The Triumph of Christianity

[Whaleboy]

Population figures for the shires surrounding London, mostly Hertfordshire and as far south as the Downs went through the floor. After the black death, London's population rose to between a third and half a million in the following century. Consider Hertfordshire, a shire to the North of London.

Year Pop
1300 81,696
1377 30636
1664 65505

http://www.smr.herefordshire.gov.uk/hist_periods/Population.htm

(Also there consider pop. relative to London)

The post-Tudor rise is of course attributable to the rise of urban centres in that county such as Watford and Hitchen. Was a pretty similar story for all the counties, particularly those near major cities. Hence, in the North of England, you only see a migration to the cities during the late 18th and 19th centuries, whereas the South at that time was very urbanised.

[Whaleboy]

Why this exponential increase? I can't see this coming about without the policies in the Agricultural revolution regarding the enclosure act, and the desire to consolidate holdings in Britain. This forced many people off the land, and into the cities.

Most people "on the land" as you put it, as a fraction of the population were forced off when after the peasants revolt the lords were no longer obliged to support the peasants, so replaced them all with more profitable sheep. The acts did force people off the land but the countryside was a dead duck by then already, particularly relative to the 12th century. It merely hastened the inevitable, and by the industrial revolution, economic factors (more employment in cities, less in countryside due to decline of cottage industry thanks to production).

[Ben Kenobi]

Herefordshire is a county of 2180 square kilometres on the borders of Wales with a current population of about 170,000 people. The City of Hereford is about 65,000 people, none of the five market towns are larger than 10,000.

From your linky.

Not sure what you are trying to do here. One would anticipate a similar recovery in London proper, as we see in Hereford.

[Whaleboy]

Oopsie... clever Whaleboy meant Hertfordshire .. let's try again...

http://www.hertsdirect.org/libsleisure/heritage1/archaeology/moreaboutarch/archer/medieval

http://popindex.princeton.edu/browse/v62/n4/i.html (these look fun )

Though Hereford at the time was considered a major population centre, let's have a look at London itself...

http://migration.ucc.ie/population/eupop.htm (a good reference)

http://www.visitlondon.com/city_guid...ondon/history/ (find details for corresponding population falls in surrounding counties)

[Ben Kenobi]

Most people "on the land" as you put it, as a fraction of the population were forced off when after the peasants revolt the lords were no longer obliged to support the peasants, so replaced them all with more profitable sheep.

True, it was more valuable for them to keep sheep than tenents.

The acts did force people off the land but the countryside was a dead duck by then already, particularly relative to the 12th century.

Were the countrysides totally dead? Not so. While they tended to send off their population, the problem is that the cities of the time killed off more than were born there. So you need a constant immigration from the country to the city just to keep the cities up.

So long as people could have a place to stay, and to farm off the land, or to work for another person nearby, they could afford to stay. Even if they were less prosperous, it would not justify breaking the ties with family, to leave to the city.

It was only once they had to leave, that they left, and even then, many people tried to return to the countryside, if they could from the city. The only attraction to the city was the ability to work.

It merely hastened the inevitable, and by the industrial revolution, economic factors (more employment in cities, less in countryside due to decline of cottage industry thanks to production).

Also true, but you need the development in the cities, for them to supplant the cottage industry in terms of total production. And this doesn't happen until well after the enclosure act. Perhaps if we saw this before enclosure, and the subsequent migrations to the city, your point would work, but the fact that we only see this after, lends credence to my thesis that this increase in population density helped to fuel the industrial revolution in Britian.

[Ben Kenobi]

Hertfordshire

I have to go soon, but when I get back, I'll continue the discussion.

Wish I got to do more of this stuff, I loved this subject in my classes.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi

Look at Britain. It was only after they passed laws regulating the countryside, that the population started to accumulate in the larger towns.

Once they got this accumulation, they could specialise to a much greater level, and improve productivity, like the way Adam Smith shows in the Wealth of nations. Once this productivity increases, you get the resultant increase in prosperity, drawing more people into the towns.

Population was increasing up until the Black Death. It declined drastically and was recovering slowly by the time of the Tudors. There was a bizarre anomalous blip when for some unknown reason life expectancy increased in the Tudor period (although it declined afterwards).

Urbanized areas were always prey to outbreaks of disease- in Tudor times an illness known as the 'English sweats' which may have been some kind of malarial fever. Along with this were outbreaks of the new strain of syphilis which appeared in Europe after the Spanish (re)discovery of the Americas, the Great Plague in 1665, cholera, dysentery, smallpox (most famously suffered by Elizabeth I), measles and other diseases associated with large populations and cramped conditions.

