What happened to London in the 17th century?
The Great Plague The unsanitary and overcrowded City of London had suffered from numerous outbreaks of the plague many times over the centuries, but in Britain it is the eighth and last outbreak of plague in the 17th century which is remembered as the “Great Plague”.
Why was London so important in the 17th century?
London exploded during the 16th and 17th centuries as it was transformed from being simply the capital of England to being a major centre of world commerce and culture.
What was the 17th century called in England?
Jacobean era
The Jacobean era refers to the years of the reign of James I in England, 1603–1625.
What did poor people eat in the 18th century?
The poorest people ate mostly potatoes, bread, and cheese. Working-class folks might have had meat a couple of times a week, while the middle class ate three good meals a day. Some common foods eaten were eggs, bacon and bread, mutton, pork, potatoes, and rice. They drank milk and ate sugar and jam.
What was life like in London in the 17th century?
A 1662 Act of Parliament admitted that “the common highways leading unto and from the cities of London and Westminster” were “miry and foul” and were thus “noisome, dangerous and inconvenient to the inhabitants”. Drainage was poor – in some areas non-existent – and faeces, both human and animal, befouled the roads.
How big was London in the 16th century?
A narrative montage of historical facts about London during the 16th and 17th centuries. SPEAKER 2: At the beginning of the 16th century, London was a small city of 50,000 people. SPEAKER 3: Actually a much more ethnically mixed city than most of us imagine today.
What was life like in London during the Georgian era?
The City retained its disorderly neighbourhoods, lively markets and open sewers, but admixed this cacophony of life with an increasingly wealthy and self-confident financial elite, housed in the classical architecture of Georgian buildings.
What was the geography of London in 1715?
If in 1715 London was composed of a series of contiguous communities spread along the Thames, each of which was within easy reach of open fields, by the 1760s London had begun to escape the magnetic attraction of the river and to make ever-deeper inroads into rural Middlesex and Surrey.