The City and its People

Inevitably, if inexactly, we shall tend to speak of London and Middlesex quite interchangeably during the course of our discussion. Our data are drawn from the whole of the county, though the fact is that London parishes together with those of Westminster account for all save a relatively modest proportion (13·25 per cent) of the whole of the charitable benefactions of the geographical entity which was the county of Middlesex. It is difficult to remember that even in the closing decades of our period much of the county was rural, with pleasant farms and stretching woodlands in regions long since consumed by the sprawling urban complex which is metropolitan London. The county was, save for Rutland, the smallest in the realm, with an area of not much more than 280 square miles. It was principally agricultural during the whole of our era, with a heavy concentration on market gardening and with a rural economy benefiting greatly from the nearness of the metropolis. There were, as well, small industrial centres, normally linked with London's requirements or facilities, of which tanning was the principal, with an adequate supply of hides assured from the numerous London slaughter-houses. Throughout our period, however, the irresistible pressure of population was expanding the urban arc beyond the ancient boundaries, with suburban fingers reaching out in the first process of urban absorption. The forerunners were the rich and the fashionable who as early as 1600 were purchasing manors and building their great houses in still rural Middlesex in order to escape the congestion, the noise, and the pestilences with which the city was chronically afflicted. The first exodus was led by the nobility and upper gentry whose great town houses had graced sixteenth-century London but of which only a few remained at the close of our period. ¹ More important, though a little later, was the movement of the great merchant families to the suburbs or to the more distant rural parishes, particularly by men who had at least begun to contemplate the bucolic joys of retirement.