798 ON PRICES GENERALLY BETWEEN 1583 AND 1793. 



upwards. The reverse of this phenomenon will be curiously 

 illustrated by the facts which will appear in the last two 

 volumes of this history, and especially during the first sixty 

 years of the eighteenth century. 



There is yet another consideration, to which I must recur. 

 To what extent are the exalted prices of the seventeenth 

 century due to the increase of population, especially when 

 no corresponding addition is made to the produce of the soil ? 

 Though I am not quite willing to accept Gregory King's 

 estimate as to the rate of production at the end of the seven- 

 teenth century, it is difficult to entirely reject it, in the face 

 of his great reputation among his contemporaries as an ac- 

 curate observer. 



I have no doubt that the population of England and Wales 

 at the end of the seventeenth century was about 5| millions, 

 despite the terrible plagues with which England was visited 1 , 

 and I have no more doubt that it was not more than half 

 that number at the end of the sixteenth. Part of this in- 

 crease (the returns of the Hearth Tax quoted above are con- 

 clusive on the subject) was due to the greater occupation of 

 the Northern counties, which appear, notwithstanding their 

 poverty, as indicated by their small tax-paying power, to 

 have been nearly as densely peopled as many parts of the 

 more prosperous and settled South. This settlement of the 

 North was I conclude mainly due to the political union of 

 the two countries, England and Scotland, and to the removal 

 of those incessant disturbances which their political severance 

 involved. I am not of course referring to the Parliamentary 

 Union, the effects of which, if it were only the riddance of 

 the Scottish Parliament, a most ridiculous and mischievous 

 mockery of representation, was an unmixed boon to the in- 

 habitants of the Northern part of the island, and in some par- 

 ticulars to those of the Southern part. 



But besides this natural and highly desirable growth of 

 numbers in the Northern counties, in which by the way the most 

 1 For the losses of life by pestilence, see vol. vi. pp. 66 1, 662, 664, 668. 



