by Ian Mortimer
If you have a head for sums, you will have worked out from the above figures that the vast majority of towns in England and Wales – about 650 of them – have fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. In fact, if you exclude all those towns with a population of 5,000 or more, the average size of all the other towns in 1700 is just 810 people, or about 200 families – barely a village, by modern reckoning.43 Yet these towns all have their own public buildings, services and hinterlands. The focal point in each place is the market. Willem Schellinks neatly illustrates this in his description of Brentford. ‘As it was Tuesday, which is the usual market day there, there was a great deal of merchandise brought to market, and lots of people come from the neighbouring villages to hawk their goods or lay in supplies.’44 Thus, although Magalotti might declare that Axminster has ‘nothing considerable apart from the church’, and Celia Fiennes might ride through Richmond (a town of about 1,400 people) and say it looks like a ‘sad, shattered town and fallen much to decay and like a disregarded place’, such settlements are important elements of the nation’s infrastructure.45
Take Moretonhampstead, for example, where I am writing this book. Sitting on the edge of Dartmoor in Devon, the town has a population in the 1660s of about 700 people, with a further 1,000 living in the hill farms dotted around the parish. There are no proper roads across the moor yet, just a track; nevertheless in this town you will find a marketplace and a market cross, a parish church and, from 1672, a Presbyterian chapel. The main market is held on Saturdays, with subsidiary markets held at various places around the town, including a shambles for selling meat, a butter market, an apple market and a corn market. There are two annual fairs for selling cattle – one held in July, the other in November – and another great market for cattle on the Saturday before Whitsun week. In the Church House across the road from where I am writing, a schoolmaster teaches local boys to read and write. Nearby is the town blacksmith (I can hear the clanging of his hammer and anvil from here). Not far from the church is an almshouse, built in 1637, which provides accommodation for sixteen poor people. From 1662 the town has a resident licensed physician; by 1700 there are two resident medical men, both licensed surgeons. There are several alehouses serving food and drink, and a newly established inn provides accommodation for visitors. Wheeled vehicles never come here because of the steepness and roughness of the terrain – commodities are brought in on packhorses – but the town is thus more important to people in the wider area as it provides a local centre for them to sell produce and obtain supplies. Thus the country folk come in on market days from up to seven miles away, which in this region means that the town serves a hinterland of about seven thousand people, in addition to its own population.46
Finally, there is one thing all towns have in common, and it concerns the F-word. Fire does not just affect London. On 25 April 1659, almost the whole of Southwold burns down, with the loss of no fewer than 238 dwelling houses in addition to its town hall, market house, prison, granaries and warehouses. When Bungay goes up in smoke on 1 March 1688, 200 houses are destroyed: only the Guildhall and the Fleece Inn are left intact. Half the town of Newmarket burns down on 22 March 1683. Add to these Rolvenden (Kent) in 1665; Prestonfield near Edinburgh in 1681; the Walks in Tunbridge Wells (subsequently known as the Pantiles) in 1687; St Ives (Huntingdonshire) in 1689; thirty houses in Morpeth in 1689; and much of Builth in 1690, and you can see that fire poses a risk wherever you are. People just don’t learn. The month of September is particularly dangerous. On 20 September 1675 the Great Fire of Northampton destroys 700 houses – more than three-quarters of the town. On 12 September 1681, seventy-two houses in the Welsh town of Presteigne are lost. And on 5 September 1694, 150 houses in Warwick are reduced to cinders. You might want to bear these dates in mind if you go travelling in September. Some tips about how to save your accommodation, should it go up in flames, may therefore come in handy. When Thomas Baskerville visits Northampton a few weeks after the fire there, he records:
I found about the middle of the town an indifferent house standing, and all the other houses for a good distance round about it burnt down, and yet the upper storeys of it were only studded with lathe and plaster work. It was a small inn and had for the sign a shoemaker’s last with this motto: ‘I have sought after good ale over the town and here I have found it at last’. The strangeness of the preservation made me alight to discover of the innkeeper how it could possibly be effected. [He] told me, by the help of some friends hoisting some hogsheads of beer out of the cellar and, being very diligent to cool those parts of the house which were very hot, they did preserve it.47
Surely this is one of the greatest events in the annals of British fire-fighting. Not only do these tipplers refuse to abandon their local, even though the rest of the town is on fire (including, presumably, some of their own homes), but they gallantly fight the fire with beer – and win.
