Hundred (England)

“ For each shire of England hath two gentlemen or knights of greatest wisdom and reputation, chosen out of the body of the same for that only purpose, saving that for Wales one only is supposed sufficient in every county, whereby the number aforementioned is made up. There are likewise forty and six citizens, two hundred and eighty-nine burgesses, and fourteen barons, so that the whole assembly of the laity of the lower house consisteth of four hundred thirty and nine persons, if the just number be supplied. ”

“ We may, therefore, with confidence pronounce that, when James the Second reigned, England contained between five million and five million five hundred thousand inhabitants. On the very highest supposition she then had less than one third of her present population, and less than three times the population which is now collected in her gigantic capital.
The increase of the people has been great in every part of the kingdom, but generally much greater in the northern than in the southern shires. ”

“ In the middle of the seventeenth century Sir William Petty, one of the most acute, and also one of the most practical men of his time, pronounced that the population of England would take three hundred and sixty years to double—the fact being, that it has doubled within about a seventh part of that period. ”

“ ENGLAND'S POWER TO RESIST THE ARMADA. 14. And what of England and of her ability to resist this formidable attack? For a hundred years before the beginning of the sixteenth century, the civil wars of the Roses had desolated the country and put an end to national growth. For the next fifty years, and until the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth, violence and bloodshed were so common that the population barely maintained its own. In 1588 the whole number of people in England and Wales was estimated at four millions, about one third of the population of Spain. ”

“ It was agreed that the Estates of Scotland should send an army of twenty-one thousand men into England, headed by the old Earl of Leven. They were to receive thirty-one thousand pounds a month,—one hundred thousand pounds of it in advance, and another sum at the conclusion of peace. ”

“ Finlaison, an actuary of eminent skill, subjected the ancient parochial registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials, to all the tests which the modern improvements in statistical science enabled him to apply. His opinion was, that, at the close of the seventeenth century, the population of England was a little under five million two hundred thousand souls. ”

“ The Pequites Wars, in which were Slain Five or Six Hundred Indians.
Ministers that have come from England, chiefly in the Ten first Years, Ninety Four: Of which returned Twenty Seven: Dyed in the Country Thirty Six: Yet alive in the Country Thirty One. [164] The Number of Ships that transported Passengers to New-England in these times, was 298, supposed: Men, Women, and Children, as near as can be ghessed 21200.
1637. The first Synod at Cambridge in New-England, where the Antinomian and Famalistical Errors were confuted; 80 Errors now amongst the Massachusets. ”

“ Commerce and industry began slowly to rally, and the wealth of the land seems to have suffered less than might have been expected. The bloodshed and confiscations of the unhappy years between 1455 and 1471 had fallen almost entirely on the nobles and their military retainers, and the cities and the yeomen had fared comparatively well. England Pg 262 had never been left desolate like France at the end of the Hundred Years' War. ”

“ The Countrey here is bless’d with the richest soil in all New-England, I have heard it reported from men of Judgement and Integrity, that one Bushel of European-Wheat hath yielded a hundred in one year. ”

“ If we cross Blackstone Edge or penetrate it with the railroad, we enter upon that classic soil on which English manufacture has achieved its masterwork and from which all labour movements emanate, namely, South Lancashire with its central city Manchester. Again we have beautiful hill country, sloping gently from the watershed westwards towards the Irish Sea, with the charming green valleys of the Ribble, the Irwell, the Mersey, and their tributaries, a country which, a hundred years ago chiefly swamp land, thinly populated, is now sown with towns and villages, p. ”

“ A little consideration of the comparative number of students with reference to the population of the country who were thus given the opportunity for higher education—and took advantage of it—at that time and the present, will show the unreasonableness of such an opinion. It is not so easy as might be imagined to determine just what was the population even of England in the Thirteenth Century. During Elizabeth's reign there were, according to the census, an estimate made about the time of the great Armada, altogether some four millions of people. ”

“ There were no large cities, in praise be it spoken, during the Thirteenth Century, and it must not be forgotten that the whole population of England at the beginning {129} of the century was scarcely more than two millions of people and did not reach three millions even at the end of it. Every rood of ground did not perhaps maintain its man, but every part of England had its quota of population so that there could not be many crowded centers. ”

“ The poor rate, which at the end of the American War, when the population of England was about 8,000,000, amounted to £2,132,487, which during the subsequent forty years of mismanagement had risen till in 1833, when the population was 14,000,000, it had reached £8,606,501, was in the course of three years reduced by upwards of £3,000,000. ”

“ One of the first objects of an inquirer, who wishes to form a correct notion of the state of a community at a given time, must be to ascertain of how many persons that community then consisted. Unfortunately the population of England in 1685, cannot be ascertained with perfect accuracy. ”

“ But no one to-day would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population of the countryside the spirit of an “England” four-fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the fields at noontide or evening, the old English service in the old English village church, now stand but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past. Is “England” then to be discovered in the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities? In the vast welter and chaos of the capital of Empire? ”

