'Our country manners'

The little town in which William Shakespeare opened his eyes in the spring of the year 1564 consisted of only six or seven streets, housing about two hundred families in all-probably fewer than a thousand people. Less then twenty miles away, a day's journey through Warwick and Kenilworth, lay the populous city of Coventry, with between seven and eight thousand people, one of the half dozen largest towns in all England. The city of Canterbury, in which Christopher Marlowe saw the light of day a few weeks before Shakespeare, in a shoemaker's house, comprised about seven hundred families, round about three thousand people in all.

Birmingham, a day's journey to the north of Stratford, was little bigger than Stratford: a return made in 1563 gives it about two hundred families. And up and down England were many ancient borough-towns even smaller than this: towns like Banbury, Burford, or Chipping Norton counted their populations in hundreds, certainly not above eight hundred each. Liverpool at this date had seven streets and about seven hundred inhabitants. The largest city in England, outside London, was Norwich, the capital city of a rich province, but even here there were fewer than fifteen thousand people: about the size of Truro or Dorchester today. Probably only half a dozen other towns in England had as many as ten thousand people. Cities as important as Gloucester may have had five thousand, Worcester about seven thousand. Everything was on a very small scale: even in the biggest towns one could see the green countryside at the end of the streets and could walk into it within five or ten minutes.