Scotland
The geography of Scotland is unlike that of either England or Wales.Quite apart from the fact that the Scottish Highlands are considerably more mountainous than anything to be found south of the border, the population is much smaller – about 1.2 million people – and consequently more spread out.48 Covering an area, including the islands, of 30,420 square miles, Scotland has a population density of just forty-one people per square mile. This is only slightly less than that of Wales. However, unlike Wales, Scotland has several large towns of more than 5,000 people. The majority of the population live in the central waist of the country (Glasgow, Edinburgh and the area between them) or in the ports on the east coast. With these large settlements and a dominant capital, Edinburgh, Scotland is more like England than Wales.
It is the wildness of the Scottish landscape that sticks in most people’s minds. The Highlands in particular are made up of many miles of uninhabited moor, heath and mountain. Even in the Lowlands there is relatively little enclosed ground, due to the scarcity of timber for building fences. The natural state of the landscape is matched by the survival of much of the indigenous fauna. The wildcat is still to be found in places. If you are lucky, you may catch a sight of one of the few remaining British wolves, the very last of which is shot in 1690.49 However, it will not surprise you to learn that not everyone will think it a blessing to encounter a wild animal. In fact, most people will only find it fortuitous in so far as it will give them a chance to kill it.
‘Barren’ and ‘barbarous’ are the two adjectives most commonly used to describe Scotland. No kings visit their northern kingdom in these years. Few Englishmen of any sort go there. Pepys sails to Edinburgh in the company of the duke of York in 1682 and travels on to Stirling, Linlithgow and Glasgow, and although he admires the last of these places as ‘an extraordinary town for beauty and trade, much superior to anything [else] to be seen in Scotland’, he adds, ‘so universal a rooted nastiness hangs about the person of every Scot (man and woman) that [it] renders the finest show they can make nauseous, even among those of the first quality’.50 Another English gentleman traveller describes the houses of the common Scottish people as ‘very mean, mud-wall and thatch the best; but the poorer sort live in such miserable huts as never eye beheld’.51 Celia Fiennes, bless her, crosses the border in 1698 but, having travelled only a couple of miles into the country, is so shocked by the unappetising food, the clothing of the native women (or the lack of it) and the primitive state of the houses that she turns around and heads back to England as fast as she can.52
In many respects, Scotland has not yet changed from its medieval state. It shows few signs of cultivation to the contemporary eye, and contains a great deal that people associate with natural squalor. The Highlands are still dotted with lairds’ castles, or peel towers, since the Scottish kings of the sixteenth century were less successful than their English counterparts in suppressing the private armies of the nobility. The sixty-six towns or royal burghs are still dominated by their churches and tollbooths – the latter being the local centres for administration and justice, where tolls are co
llected and councils and courts are held. Prior to the abolition of the rule of bishops in 1689, Scotland still has its fourteen medieval cathedrals. Most of these are relatively small buildings, located in burghs with fewer than a thousand inhabitants, just as they were in the Middle Ages; only three (Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen) are situated in large settlements.53 The majority of country folk live in ‘touns’: small communities of four to ten families working the land together.54 The inhabitants of these touns operate an agricultural system called runrig – the allocation of strips of land in an arable infield to the tenants on a periodic basis, and the collective use of an outfield, further away from the toun, for grazing cattle or growing hardy crops, such as oats. These touns also have their common grazing lands and their shielings up on summer pastures. Near the coasts and the salt-water lochs, people supplement their farming with fishing.
