanied by six thousand people. It then had not awe and anxiety. The most eminent of these towns were indeed known in the seventeenth century as respectable seats of industry. Nay, their rapid progress and their vast opulence were then sometimes described in language which seems ludicrous to a man who has seen their present grandeur. One of the *The population of York appears, from the return of baptisms and burials, in Drake's History, to have been about 13,000 in 1730. Exeter had only 17,000 inhabitants in 1801. The population of Worcester was numbered just before the siege in 1646. See Nash's History of Worcestershire. I have made allow to have taken place in forty years. In 1740, the population of Nottingham was found, by enumeration, to be just 10,000. See Dering's History. The population of Gloucester may readily be inferred from the number of houses which King found in the returns of hearth money, and from the number of births and burials which is given in Atkyns's History. The population of Derby was 4000 in 1712. See Wolley's MS. History, quoted in Lysons's Magna Britannia. The population of Shrewsbury was ascertained, in 1695, by actual enumeration. As to the gaieties of Shrewsbury, see Farquhar's Recruiting Officer. Farquhar's description is borne out by a ballad in the Pepysian Library, of which the burden is "Shrewsbury for me.' ance for the increase which must be supposed That It a single press. It now supports a Leeds was already the chief seat of the woollen manufactures of Leeds. Yorkshire: but the elderly inhabitants could still remember the time when the first brick house, then and long after called the Red House, was built. They boasted loudly of their increasing wealth, and of the immense sales of cloth which took place in the open air on the bridge. Hundreds, nay thousands of pounds, had been paid down in the course of one busy market day. The rising importance of Leeds had attracted the notice of successive governments. Charles the First had granted municipal privileges to the town. Oliver had invited it to send one member to the * Blome's Britannia, 1673; Aikin's Country round Manchester; Manchester Directory, 1845; Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture. The best information which I have been able to find, touching the population of Manchester in the seventeenth century, is contained in a paper drawn up by the Reverend R. Parkinson, and published in the Journal of the Statistical Society for October 1842. House of Commons. But from the returns of the hearth money it seems certain that the whole population of the borough, an extensive district which contains many hamlets, did not, in the reign of Charles the Second, exceed seven thousand souls. In 1841 there were more than a hundred and fifty thousand.* Sheffield. A large cerned by every traveller. Birmingham had not been thought of sufficient importance to re- Birmingturn a member to Oliver's Par- ham. liament. Yet the manufacturers of Birmingham were already a busy and thriving race. They boasted that their hardware was highly esteemed, not indeed as now, at Pekin and Lima, at Bokhara and Timbuctoo, but in London, and even as far off as Ireland. They had acquired a less honourable renown as coiners of bad money. In allusion to their spurious groats, some Tory wit had fixed on demagogues, who hypocritically affected zeal against Popery, the nickname of Birminghams. Yet in 1685 the population, which is now little less than two hundred thousand, did not amount to four thousand. Birmingham buttons were just beginning to be known: of Birmingham guns nobody had yet heard; and the place whence, two generations later, the magnificent editions of Baskerville went forth to astonish all the librarians of Europe, did not contain a single regular shop where a Bible or an almanack could be bought. On market days a bookseller named Michael Johnson, the father of the great Samuel Johnson, came over from Lichfield, and opened a stall during a few hours. This supply of literature was long found equal to the demand.† About a day's journey south of Leeds, on the verge of a wild moorland tract, lay an ancient manor, now rich with cultivation, then barren and unenclosed, which was known by the name of Hallamshire. Iron abounded there; and, from a very early period, the rude whittles fabricated there had been sold all over the kingdom. They had indeed been mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer in one of his Canterbury Tales. But the manufacture appears to have made little progress during the three centuries which followed his time. This languor may perhaps be explained by the fact that the trade was, during almost the whole of this long period, subject to such regulations as the lord and his court leet thought fit to impose. The more delicate kinds of cutlery were either made in the capital, or brought from the Continent. Indeed it was not till the reign of George the First that the English surgeons ceased to import from France those exquisitely fine blades which are required for operations on the human frame. Most of the Hallamshire forges were collected in a market town which had sprung up near the castle of the proprietor, and which, in the reign of James the First, had been a singularly miserable place, containing about two * Hunter's History of