The 'increased production' seen in the Industrial Revolution hardly benefited the urban poor- at one point the staple diet of the urban poor was white bread and tea, rather than the far healthier ale and brown bread which was spurned because the better sort preferred refined flour and the luxury drink of tea.
Vitamin deficiency diseases such as pellagra and rickets were common.

One element which ensured a ready supply of cheap labour from rural areas (other than enclosures of previously common land by rapacious landowners) was 'lax' morals:

' The life of the farm labourer was very different in the 19th Century to what is now. For instance, among the Dorset peasants, conception before marriage was perfectly normal, and the marriage did not take place until the pregnancy was obvious.... The reason was the low wages paid to the workers and the need to ensure extra hands in the family to earn.'

The woman whose testimony this is was born in 1883- she was the daughter of Thomas Hardy's doctor.
The rural working class were obviously discontented- and it's no surprise that the Tolpuddle Martyrs were from Hardy's county of Dorset, which achieved some notoriety for being the area of England where labourers of both sexes were exploited to the most shameful degree.

A similar 'laxity' with regard to morals could be observed in the overcrowded unsanitary hovels of the city's poor:

''Modesty must be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where in one small chamber, with the beds lying as thickly as they can be packed, father, mother, young men, lads, grown and growing up girls- two and sometimes three generations- are herded promiscuously; where every operation of the toilette and of nature, dressings, undressings, births, deaths,- is performed by each within the sight and hearing of all- where the whole atmosphere is sensual and where human nature is degraded below the level of the swine... Cases of incest are anythibng but uncommon.

We complain of the ante-nuptial unchastity of our women....here in cottage herding, is the sufficient account and history of it all....'

Reverend James Fraser, 1867

and:

'At the infirmary many girls of 14 years of age, and even girls of 13, up to 17 years of age, have been brought in pregnany to be confined here. The girls have acknowledged that their 'ruin' has taken place... in going or returning from their (agricultural) work.

I have myself witnessed gross indecencies between boys and girls of 14 to 16 years of age....'

Children's Employment Commission Report, 1867


Various factors enabled the population both urban and rural to grow- one humble but staggeringly obvious factor, was the potato, which enabled the non-industrialized Irish population to explode. So much for specialization and improved productivity.... in 1894, in the greatest city in the world, in the greatest empire the world had ever seen, in Bethnal Green 83 per cent of children had no solid food other than bread at seventeen out of twenty one meals in any week.

The Industrial Revolution meant that for the first time since the dispossession of Roman peasantry by the explosive growth of the latifundia, mass urban poverty could be observed by anyone with a mind to view it.
A worker in Great Britain might earn in the 'booming' 1830s and 1840s a wage between 25 pence and 2 pounds a week. In 1840-41, 25 pence purchased six four lb loaves, not of a very good quality. This would have been enough to just feed two adults and three children, at a time when childcare, nurseries and contraception were outside the reach of the majority of the urban workforce.

This 25 pence spent on bread meant nothing left over for rent, tea, sugar, meat, vegetables and certainly not fruit.

There were however improvements in crops through crossbreeding and agricultural experimentation, crop rotation, better ploughs, the replacement of oxen by horses, an increase in glass production which facilitated market gardening (unseen in Europe since Roman times, Venice led the way in the return of this technique), the colonization and subsequent opening up of arable land in parts of Eastern Europe by Brandenburg-Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia, and with the advent of the steam railway and steamships, the shipment of grain from Canada, the United States and Australia.

Scientific agriculture not specialization and improved industrial production fed the growing populations of the industrializing world.

Advances in food science meant that canned food became a viable prospect, adulteration of food was banned and prosecuted, and in the early 20th Century, the role of vitamins came to be understood.

Rickets disappeared in urban areas of Great Britain, only to make its reappearance when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister- presumably not what she meant by a return to 'Victorian values', but then irony was never her strong point.

The triumph of medicine over disease and the understanding of disease also meant fewer city dwellers died from the diseases of the city- cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, dysentery, scurvy, and so on.

[Heresson]

I've lost control over this thread

[OzzyKP]

That tends to happen.

[CharlesBHoff]

Originally posted by molly bloom



Population was increasing up until the Black Death. It declined drastically and was recovering slowly by the time of the Tudors. There was a bizarre anomalous blip when for some unknown reason life expectancy increased in the Tudor period (although it declined afterwards).

