Poverty and the polarisation of society

If rising prices and populations threatened to undermine the stability of London and other English cities during the sixteenth century, it is often argued that they did so because the ensuing decline in real income and growth in unemployment drove the majority of townspeople below the poverty line, hastening the polarisation of urban society in general and the growth of oligarchy in particular. For a precious few who lived in England's cities the Tudor period offered opportunities for amassing fortunes which rivalled and occasionally surpassed those possessed by peers of the realm. Living in spacious mansions, sealed off from the wretched poverty around them, the rise in prices was little more than a thorn in the side of their opulent life style. But for most townspeople, we are told, a single meal was a fortune, subsisting an accomplishment. As prices rose and wage increases failed to keep pace, the decline in living standards pushed ever-increasing numbers of urban households perilously close to the brink of starvation. Crammed into overcrowded, dilapidated tenements rising from squalid streets and alleys, doubtless each day's dawn was greeted apprehensively by the majority of England's townspeople.

According to P. Clark and P. Slack taxation records from the 1520s ‘reveal a common pattern of wide extremes of wealth and poverty’ in urban England, a ‘gulf between rich and poor [which] generally widened’ during the following century.