“ Peter, the Roman church shall receive yearly a thousand marks sterling, namely at the feast of St. Michael five hundred marks, and at Easter five hundred marks—seven hundred, namely, for the kingdom of England, and three hundred for the kingdom of Ireland—saving to us and to our heirs our rights, liberties and regalia; all of which things, as they have been described above, we wish to have perpetually valid and firm; and we bind ourselves and our successors not to act counter to them. ”

“ The authorities are neither difficult of consultation nor distant, and comparatively much more is known about the population of England at this time than about most of the continental countries. England was under a single ruler, while the geographical divisions that we now know by the name of France, Spain, Italy and Germany were the seats of several rulers at least and sometimes of many, a circumstance which does not favor our obtaining an adequate idea of the populations. ”

“ In 1750, England and Wales counted 6,400,000 inhabitants, and not until the end of the century did the population rise to 9,000,000. London in the middle of the eighteenth century had something like 600,000 inhabitants, — no insignificant number, it is true, but not so large as to preclude a man in society from the possibility of knowing almost everybody of importance. Naturally, then, society was more a unit than it is to-day. ”

“ The density of the population was found to vary in different parts of England, and Wales, from as few as eighteen persons in a square mile, to as many as 185,751 in a similar area. A very curious and interesting illustration has been furnished of the increased proximity of the inhabitants, in consequence of the increase of population, during the present century. ”

“ To such Causes as these, New-England owes the vast Increase of its Inhabitants . . . the whole Number of Inhabitants must now amount to 160 or 165,000, and of them about 30 or 35000 fighting Men, which is the Military Strength of the Country. ”

“ When it is recalled that the census of England made in Elizabeth's time, just before the Great Armada was expected, showed a total population of less than five million, the amount of good that could be accomplished by this vast sum of money, not in the hands of a few, but distributed in 30,000 treasuries and used for social purposes, can be readily understood. ”

“ The population of the United Kingdom in 1876 was estimated at near thirty-four millions; in the last few decades the decennial increase had been considerably over two millions; at that rate the population in 1900 would be near forty millions. ”

“ East Anglia was from first to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament was unquestionable and impregnable, even after the strength of its population had been diminished by sending some thousands of picked men and women to America. While every one of the forty counties of England was represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglian counties contributed to it far more than all the rest. ”

“ The hundreds, or groups of parishes, necessarily share their boundaries, and groups of hundreds are often aggregated to form larger subdivisions of counties. A wider grouping according to natural characteristics may now be recognized only in the cases of Wales, East Anglia, Wessex and such less definite groups as the Home Counties around London or the Midlands around Birmingham. Configuration is only one out of many conditions modifying distributions, and its effects on England as a whole appear to be suggestive rather than determinative. ”

“ In England, on the contrary, one often travels, stage after stage, through an unvarying expanse of flat fields laid out on the level formations, which, undisturbed by trappean or metamorphic rocks, stretch away at low angles for hundreds of miles together, forming blank tablets, on which man may write his works in whatever characters he pleases. Doubtless such a disposition of things adds greatly to the wealth and power of a country;—the population of Yorkshire, at the last census, equalled that of Scotland in 1801. ”

“ A population—to speak of England, for it is of England we are thinking—of five millions, as it was in the time of Queen Elizabeth, cannot bear comparison with ours of nearer twenty millions. Then, if we enlarge our view, and take in England's transplanted progeny, whose activity and whose advancement in knowledge and science we share, under every facility for the transmission of knowledge, we may fairly speculate upon a very wonderful futurity. ”

“ Prejudice must have been intensely strong in days gone by; for it would seem to have to bear, deservedly, the chief blame for past neglect in seeking the important information which can alone be obtained through this channel. It was not till 1801, I believe, that the first actual enumeration of the people of England and Scotland took place, although an imperfect attempt to ascertain the number of the population had been made in the previous century. Since 1801 the census taking has become more general in the United Kingdom. ”

“ Of this surplus population there are, according to the reports of the Poor Law commissioners, on an average, a million and a half in England and Wales; in Scotland the number cannot be ascertained for want of Poor Law regulations, and with Ireland we shall deal separately. Moreover, this million and a half includes only those who actually apply to the parish for relief; the great multitude who struggle on without recourse to this most hated expedient, it does not embrace. ”

“ When a reader, therefore, is told of the vast increase of population in London, let him sober down his astonishment until he knows which (among half-a-dozen different Londons) is the one alluded to. As 'our own country' may be taken to mean England only, or England and Wales, or Great Britain, or the United Kingdom, or the British Empire, in five different degrees of largeness, so may 'our metropolis' have at least as many significations. Tables of metropolitan population have been issued in the following form:—1750, 676,250 ”

“ The total population in London and 71 of the largest towns in England was over 7,667,622, and the population in the country and in smaller towns was over 12,398,602, so that there are nearly eight-twentieths of the population in those 72 towns. ”

“ Wherever the towns lay thick, Puritanism was strong; London, the populous Eastern Counties, Kent, the cluster of growing places on the borders of Yorkshire and Lancashire, from Leeds to Liverpool, were all Parliamentarian strongholds. On the other hand, in the West and the North, and among the Welsh hills, the Church was still omnipotent, and Nonconformity was weak. These districts were led by the local peers, and still more by the county gentry, and of both those classes a large majority held to the king. ”