The best and the worst of urban worlds

Recent scholarship has painted a rather grim picture of life in England's cities during the sixteenth century. Indeed in the view of many historians it was an age of acute urban crisis, decades when a host of insurmountable problems left cities throughout the realm desolate and decayed: traditional urban economies deteriorated in the face of suburban competition; growing unemployment and the financial burdens of urban residence, especially high taxes, resulted in widespread depopulation; a century-long rise in prices depressed living standards and drove the majority of all townspeople below the poverty line. Summarising what is viewed by many as a consensus regarding the state of England's cities from the 1520s through the 1570s, C. Phythian-Adams concluded that ‘at no other period in national history since the coming of the Danes have English towns in general been so weak’.