ABSTRACT

Even though London lies some 50 km from the sea up a tidal estuary, maritime networks played a significant role in its emergence as Britain’s biggest and wealthiest city. In the early thirteenth century, London controlled about 17 per cent of the value of England’s overseas trade, a share that increased to 36 per cent in the first decade of the fourteenth century and 61 per cent in the late 1470s. 1 London’s grip on England’s increasingly valuable cloth exports was particularly notable, rising from 13 per cent of all cloth exports in the mid-fourteenth century, to around 40 per cent in the 1430s, then 61 per cent in the first decade of the sixteenth century, and an astonishing 90 per cent by the mid-sixteenth century. 2 London’s population growth was equally impressive. By 1300 it had become one of Europe’s largest cities, with a population perhaps as high as 80,000. 3 The Black Death and subsequent plagues reduced the population to about half that size in the late fourteenth century, but the city reached its pre-plague population in the early sixteenth century and by 1600 had grown to 120,000. 4 If its rapidly expanding suburbs are included, metropolitan London was home to 110,000 people in 1500 and almost half a million in 1700 when it ranked as Europe’s largest city. It grew far faster than the rest of the country; in 1500, London was probably four times larger than the next provincial town, and in 1600, perhaps ten times as large, with the gap widening even more in the seventeenth century. Its share of the country’s overall wealth also significantly increased from 1334, when Londoners accounted for 2 per cent of lay taxable assets, to about 9 per cent in the early sixteenth century. 5