Hallamshire. (1848.) thousand inhabitants, of whom a third In 1851 the population of Sheffield had inwere half starved and half naked beg-creased to 135,000. (1857.) + Blome's Britannia, 1673; Dugdale's Wargars. It seems certain froin the paro-wickshire; North's Examen, 321.; Preface to chial registers that the population did not amount to four thousand at the end of the reign of Charles the Second. The effects of a species of toil singularly unfavourable to the health and vigour of the human frame were at once dis Thoresby's Ducatus Leodensis; Whitaker's Loidis and Elmete; Wardell's Municipal History of the Borough of Leeds. (1848.) In 1851 Leeds had 172,000 inhabitants. (1857.) Absalom and Achitophel; Hutton's History of Birmingham; Boswell's Life of Johnson. the baptisms 125. I think it probable that In 1690 the burials at Birmingham were 150, the annual mortality was little less than one in twenty-five. In London it was considerably greater. A historian of Nottingham, half a century later, boasted of the extraordinary salubrity of his town, where the annual mortality was one in thirty. See Dering's History of Nottingham. (1848.) In 1851 the population of Birmingham had increased to 232,000. (1857.) Liverpool. Watering Such has been the progress of those towns where wealth is created and accumulated. Not less places. rapid has been the progress of towns of a very different kind, towns in which wealth, created and accumulated elsewhere, is expended for purposes of health and recreation. Some of the most remarkable of these gay places have sprung into existence since the time of the Stuarts. Cheltenham is now a greater city than any Cheltenwhich the kingdom contained ham. in the seventeenth century, London alone excepted. But in the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth, Cheltenham was mentioned by local historians merely as a rural parish lying under the Cotswold Hills, Brighton. These four chief seats of our great manufactures deserve especial mention. It would be tedious to enumerate all the populous and opulent hives of industry which, a hundred and fifty years ago, were hamlets without parish churches, or desolate moors, inhabited only by grouse and wild deer. Nor has the change been less signal in those outlets by which the products of the English looms and forges are poured forth over the whole world. At present Liverpool contains more than three hundred thousand inhabitants. The shipping registered at her port amounts to between four and five hundred thousand tons. Into her custom house has been repeatedly paid in one year a sum more than thrice as great as the whole income of the En-and affording good ground both for tilglish crown in 1685. The receipts of lage and pasture. Corn grew and cattle her post office, even since the great browsed over the space now covered by reduction of the duty, exceed the sum that long succession of streets and vilwhich the postage of the whole kingdom las.* Brighton was described yielded to the Duke of York. Her as a place which had once been endless docks, quays, and warehouses thriving, which had possessed many are among the wonders of the world. small fishing barks, and which had, Yet even those docks and quays and when at the height of prosperity, conwarehouses seem hardly to suffice for tained above two thousand inhabitants, the gigantic trade of the Mersey; and but which was sinking fast into decay. already a rival city is growing fast on The sea was gradually gaining on the the opposite shore. In the days of buildings, which at length almost enCharles the Second Liverpool was de- tirely disappeared. Ninety years ago scribed as a rising town which had re- the ruins of an old fort were to be seen cently made great advances, and which lying among the pebbles and seaweed maintained a profitable intercourse on the beach, and ancient men could with Ireland and with the sugar colo- still point out the traces of foundations nies. The customs had multiplied on a spot where a street of more than eightfold within sixteen years, and a hundred huts had been swallowed amounted to what was then considered up by the waves. So desolate was the as the immense sum of fifteen thousand place after this calamity, that the pounds annually. But the population vicarage was thought scarcely worth can hardly have exceeded four thousand: having. A few poor fishermen, howthe shipping was about fourteen hun-ever, still continued to dry their nets dred tons, less than the tonnage of a single modern Indiaman of the first class; and the whole number of seamen belonging to the port cannot be estimated at more than two hundred.* * Blome's Britannia; Gregson's Antiquities of the County Palatine and Duchy of Lancaster, Part II.; Petition from Liverpool in the Privy Council Book, May 10. 1686. In 1690 the burials at Liverpool were 151, the baptisms 120. In 1844 the net receipt of the customs at Liverpool was 4,365,5267. 1s. 8d. on those cliffs, on which now a town, more than twice as large and populous as the Bristol of the Stuarts, presents, mile after mile, its gay and fantastic front to the sea.† England, however, was not, in the seventeenth century, destitute of water (1848.) In 1851 Liverpool contained 375,000 inhabitants. (1857.) * Atkyns's Gloucestershire. Magna Britannia; Grose's Antiquities; New Brighthelmstone Directory, 1770. |