There are some signs of economic innovation. In the south and south-west of the country, some touns are specialising in rearing sheep.55 The surpluses derived from such specialisation allow farmers to move from subsistence farming to commerce, which in turn leads to economic growth in the market towns or ‘burghs’. Partly because of this, you will increasingly notice large numbers of people on the move, travelling with their cattle from high ground to sell them in the Lowlands, or transporting grain in the other direction. Young men and women walk from rural areas into the burghs looking for work as apprentices and servants.
It is the large settlements, and above all the ports, that are showing the strongest signs of economic vitality. Glasgow has been growing steadily for the last 400 years, so that by 1700 its population has reached 15,000, making it the second-largest city north of the border.56 In 1668 the town council purchases land at Newark in order to build a deep-water harbour, called Port Glasgow, to encourage trade. Although this is slow to yield profit, it coincides with the rise of Atlantic commerce and sows the seeds for Glasgow’s phenomenal growth in the next two centuries. On the east coast, the largest ports – Perth, Dundee, Aberdeen and Leith (an adjunct to Edinburgh) – have long been recognised on the Continent for their exports of salmon, coal, linen, salt, beef, wool, coarse cloth and hides.57 Now they are importing luxury items too, such as fine cloth from England and wine from Bordeaux. As a result of their country’s prosperity, at least 6.6 per cent of the Scottish population lives in a town of 5,000 people or more in 1691 – compared to 5.4 per cent in England (excluding London).58 Although Scotland might appear to be predominantly an impoverished barren wilderness, overall it is just as urbanised as provincial England.
Pride of place in the ranks of Scottish towns goes to Edinburgh. With a population (including Leith) of 40,000 or more in 1700, it is easily the second-largest city in Great Britain. Its growth is partly to do with the fact that it is a national capital, not just a regional one, even though royal rule has been sporadic for the last century or so. In fact, the absence of an active king on Scottish soil for most of the period since 1542 accentuates Edinburgh’s importance, as the Scottish government no longer has to follow the king on his peregrinations around his kingdom, as it did in the Middle Ages. Regents, councils, ministers and their households are based firmly in Edinburgh. As a result, Scottish noblemen build substantial stone houses for themselves in the city. Merchants too start to demonstrate their increasing wealth in new, more impressive houses. For example, Gladstone’s Land is rebuilt by a merchant as a flat-fronted six-storey town house with an arcade on the ground floor incorporating a shop, twenty years before Inigo Jones executes his arcade design for Covent Garden. The merchants’ trade corporations also build striking new halls for themselves, such as the Tailors’ Hall on Cowgate. The highlight of all this civic rebuilding is undoubtedly Parliament Hall, built in the 1630s, where the Scottish Parliament meets.
After the Scots rapturously welcome back the monarchy in 1660, Edinburgh becomes even more a centre of national attention. But it is not just the nobility and the merchants who are making the running, it is also the new professionals or ‘men of ability’. The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh is founded in 1681 and the same year sees the establishment of the Advocates Library. By 1690, there are more than 200 lawyers, 33 physicians and 24 surgeons resident in the city.59 Heriot’s Hospital finally opens its doors in 1659, in a splendid turreted building that differs strikingly from the mountains of irregular masonry that form most of the noble houses in the city. Under the superintendence of Robert Mylne, Master Mason to the kings of Scotland, more elegant structures appear, not least of which is Mylne’s Square, in the heart of the city, and Mylne’s Court, on the Royal Mile. Holyroodhouse, the palace of the kings of Scotland, is remodelled along Palladian lines by Mylne and Sir William Bruce in 1671. A water supply is piped to the city from Comiston Springs in 1675, with well-heads and cisterns designed by Mylne and Bruce. The Bank of Scotland is established in 1695 to lend money to Scottish businesses. In 1685, the old College of King James comes to be known as the University of Edinburgh.60 Gradually Edinburgh is turning itself into that most unusual thing: a capital city without a resident head of state.
