ABSTRACT
Elizabethan England was a rural society in which most people lived and workedin small communities that were focused on agriculture. Towns served these communities as centres of distribution and trade, allowing rural villagers to acquire tools and other goods which they could not produce efficiently for themselves. Towns, in turn, were connected to one another, and to communities elsewhere in the wider world, through a network of exchange of goods and people. Historians do not always agree on the minimum size required of a community before it may be labelled ‘urban’, with some making the case that a population of 5,000 was required for a place to have all of the characteristics of an urban centre while others emphasise the ways in which relatively small settlements of no more than 400-500 people exhibited many distinctly urban characteristics. The discussion in the present essay is most influenced by this latter approach because it assumes that the primary function of an Elizabethan town was economic and that even relatively small communities played crucial roles in supplying commodities and immigrants to larger towns. Although many residents of a town could be employed in the agricultural sector, there would be a significant proportion of a town’s inhabitants engaged in productive activity related only indirectly, if at all, to agriculture. Given that their primary reason for existence was economic, a survey of the economies of Elizabethan towns amounts to a survey of urban life generally.
