26 • Beginningsmetal, and leather trades, with an ever-expanding victualing trade.^25
Trade and manufacturing went hand in hand with the surge in population.
In 1550 , London’s population had been about 70 , 000. A half-century later
it approached 200 , 000. By 1650 it had more than doubled again. London in
1665 was home to at least 450 , 000 persons, with visitors and transients
raising the total population to around 500 , 000. These are, of course, rough,
working approximations; no one at the time knew the true population
count.^26
By the time of the Great Plague of 1665 , London had exceeded in popula-
tion all the capitals and major cities of Europe except Paris and had drawn
almost even with that great metropolis. Metropolitan London had out-
stripped Paris in the ratio of the capital to the rest of the country: London
had close to 10 percent of the total English population of five million; Paris
held less than 3 percent of France’s reputed twenty million.^27 This explosive
growth came largely from the overpopulated English countryside, whose
youth and adults were drawn to the capital by the lure of a job with better
wages.^28 From the fourteenth century, when, after the Black Death, Dick
Whittington had walked barefoot to London from Gloucestershire, urged
on (the legend says) by church bells pealing a message that he would be
“thrice Lord Mayor,” London had attracted outsiders. The pace quickened in
the sixteenth century and accelerated again in the early seventeenth century,
causing the first Stuart monarch, James I, to exclaim, “Soon London will be
all England.” He scarcely exaggerated. Under James, his son Charles I, and
Oliver Cromwell’s revolutionary Puritan regime, London welcomed, on
average, six thousand immigrants each year.^29 So great was the lure of the
capital that, when Charles II took back his father’s throne in 1660 , one-sixth
of his subjects who survived to adulthood would live at some time in the
metropolitan area.^30 Immigrants from the Continent, especially the Low
Countries, added to the burgeoning population.
The number of mouths to feed was a concern, for famine occasionally
stalked the land. But production by country farmers had kept pace with the
gargantuan appetite of the capital.^31 A greater danger to life came from
within; more Londoners died than were born each year. This dark side of
London’s growth was masked by the inflow of immigrants, which more than
made up the difference. As calculated by the London haberdasher-turned-
demographer John Graunt from the metropolitan Bills of Mortality, the city
and suburbs filled up quickly with a surge of new births and immigration
even after the Great Plague of 1625. London was not a healthy place, but it
had become an extraordinarily prosperous and attractive venue.^32