ABSTRACT
No one challenged the wealth or importance of London, but continental Europeans tended to dismiss other English towns out of hand, and with reason. John Coke's patriotic broadside has a defensive ring, and probably only two towns in his list boasted a population of 10,000 or more, while some had fewer than 2,000. At that time there were about 30 European cities with over 40,000 inhabitants, 11 in Italy, 7 in Spain, 6 in France, but only 1, London,
in the British Isles. Their national populations were also much higher, but that was not the only reason. The Netherlands, with a combined northern and southern population less than England's, had seven cities of over 40,000 by 1600: Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Brussels, Bruges, Leiden and Haarlem. Giovanni Botero (1588) considered that 'in England, London excepted ... there is not a city ... that deserves to be called great,' while the Swiss Platter (1599) thought that whoever had visited London and the neighbouring royal palaces 'may assert without impertinence that he is properly acquainted with England'}
Table 7.1 could be taken as a commentary on Botero's remark. Too much reliance cannot be placed on figures not compiled for demographic purposes, but the orders of magnitude are not in doubt, and are consistent with the very few apparently full Elizabethan and early Stuart censuses: Poole (1574), 1,375; Coventry (1586/87), 6,502; Southampton (1596), 4,200; Bristol (1607), 10,549; Sheffield (1616), 2,207; Stafford (1622), 1,550. It is safe to say that no Tudor provincial town ever exceeded 20,000 in size, though Norwich reached perhaps 17,000 or 18,000 before the devastating plague of 1579. One recent estimate suggests that 8 per cent of the English population dwelt in towns of over 5,000 people by about 1600, but 5 per cent was accounted for by London alone. Admittedly, if all small towns are included, the proportions are much higher, about 31 per cent in Gloucestershire (without Bristol) and 26 per cent in Norfolk and Suffolk. Yet it is not at all clear that towns other than London were expanding their share of the population. Dyer suggests that the urban populations of Gloucestershire, Leicestershire, Norfolk and Suffolk, though growing between 1563 and 1603, barely maintained their proportion of the total county populations.4
