Note n — Chapter VIII

Drake, the historian of York, maintains that London was less populous, about the time of the Conquest, than that city; and quotes Hardynge, a writer of Henry V.'s age, to prove that the interior part of the former was not closely built. Eboracum, p. 91. York however does not appear to have contained more than 10,000 inhabitants at the accession of the Conqueror; and the very exaggerations as to the populousness of London prove that it must have far exceeded that number. Fitz-Stephen, the contemporary biographer of Thomas à Becket, tells us of 80,000 men capable of bearing arms within its precincts; where however his translator, Pegge, suspects a mistake of the MS. in the numerals. And this, with similar hyperboles, so imposed on the judicious mind of Lord Lyttelton, that, finding in Peter of Blois the inhabitants of London reckoned at quadraginta millia, he has actually proposed to read quadringenta. Hist. Henry II., vol. iv. ad finem. It is hardly necessary to observe that the condition of agriculture and internal communication would not have allowed half that number to subsist.

The subsidy-roll of 1377, published in the Archæologia, vol. vii., would lead to a conclusion that all the inhabitants of London did not even then exceed 35,000. If this be true, they could not have amounted, probably, to so great a number two or three centuries earlier. But the numbers given in that document have been questioned as to Norwich upon very plausible grounds, and seem rather suspicious in the present instance. [Note V.]