The aim of this reader - one of a set of four volumes on urban history covering the late 12th to early 20th centuries - is to gather together in an accessible form a number of key contributions to the study of the Tudor and Stuart town. Topics covered include social problems in Elizabethan London.

Preface 1 Introduction 2 Urban development in England and Wales in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries 3 English pre-industrial urban economies 4 Household size and structure in early-Stuart Cambridge 5 Social problems in Elizabethan London 6 Change and stability in seventeenth-century London 7 Residential patterns in pre-industrial cities: Some case studies from seventeenth-century Britain 8 Civic mentality and the environment in Tudor York 9 'The Ramoth-Gilead of the Good': Urban change and political radicalism at Gloucester 1540-1640 10 Newcastle and the nation: The seventeenth-century experience 11 The corporate town and the English State: Bristol's 'little businesses' 1625-1641