Housing for the Lesser Sort in Stuart London: Findings from Certificates, and Returns of Divided Houses

Abstract

Conflicts between the Crown's and London authorities' desire to prohibit and control London's growth, and in-migrants' need for cheap housing, forced many builders to provide it in unconventional ways, sometimes from unusual sources. The Certificates of offending houses and builders, and the Returns of Divided Houses give us an unusually clear picture of the types of houses so produced along with a sense of the people, mostly poor, who were forced to seek out this kind of shelter. The Returns also provide detailed first-hand accounts of the incredible degree of overcrowding that sometimes occurred in the heart of London in the mid-seventeenth-century.