A labour shortage before Elizabeth's reign

The wretched poverty in which approximately two-thirds of all townspeople in early modern England are said to have lived was, in the view of P. Clark, ‘very much a function of the failure of urban economies to keep pace with population increase’. As the gap widened and the numbers of unemployed mounted, ‘poverty had a wide-ranging ripple effect on towns, depressing demand, undermining the position of lesser tradesmen and generating social tension, political conflict and administrative strains’. The problem of minimising the gap between economic and demographic growth was difficult indeed in London. With its population roughly tripling in size during the sixteenth.century, far greater than the rate of demographic growth in any other town in England, a considerable expansion in the city's economy was needed to maintain the livelihoods of the ever-increasing numbers of people who lived and worked there. This, then, was one of the challenges facing the capital during the Tudor period. How did London fare?

It is possible from petitions and other contemporary sources to acquire a sense about whether demographic and economic growth remained roughly in balance over time and from the companies' records to estimate changes in the size of the city's adult male labour force, but data relating to the demand for labour are difficult to obtain. Thus we can never be certain whether, say, unemployment was due to an over-supply of labour, resulting in part from increased population, or an under-demand for it.