^{page 1 note 1} A relation, or rather a true account, of the isle of England, about 1500, translated from the Italian by Sneyd, C. A. (Camden Society, O.S., xxxvii, 1847)Google Scholar .

^{page 2 note 1} An account of the origin and incidence of the subsidy is given in the Introduction to Suffolk in 1524: Subsidy Return (Suffolk Green Books, no. x. Woodbridge, 1910). For the text of the act of 1523, see Statutes of the Realm, iii. 230–41. The act did not extend to Queen Catherine, nor to the inhabitants of Ireland, Wales, Calais, Guernsey, and Jersey. In England it excluded the English inhabitants of the Cinque Ports and the members thereof, the counties of Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, and Cheshire, the bishopric of Durham, the towns of Brighton and Westbourne, the wardens of Rochester Bridge, and the town of Ludlow.

^{page 3 note 1} There is no need to multiply examples; the treatment of Salisbury was typical enough of the new approach. In the tenth granted in 3 Henry VIII Salisbury was called upon to pay £65.6.10. The lay subsidy in the same year yielded £143.16.8,. while the subsidy of 1523–7 yielded £852.5.7.

^{page 3 note 2} All those assessed at £40 and over in lands or goods were required to pay the first instalment of the subsidy by way of an Anticipation in the autumn of 1523, but the tax so paid is included in the accounts and assessments of 1524.

^{page 3 note 3} The figures are extracted mainly from the totals returned to the Exchequer and may be found in P.R.O., Exchequer L.T.R., Enrolled Accounts (Subsidies), E. 359/41. They have been supplemented where necessary by an examination of the particular assessments (E. 179). Very occasionally both these sources fail to produce a complete answer, which accounts for the approximate figures attached to some towns in Table I.

^{page 4 note 1} The quotas fixed in 1334 for the tenth, whenever it should be demanded, give as accurate a picture of the economic standing of the towns as we could hope for. They are conveniently gathered together in P.R.O., Exchequer K.R. Misc. Books, E. 164/7. The details of the Newcastle musters in 1539 and 1547 are given in Welford, R., History of Newcastle and Gateshead: Sixteenth Century (London, 1887), pp. 173–4, 244Google Scholar . There were 1,714 able-bodied men in the latter year. A conservative multiplier for arriving at the total population would be six, so that the town had rather more than 10,000 people in that year. Newcastle maintained her place as fourth among provincial towns during the seventeenth century. The number of hearths at Newcastle in 1662 was exceeded only by that at Norwich, York, and Bristol (Meekings, C. A. F., Dorset Hearth Tax Assessments, 1662–1664, Appendix III (Dorchester, 1951) )Google Scholar .

^{page 5 note 1} The Coventry Leet Book, ed. Harris, Mary Dormer, iii. 674–5Google Scholar .

^{page 5 note 2} Russell, J. C., British Medieval Population, p. 298Google Scholar , suggests a population of 67,744 o n the basis of the chantry certificates of 1545.

^{page 5 note 3} My estimates for Bristol, Exeter, Salisbury, and York are based upon the taxable population in the 1524 assessments, as compared with the known Coventry totals. The estimates for Gloucester and Worcester are based upon the chantry certificates. For Norwich, neither the chantry certificates nor the complete 1524–5 assessments survive, but I calculate (by comparison with the Exeter figures for 1524) that the complete Norwich assessment in 1524 would have contained about 1,320 names, giving a total population of just about 12,000. Hudson, W. and Tingey, J. C., Selected Records of the City of Norwich, ii, p. cxxivGoogle Scholar , say that 1,400 persons contributed to the subsidy of 1524 but give no authority for this statement. If it is correct, the maximum population for the city would be about 12,600.

page 7 note 1 McClenaghan, Beatrice, The Springs of Lavenham and the Suffolk cloth trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Ipswich, 1924)Google Scholar, passim, for the possessions of Thomas Spring III. The Spring tax-assessments of 1524 will be found in Suffolk in 1524, pp. 19, 24, 405. A transcript of the 1522 survey for Babergh hundred in Suffolk, which includes Lavenham, is to be found in the Ipswich public library.

page 8 note 1 Pirenne, H., Economic and Social History of Modern Europe, pp. 47, 49, 163, 164Google Scholar . At Swaffham in western Norfolk there is a somewhat similar story about one John Chapman, a fifteenth-century merchant, who is supposed to have begun his successful career as a pedlar after finding (directed by a dream) a useful cache of goods. Such stories are not uncommon in other countries, and may have a considerable basis of truth, but they serve to show the rarity of the vagabond-type becoming successful merchants rather than the opposite.

