these small
landholders, an income mace up of rent, profit, and wages, was estimated
at between sixty and seventy pounds a year. It was computed that the
number of persons who tilled their own land was greater than the number
of those who farmed the land of others. [89] A large portion of
the yeomanry had, from the time of the Reformation, leaned towards
Puritanism, had, in the civil war, taken the side of the Parliament,
had, after the Restoration, persisted in hearing Presbyterian and
Independent preachers, had, at elections, strenuously supported the
Exclusionists and had continued even after the discovery of the Rye
House plot and the proscription of the Whig leaders, to regard Popery
and arbitrary power with unmitigated hostility.

Great as has been the change in the rural life of England since the
Revolution, the change which has come to pass in the cities is still
more amazing. At present above a sixth part of the nation is crowded
into provincial towns of more than thirty thousand inhabitants. In the
reign of Charles the second no provincial town in the kingdom contained
thirty thousand inhabitants; and only four provincial towns contained so
many as ten thousand inhabitants.

Next to the capital, but next at an immense distance, stood Bristol,
then the first English seaport, and Norwich, then the first English
manufacturing town. Both have since that time been far outstripped
by younger rivals; yet both have made great positive advances. The
population of Bristol has quadrupled. The population of Norwich has more
than doubled.

Pepys, who visited Bristol eight years after the Restoration, was struck
by the splendour of the city. But his standard was not high; for he
noted down as a wonder the circumstance that, in Bristol, a man might
look round him and see nothing but houses. It seems that, in no other
place with which he was acquainted, except London, did the buildings
completely shut out the woods and fields. Large as Bristol might then
appear, it occupied but a very small portion of the area on which it
now stands. A few churches of eminent beauty rose out of a labyrinth
of narrow lanes built upon vaults of no great solidity. If a coach or
a cart entered those alleys, there was danger that it would be wedged
between the houses, and danger also that it would break in the cellars.
Goods were therefore conveyed about the town almost exclusively in
trucks drawn by dogs; and the richest inhabitants exhibited