Stranica 107 [107]
OCR
THE GROWTH OF THE CITY 85 at various periods are not now printed tor the first time; but seem as complete as the vague statistics at our command will enable us to make them. Nothing can be more difficult and more hopeless than to approximate to the actual population before the seventeenth century. In 1636 the Lord Mayor estimated that there were about 700,000 souls within the Liberties; and just before the Great Plague, Howell, the author of the Leffers, thought there were not less than a million and a half in all London. In the Plague of 1603-11, 14,000 people were believed to have died—as many as 4000 in the one year 1609. In 1625, 35,417 people died of the Plague. In the Great Plague year, 1665, 100,000. victims is stated to be a moderate estimate of the deaths. In a curious old collection of notes relating to the Plague, published in 1721, we are told that in 1625 the burials were 54,265 and the christenings 6,983. The deaths therefore in that, the worst
