1. E. Jones (1980) p. 126. [BACK]

2. For studies on the social topography of seventeenth-century London, see continue

      E. Jones (1980); Finlay (1981) pp. 77-81 based on data for the City in the 1630s; Jones & Judges (1935-6); Glass (1966) p.xxiii based on data for the City in the 1690s; Power (1986) based on data for the whole metropolis in the 1660s. [BACK]

3. Nothing much had changed by the 1790s, when L. D. Schwarz found a distribution of rich and poor very similar to that found by Power for the 1660s. He also found the middling people spread 'remarkably evenly across London, forming about a tenth of the population everywhere, irrespective of the wealth or poverty of their parish' (Schwarz (1982) p. 174). [BACK]

4. Defoe (1724-6) ii, 2. Another 29 men in the sample had a residence in London and a second country residence which was normally not far from the outskirts of the metropolis. Other people used to rent houses or apartments in the country for the summer. [BACK]

5. Simond (1817) i, 64 quoted by Summerson (1962) p. 67; Chs 4 and 5 of the latter provide a good introduction to the London house of our period. [BACK]

6. Descriptions of houses in this section rely largely on inventories. These give a good idea of numbers and location of rooms and mention yards, cellars, garrets etc., but give no description of external appearance, measurements etc. [BACK]

7. Maitland (1739) pp. 294-6; Reddaway (1940) pp. 129-30. In general on the rebuilding, see Reddaway (1940), Bell (1923) and P. E. Jones (1966). [BACK]

8. At least 138 (37 per cent) of the sample owned a lease of their dwelling-house; others owned leases which are not specifically described as their dwelling-house but which might have been or might just be an investment. In their fullest form, inventories state the number of years to come on a lease, the quit rent, the clear rent if the property is let to a third party, the number of years' purchase and the valuation. Only a minority include all this information. For books on valuation and building costs, see Leybourn (1668), Primatt (1667), Phillips (1719). [BACK]

9. Average length of lease remaining was 27 years; median 20; range 2 1/2 to 73 years; based on 55 inventories which provide this information. Reddaway (1940) Chs 3 and 4; P. E. Jones (1966) for details of the bargains struck. [BACK]

10. For examples of valuations with low quit-rents, sec S.23, tobacconist in Walbrook (59-year lease, £2 p.a. quit-rent, valued at £374); S.44, builder in Spitalfields for his house, garden and yard (74, £6 p.a., £180); S.77, soapmaker in Bread Street Hill (50, £15 p.a., £340); S.91, merchant in Bevis Marks (41, £5 p.a., £640). [BACK]

11. A. Smith (1961) i, 131-2; rents can be calculated if unpaid rent for a specific time is listed in inventories. See S.340 (jeweller in Cheapside, £80); for £60, see S.13 (linen-draper in Leadenhall Street); for £50 to £55, see S.40 (rentier in Adam Court, Broad St), S.52 (merchant in St Dunstan's Hill, S.83 (mercer in Milk St), S.224 (merchant in Aldermanbury). For some lower rents, see S.4 (£20, apothecary of St Andrew Undershaft), S.54 (£12, carter in Thames St), S.161 (£30, working goldsmith in Foster Lane), S. 164 (£20, comb-maker in Rosemary Lane, Whitechapel). A more comprehensive source for rents can be found in the assessments for the continue

      parliamentary aids from 1689 onwards, later known as the Land Tax (Ward (1953) pp. 6-10). For example, the 1694 aid (5 W&M c.1) was assessed in two parts: 4s. in the £ of one year's value of lands, messuages etc. and 24s. for every £100 of personal estate (i.e. 4s. in the £, assuming that the return on such estate was 6 per cent). In the City, the 'real' part of this assessment was made on the actual or computed rack rents paid by occupiers. It is clear from appeals (CLRO Ass. Box 2, No. 1) that this tax very accurately reflects actual rents, which ranged for those in our sample from £200 p.a. for the merchant John Cary to £12 p.a. for the haberdasher George Fryer. The most seriously affected by this tax were tavern-keepers. John Carter (S.248), for instance, was paying one-fifth of £140 (£28) p.a. as tax on a tavern in King Street, near Guildhall, which since he died in 1697 worth only £484 must have been a very serious drain on his income. The second part of the tax, on personal estate, was grossly underestimated and very regressive. To take two examples, the wine merchant John Newton, who died in 1697, was rated at £200 personal estate and was actually worth £14,402 when he died, while the tavern-keeper mentioned above, John Carter, was also rated at £200 but was actually worth only £484 when he died in 1697. Despite the regressive assessment of this tax, it provides a fairly good indication of the rank order of personal wealth—people who died wealthy generally paying the most and people who died relatively poor the least, despite the particular example above. [BACK]

12. A. Smith loc. cit; Swift (1948) i, 34; Derbyshire Record Office, Gell Papers, 258/68/11 i, j, 1; de Saussure (1902) p. 165; cf. Misson (1719) p. 145. Both the last two foreigners were impressed by the ease with which lodgings could be found. [BACK]