^{page 9 note 1} Exeter city records, Book 51, passim.

^{page 10 note 1} Register of the Freemen of Leicester, 1196–1930, ed. Hartopp, Henry (2 vols., Leicester, 1927–1931)Google Scholar .

^{page 10 note 2} Postan, M., ‘The Trade of Medieval Europe: the North’, Cambridge Economic History of Europe, ii. 172–3Google Scholar .

^{page 11 note 1} For Canynges's property see The Antiquities of Bristow in the middle centuries, ed. Dallaway, James (Bristol, 1834), p. 192Google Scholar . For the Crugge property there are the wills and inquisitions post mortem of William Crugge and John Crugge in Somerset House and the P.R.O. respectively. For Marler there is the survey of 1522 among the Coventry archives (Accounts Various, 18).

^{page 11 note 2} Youings, Joyce, ‘The City of Exeter and the Property of the Dissolved Monasteries’, Trans. Devonshire Assoc. lxxxiv (1952), 131, 139–40Google Scholar .

^{page 12 note 1} Stow's Survey of London, ed. Morley, Henry (London, 1893), pp. 375, 384Google Scholar , and passim. At Plymouth one of the principal merchants built a street which in 1584 was called ‘Sperkes newe streate’ and survives as New Street today. It was a middle-class street, judging by the remaining houses. At least two other streets in Elizabethan Plymouth were named after rich merchants, and the assumption is that they financed their building.

^{page 12 note 2} These figures cover most of the occupied persons in these towns. I have excluded from them all such general categories as labourers, servants, and yeomen, who would, in any event, have been fairly evenly distributed among the principal crafts and trades of the town. The Coventry survey has already been noted; the Northampton assessment is in P.R.O., E. 179, 155/124.

^{page 14 note 1} Any system of classification is open to detailed objections, but in distinguishing the textile trades from the wholesale and retail clothing trades I have put the cappers and hatters of Coventry under textiles rather than clothing, as the trade was clearly producing mainly for an external market; and I have classified the shoemakers under leather and allied trades rather than clothing for the same reason.

^{page 116 note 1} The assessments for the subsidy at Swaffham do not give occupations it is rare for these assessments to do so), and we know nothing more than Leland tells us.

^{page 116 note 2} Dugdale, , in his Antiquities of Warwickshire (1656)Google Scholar , observes that the city authorities purchased all the monastic lands in and near Coventry, and also all the lands of the gilds and chantries, but all this enterprise did ‘not balance the Loss this City sustained by the Ruine of that great and famous Monastery, and other the Religious Houses.… For to so low an Ebbe did their Trading soon after grow, for want of such Concourse of People that numerously resorted thither before that fatal Dissolution, that many thousands of the Inhabitants to seek better Livelyhoods, were constrain'd to forsake the City.’ The simultaneous decay of the cap and cloth trades was another important factor in Coventry's decline in these years.

^{page 17 note 1} The Exeter survey of 1522 is in the city archives (Misc. Book, 156a). It does not give occupations as the Coventry survey does, and is not so informative in other respects. The Leicester estimate is given by Charman, D. ‘Wealth and Trade in Leicester in the Early Sixteenth Century’, Trans. Leics. Arch. Soc, xxv (1949), 84Google Scholar .

^{page 118 note 1} For Leicester, see Charman, , op. cit., 80–1Google Scholar . The figures for Coventry and Exeter are calculated from the 1524 subsidy assessments in the P.R.O.