Read Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History for Free Online Page B

carried in the saliva of fleas which were carried by rats which were carried by ships which brought trade from Europe. The Black Death, so named for the swollen black marks it left on the skin, was intensely virulent: if one contracted it, the odds of survival were only one in four. Most victims died a painful death within a matter of days. The result was to reduce the population by nearly one-half by the end of the fourteenth century. It continued to dwindle for most of the fifteenth, in part because the plague returned again and again, albeit with diminishing virulence, until the last major outbreak in 1665.
    Even when the plague did not rage, medieval and early modern English men and women were still prey to all sorts of bacterial and viral infections which have been eradicated or neutralized in our own time. This was partly because they lacked modern antibiotics, partly because they lacked any sense of the connection between hygiene and disease, and occasionally because of malnutrition. In fact, when the harvest was good the diet of the average peasant was fairly healthy, consisting of bread, pea soup, cheese, occasional meat, and ale; however, perhaps one harvest in four was poor, one in six so poor as to produce famine. Though deaths from starvation itself were rare (mostly confined to remote areas of subsistence agriculture in the North), historians have been able to show a correlation between bad harvest years and those with a higher incidence of epidemic disease, probably a result of malnutrition. Even in temperate years, clothing and housing were, as we shall see, barely adequate to keep one warm and dry. Even where housing was adequate it was made of cheap plaster framed in wood and, thus, prone to collapse or fire. Few knew how to swim, so drowning in England’s many rivers was common. And there was always the violence of wars and border raids. As a result of these harsh realities, the average life expectancy of a late medieval or early modern English person was about 35 years. This does not mean, of course, that there were no old people, but it does mean that they were far more rare in this society than in our own. Another reason for this depressing figure was that at the beginning of life’s span infant mortality ran at about 20 percent in the first year; another 10 percent of children would die before age 10. It is therefore not surprising that England’s population only began to grow again in the 1470s or 1480s.
    Of England’s 2.2 million people in 1485, less than 10 percent lived in cities. Of these, London was by far the largest (see map 3 ). It was at once the capital, the legal center, and the primary seaport for trade with Europe. But, at about 50,000 inhabitants, it was less than half the size of modern-day Peoria, Illinois, or roughly equal to Terre Haute, Indiana, or Carson City, Nevada. In 1485 its governmental and cultural influence on the rest of the country was fairly minimal. London’s population and its influence were to grow immensely, however, during the early modern period. By 1700 London would be the largest city in Europe, with over half a million inhabitants. It would also be the wealthiest city in the world, the hub of a vast empire, an immense emporium for goods and services, and the unchallenged center of government and setter of cultural trends for the British Isles.
    The next largest cities – Norwich in East Anglia, Bristol (a seaport off the huge Bristol Channel at the mouth of the Severn) to the west, Coventry in the south Midlands, and York in the North – had no more than 10,000 people each in 1485. Below them came major county towns like Dorchester or Stafford and cathedral cities like Lincoln or Salisbury with a few thousand inhabitants apiece ( map 3 ). In general, the fifteenth century had been a time of boom and bust for such middling-sized cities. There were many reasons for this: a general economic crisis in Europe during the second half of the fifteenth century, the