Urbanized areas were always prey to outbreaks of disease- in Tudor times an illness known as the 'English sweats' which may have been some kind of malarial fever. Along with this were outbreaks of the new strain of syphilis which appeared in Europe after the Spanish (re)discovery of the Americas, the Great Plague in 1665, cholera, dysentery, smallpox (most famously suffered by Elizabeth I), measles and other diseases associated with large populations and cramped conditions.

The 'increased production' seen in the Industrial Revolution hardly benefited the urban poor- at one point the staple diet of the urban poor was white bread and tea, rather than the far healthier ale and brown bread which was spurned because the better sort preferred refined flour and the luxury drink of tea.
Vitamin deficiency diseases such as pellagra and rickets were common.

One element which ensured a ready supply of cheap labour from rural areas (other than enclosures of previously common land by rapacious landowners) was 'lax' morals:

' The life of the farm labourer was very different in the 19th Century to what is now. For instance, among the Dorset peasants, conception before marriage was perfectly normal, and the marriage did not take place until the pregnancy was obvious.... The reason was the low wages paid to the workers and the need to ensure extra hands in the family to earn.'

The woman whose testimony this is was born in 1883- she was the daughter of Thomas Hardy's doctor.
The rural working class were obviously discontented- and it's no surprise that the Tolpuddle Martyrs were from Hardy's county of Dorset, which achieved some notoriety for being the area of England where labourers of both sexes were exploited to the most shameful degree.

A similar 'laxity' with regard to morals could be observed in the overcrowded unsanitary hovels of the city's poor:

''Modesty must be an unknown virtue, decency an unimaginable thing, where in one small chamber, with the beds lying as thickly as they can be packed, father, mother, young men, lads, grown and growing up girls- two and sometimes three generations- are herded promiscuously; where every operation of the toilette and of nature, dressings, undressings, births, deaths,- is performed by each within the sight and hearing of all- where the whole atmosphere is sensual and where human nature is degraded below the level of the swine... Cases of incest are anythibng but uncommon.

We complain of the ante-nuptial unchastity of our women....here in cottage herding, is the sufficient account and history of it all....'

Reverend James Fraser, 1867

and:

'At the infirmary many girls of 14 years of age, and even girls of 13, up to 17 years of age, have been brought in pregnany to be confined here. The girls have acknowledged that their 'ruin' has taken place... in going or returning from their (agricultural) work.

I have myself witnessed gross indecencies between boys and girls of 14 to 16 years of age....'

Children's Employment Commission Report, 1867


Various factors enabled the population both urban and rural to grow- one humble but staggeringly obvious factor, was the potato, which enabled the non-industrialized Irish population to explode. So much for specialization and improved productivity.... in 1894, in the greatest city in the world, in the greatest empire the world had ever seen, in Bethnal Green 83 per cent of children had no solid food other than bread at seventeen out of twenty one meals in any week.

The Industrial Revolution meant that for the first time since the dispossession of Roman peasantry by the explosive growth of the latifundia, mass urban poverty could be observed by anyone with a mind to view it.
A worker in Great Britain might earn in the 'booming' 1830s and 1840s a wage between 25 pence and 2 pounds a week. In 1840-41, 25 pence purchased six four lb loaves, not of a very good quality. This would have been enough to just feed two adults and three children, at a time when childcare, nurseries and contraception were outside the reach of the majority of the urban workforce.

This 25 pence spent on bread meant nothing left over for rent, tea, sugar, meat, vegetables and certainly not fruit.

There were however improvements in crops through crossbreeding and agricultural experimentation, crop rotation, better ploughs, the replacement of oxen by horses, an increase in glass production which facilitated market gardening (unseen in Europe since Roman times, Venice led the way in the return of this technique), the colonization and subsequent opening up of arable land in parts of Eastern Europe by Brandenburg-Prussia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia, and with the advent of the steam railway and steamships, the shipment of grain from Canada, the United States and Australia.

Scientific agriculture not specialization and improved industrial production fed the growing populations of the industrializing world.

Advances in food science meant that canned food became a viable prospect, adulteration of food was banned and prosecuted, and in the early 20th Century, the role of vitamins came to be understood.

Rickets disappeared in urban areas of Great Britain, only to make its reappearance when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister- presumably not what she meant by a return to 'Victorian values', but then irony was never her strong point.

The triumph of medicine over disease and the understanding of disease also meant fewer city dwellers died from the diseases of the city- cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis, dysentery, scurvy, and so on.