13. Not all inventories give sufficient detail to determine lay-out. However, many specify that rooms were up one, two or three pair of stairs or in the garret, were at the back, front, middle, east, west etc. The greatest difficulty is with kitchens and dining-rooms, which did not really need any further description since it would be obvious which room was meant. However, position is often clear from the order in which rooms were listed. [BACK]

14. S.164 (Justice); S.115 (Marshall); see S.259 and 296 for merchants with houses laid out like this. [BACK]

15. S.94 (Edwards); for examples of 'missing' rooms, see S.95 (only one room on second floor), S.113 (only one room on first and third floors), S.133 (either first or second floor missing). [BACK]

16. S.272 (Pinder); S.107 (Birkin). Numbers of rooms here and below include bedrooms (inc. garret bedrooms), living rooms and kitchens but do not include such additions to living rooms as closets or to kitchens as washhouses and butteries; nor do they include cellars or rooms used for work such as shops, workshops or warehouses. [BACK]

17. For a detailed description of the tax, see Glass (1966). [BACK]

18. Thirsk & Cooper (1972), p. 772; Jones & Judges (1935) pp. 58-62. See also Glass (1969) for analysis of a sample of parishes within the Walls; in Table 1 (p. 375) he presents figures of 6.03 persons per house (inc. 1.38 children and 1.43 servants and apprentices) for his sample of 40 parishes. break [BACK]

19. London (1966). [BACK]

20. S.274 (Assessment 4.6); cf. John Hicks (S.309, Ass. 44.31), who left £2370 in 1704; Edward Osborne (S.307, Ass. 9.35), who left £2197 in 1704; Thomas Penford (S.278, Ass. 77.12), who left £1832 in 1701 and Luke Meredith (S.270, Ass. 35.27), who left £1501 in 1700—all non-payers of surtax who seem unlikely to have accumulated this rapidly. Meredith, for example, would have had to make compound clear profits over all his household expenses of 25 per cent p.a. to have turned £500 into £1500 in just five years. On rates of profit, see pp. 137-42. [BACK]

21. Wigfall (S.259, Ass. 34.2); Levett (S.317, Ass. 59.24); cf. the banker Thomas Williams (wife and 3 children missing), who had a house at Stratford (S.246, Ass. 71.18) and the merchant Francis March (S.250, Ass. 29.17), who had 3 sons missing, all under the age of apprenticeship, as is known from his will; they were probably at boarding school. For other examples, see the source note at the end of Table 8.3, p. 217. [BACK]

22. A. Smith (1961) i, 132. 'A tradesman in London is obliged to hire a whole house . . . His shop is upon the ground-floor, and he and his family sleep in the garret; and he endeavours to pay a part of his house-rent by letting the two middle stories to lodgers.' Very few members of our sample conform to this specification. The 1695 assessments suggest that there were far more lodgers in poorer quarters of the town and in the houses of poorer people and widows. [BACK]

23. The two people who have been put down as lodgers, a man and a woman of the same surname but not married, were not specified as either lodgers or servants. [BACK]

24. One can get a fairly good idea of who did or did not employ servants from the schedules drawn up for the Poll Tax and Marriage Duties Tax in the CLRO. Very few people can be said not to belong to the servant employing class simply on the grounds of their occupation. [BACK]

25. Defoe (1724) p. 139. [BACK]

26. Defoe (1725) pp. 4, 8. For general comment, see that book and Defoe (1724), and for a wider sampling of contemporary criticism, see Hecht (1956). Our inventories suggest that Defoe exaggerated a little, but correctly discerned the trend, the wages of maids in the 1670s being about £3-3 1/2 a year and in the 1710s about £5-5 1/2. [BACK]

27. London Chronicle (1758) iii, 327c; Defoe (1725) pp. 18-19. Job specification seems to have been the normal pattern, as can be seen from the assessment for St Michael Bassishaw (CLRO Marriage Duties No. 73), which has very detailed information on occupations. See also pp. 220-9 for  Pepys's  household, where the jobs were always specified. [BACK]

28. All these epithets are from The Compleat Servant-Maid (1677). Wishful thinking did not change much. See The Servant's Calling (1725). [BACK]

29. For  Pepys's  household, see  Pepys  vol. x, 193-7; in the same volume there are brief biographical notes on some of his servants. References to servants can be found in the index, vol. xi and detailed references are not given here, except for full quotations. [BACK]

30.  Pepys's  clerk, Will Hewer, also lived in the household till November continue

      1663, when he went into lodgings, and his duties also combined personal service and government work. [BACK]

31. GLRO DL/C/246, Chambers v. Chambers, fos 61-89. See also Earle (1989), where it is estimated that median time in one place was about one year. [BACK]

32. De Saussure (1902) p. 157; Houghton (1727-8) i, 349. For an interesting discussion of household tasks, see Davidson (1983). [BACK]

33.  Pepys  4/4/1663 and 29/7/1663. [BACK]

34. E.g. GLRO DL/C/245, Fell v. Fell, fo. 91. [BACK]

35. I may have missed some of  Pepys's  groping but, as far as I can see, the chosen girls were the companions Mary Mercer (after 17 months in  Pepys's  household) and Deb Willet (after 6 months) and the maids Susan (after nearly 2 years' service), Nell Payne (after one month) and Jane Birch (after  Pepys  had known her for 10 years). [BACK]

