The Elizabethan Farmer

In four hundred years, though a Dunwich may disappear into the sea and the coastline may recede from Rye, the climate and contours of a country, except where human beings have deliberately taken a hand, suffer few material changes. During the same period, however, sweeping changes often occur both in the density of the population and in its social habits. The English people, for instance, have multiplied their numbers more than ten-fold— from four to nearly , fifty million. No longer mainly concerned with food-production, they are gathered together, for the most part, in crowded urban communities. These basic facts must be recapitulated if we are to understand the life of the Elizabethan farmer, whose circumstances were so different from our own that, until we have grasped their background, we find it hard to picture them. A population of four millions then lived on an area of some thirty-seven million acres, the total area of England and Wales. Large groupings of population were rare, London being the only sizeable city.