Syphilis didnot come from the new world from the Indian.
The History channel ran than show that show than richman bury in England have advange stage of syphilis the body date from late 13th century to early 14th century. Then they undercover than ancient Greek city dataing back to around 1200 BCE in which 1/3 of the people bury bones show sign of then haveing syphilis. Syphilis damage bones in a certain way in the advange stage.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by CharlesBHoff


Syphilis didnot come from the new world from the Indian.
The History channel ran than show that show than richman bury in England have advange stage of syphilis the body date from late 13th century to early 14th century. Then they undercover than ancient Greek city dataing back to around 1200 BCE in which 1/3 of the people bury bones show sign of then haveing syphilis. Syphilis damage bones in a certain way in the advange stage.

It'd be nice if you bothered to read my post correctly. I said it was a new strain of syphilis, not that it was wholly introduced from the Americas.

'New' strain implies the existence of an old strain, geddit?

In any case, I knew a forensic archaeologist at Manchester University in the 1980s who had studied bones from Mediterranean classical inhumations and had observed the characteristic pitting signs of syphilis in them. I was also aware of the research which had revealed signs of syphilis in human remains in the northern English port city of Hull.

" Syphilitic osteomyelitis

Caused by Treponema pallidum and T. pertenue (yaws)

Bone involvement more common in congenital syphilis; appears at 5th month of gestation in areas of active enchondral ossification (osteochondritis) and periosteum

Acquired syphilis involves bone in tertiary phase, usually nose, palate, skull, tibia, vertebrae, hands/feet

Xray: reactive periosteal bone deposition (“saber shin” of tibia)

Gross: bone destruction and production; necrotic, well-defined bone defects of cortex and periosteum surrounded by sclerotic bone

Micro: edematous granulation tissue, plasma cells, granulomas, necrotic bone and new bone production

Positive stains: silver stains "

http://www.pathologyoutlines.com/bonepf.html

Good try Charley Farley, but no cigar.

[CharlesBHoff]

Originally posted by molly bloom


It'd be nice if you bothered to read my post correctly. I said it was a new strain of syphilis, not that it was wholly introduced from the Americas.

'New' strain implies the existence of an old strain, geddit?

In any case, I knew a forensic archaeologist at Manchester University in the 1980s who had studied bones from Mediterranean classical inhumations and had observed the characteristic pitting signs of syphilis in them. I was also aware of the research which had revealed signs of syphilis in human remains in the northern English port city of Hull.

" Syphilitic osteomyelitis

Caused by Treponema pallidum and T. pertenue (yaws)

Bone involvement more common in congenital syphilis; appears at 5th month of gestation in areas of active enchondral ossification (osteochondritis) and periosteum

Acquired syphilis involves bone in tertiary phase, usually nose, palate, skull, tibia, vertebrae, hands/feet

Xray: reactive periosteal bone deposition (“saber shin” of tibia)

Gross: bone destruction and production; necrotic, well-defined bone defects of cortex and periosteum surrounded by sclerotic bone

Micro: edematous granulation tissue, plasma cells, granulomas, necrotic bone and new bone production

Positive stains: silver stains "

http://www.pathologyoutlines.com/bonepf.html

Good try Charley Farley, but no cigar.

Molly the The anti-islamist. There was no new strain it was than lies spead by than incompiant doctor who dislike the local native in the new world and to hide the spainish use of germ warfare in the new world on the native by speading smallpox by giving smallpox inflect blanket to the native on purpose something which your blias mind would approve of.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

I don't think there was much subterfuge associated with the Spanish use of smallpox. They were quite open about cleansing the world of the heathens. After all, the Indians didn't get CNN or decent newspapers to warn them.

[BeBMan]

CBH: Well argued. You actually make me wish to convert over to Islam.

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by CharlesBHoff


Molly the The anti-islamist. There was no new strain it was than lies spead by than incompiant doctor who dislike the local native in the new world and to hide the spainish use of germ warfare in the new world on the native by speading smallpox by giving smallpox inflect blanket to the native on purpose something which your blias mind would approve of.

Anti-Islam!

It was the Brits, not the Spanish or Americans, who spread smallpox delilberately through the distribution of infected blankets, and that was only once.

As for syph, it reappeared with a vengence in 1495 in Naples. Given the havok it wrecked among the French army, I find it difficult to believe it had only been in Europe for two years. I find it more likely to have been a mutation of pre-existing sysph.