36.  Pepys  3/11/1663, 21/2/1664 and 29/8/1664. [BACK]

37.  Pepys  7/1/1663. [BACK]

38.  Pepys  19/2/1665; GLRO DL/C/245 fo. 215;  Pepys  20 and 21/8/1663. [BACK]

39.  Pepys  12/11/1662; 8/10/1666; 8/12/1662; 3/9/1666; 12/3/1663; 10/6/1663; 13/5/1667. [BACK]

40.  Pepys  2/4/1661; 26/8/1661; 9/4/1663; 27/4/1663; 27/3/1664; 27/5/1664; 23/4/1666. [BACK]

41. GLRO DL/C/246 fos 43, 74-5 and see these depositions generally for servant life. [BACK]

42. Brodsky (1986) pp. 134-7. [BACK]

43. Defoe (1727) (2) p. 133; on contraception, see Stone (1977) pp. 261-7; Earle (1976) pp. 266-8; on fertility, see Finlay (1979) pp. 26-38, who suggests that the higher fertility in wealthier parishes might be explained by a greater use of wet-nurses so that mothers did not have the partial protection from conception that breast-feeding provides. [BACK]

44. See, in particular, Stone (1977) p. 82 and Ch. 9 and Plumb (1975); for a summary and critique of this school of historians, see Pollock (1983) pp. 1-67. [BACK]

45. Pollock (1983) esp. pp. 144-56. This book contains the most devastating critique of the harsh childhood thesis but see also Wrightson (1982) pp. 104-18 and Macfarlane (1979). [BACK]

46. Pollock (1983) passim. For her critique of her sources, see pp. 68-95. [BACK]

47. Pollock (1983) p. 145. [BACK]

48. Wadsworth (1712) p. 58 quoted in Morgan (1944) p. 39; Ryerson (1961); Stone (1977) pp. 113-16, 267-73; Mechling (1975). [BACK]

49. Generalizations from depositions in GLRO DL/C/245-248. [BACK]

50. This paragraph is based on the inventories of the sample. One inventory (S.304) lists a 'Noah's ark' but this seems to have been for the delectation of the father, an inveterate collector, rather than for his children. See Plumb (1975) for the increase in spending on children. Most children's toys, if they had them, would probably have been too cheap and battered to merit valuation, but once again there is the problem of silence. [BACK]

51. Disinherited—S. 12 (PROB 11/324 fo. 91), Richard Darnelly; S.116 continue

      (PROB 11/357 fo. 68), John Rayner; S.216 (PROB 11/400 fo. 12), William Ambler; see also for obedience, duty etc. to the mother, S.246, 280, 285, 307, 316, 354 etc. Most wills give no clue to feelings on these subjects, one way or the other. For Stone's views, see Stone (1977) Ch. 9. [BACK]

52. For some examples of 'mixed' families, see Nos 7, 15, 18, 24, 30, 35 and 36 in Table 8.3 (p. 214), all of which were headed by a man living with his second wife and most of which had children from at least two marriages. Recent work has shown that widows did not remarry as often as once thought (see Carlton (1978), Todd (1985)). However, widows in our class would have been financially attractive to suitors and it seems probable that their remarriage rate would have been much higher than the average, as has recently been shown by Brodsky (1986) in her study of late Elizabethan London. For a case involving refusal to let children of a previous marriage into the house, see GLRO DL/C/246, Chambers v. Chambers. For a will expressing fears about the children of a first marriage, see PRO PROB 11/363 fo. 78 (Richard Davis). [BACK]

53. On the feeding of infants, see Pollock (1983) pp. 212-18. For a contemporary critic of wet-nursing, see Tillotson (1694) pp. 104-11. See also Finlay (1979), esp. pp. 34-5 where he indicates that the practice was a common one. [BACK]

54. Misson (1719) p. 33. [BACK]

55. GHMS 10823/1 p. 36; cf. GHMS 12017 pp. 11-14. A rather good idea of the atmosphere in a middle-class household can be obtained from the dialogues in Defoe (1715). [BACK]

56. Will of Sir John Robinson, PRO PROB 11/362 fo. 28; this was a common formula. On worries about money, see Pollock (1983) p. 115. For a good example, see BL Add. 4454, the commonplace book of Katherine Austin, a propertied London widow who saw her main duty in life to insure that the estate created by her father and by her husband and his father should be handed on intact to her children. [BACK]

57. Campbell (1747) p. 4; on middle-class schools, see pp. 65-8. [BACK]

58. The diary and letters of the Quaker hop-merchant Peter Briggins provide a good example of relations between parents and children at boarding school (see Howard (1894) pp. 46, 54, 67, 73). [BACK]

59. GHMS 10823/1 p. 38; Hedges (No. 35) and Cary (36) in Table 8.3 (p. 214). On ages that children left home, see Wall (1978). [BACK]