As you wander through the streets of the city, two things are likely to strike you above all others: the stench of the place and the height of the buildings. With regard to the first, the town regulations stipulate that no refuse and excrement is to be put out for collection on a Sunday. That’s all well and good – except that you will still find rakers leading their carts through the streets on the other six days. Thus you will find buckets of rotting fish heads and bones, scraps of skin and offal, bloody linen, urine and excrement waiting in the street to be collected. In summer months the problem is particularly acute, as the heat hastens the rotting of the buckets’ contents and the streams around the city dry up, preventing the washing away of such waste. A visitor from Cheshire describes the olfactory condition of Edinburgh in these words: ‘the sluttishness and nastiness of this people is such … their houses and halls and kitchens have such a noisome taste, a savour, and that so strong, as it doth offend you so soon as you come within their wall’.61 Another visitor recalls that ‘the scent was so offensive that we were forced to hold our noses as we passed the streets’. In contrast, Glasgow smells as sweet as a rose. ‘For pleasantness of sight, sweetness of air, and delightfulness of its gardens and orchards, it surpasseth all other places,’ writes a visitor in 1669, foreshadowing Samuel Pepys’s similar comments a few years later.
With regard to the buildings, a great number of the houses in the town are six or seven storeys high. Some are eleven, twelve or thirteen storeys. Others resemble a huge cliff face of tenements, with a central stair turret protruding into the street. You will find the very highest buildings around Parliament Square. If you are more familiar with the new four-storey houses in London, these will seem like skyscrapers in comparison. In fact, you might feel a little nervous climbing a dozen flights of stairs to visit someone at the top of one of these structures. After all, there are no fire escapes. What if the worst should happen?
On Saturday, 3 February 1700, at about ten o’clock at night, the worst does happen. Fire breaks out in a group of buildings around a small courtyard chiefly occupied by lawyers, immediately behind Parliament Close. The buildings in question are fifteen storeys high; people regularly point them out as the highest in Edinburgh. Duncan Forbes discusses the consequent Great Fire in a letter to his brother:
It continued till eleven o’clock of the day with the greatest fervour and vehemence that ever I saw fire do, notwithstanding that I saw London burn. There are burnt by the easiest computation between three and four hundred families’ [homes]; all the pride of Edinburgh is sunk; from the Cowgate to the High Street all is burnt and hardly is one stone left upon another. The [houses of the] Commissioner, the President of Parliament, the President of the Court of Session, the Bank, most of the Lords, lawyers and clerks, were all burnt, besides many poor and great families … Few people are lost, if any at all, but there was neither heart nor hand left am
ong them for saving [the buildings] from the fire, nor a drop of water in the cisterns. Twenty thousand hands [removing] their trash they knew not where, and hardly twenty at work. These Babels, of ten and fourteen storeys high, are down to the ground, and their fall is very terrible … The Exchange, vaults and coal cellars under Parliament Close still burning. This epitome of Dissolution I send to you without saying any more but that the Lord is angry with us, and I see no intercessor.62
Forbes is wrong in one respect. The pride of Edinburgh is not ‘sunk’. In fact, like London, its great days are just beginning. The city goes on to provide much of the impetus for the Scottish Enlightenment in the next century. Furthermore, one particular triumph arises from the ashes. In 1703 the good people of Edinburgh set up a ‘Company for quenching of fire’ – and thereby establish the first municipal fire brigade in Britain.63
3
The People
In 1695 Gregory King attempts to calculate the size of the future population of the kingdom. This is a truly radical idea: in the past, people would not have believed such things could be predicted; they assumed they were wholly subordinate to the will of God. Nevertheless, King carefully analyses the past data and concludes that the population of England and Wales will increase from the 5.5 million people of his own time to 6.42 million in 1800, 7.35 million in 1900, and 8.28 million in the year 2000.1 He further predicts that, by the year 2300, the population will have hit a ceiling of 11 million; it will not grow beyond this, for the simple reason that there is not enough land in the kingdom to feed more people. It is a brilliant piece of analysis: perceptive, well evidenced and well argued. The only snag is that it is completely wrong. The population will reach 11 million by 1820, not 2300. At the time of writing (2016), it is almost five times King’s absolute maximum.
