During the Tudor and Stuart periods the population of England doubled, increasing from perhaps 2.5 to 5 million. When the total had last reached the 4 5 million mark, in the early fourteenth century, there had been a sharp Malthusian cut-back. How then did the country manage to break through this crucial barrier at its second attempt? Victor Skipp throws light on this question by constructing a detailed model of demographic, economic and social change for a sample group of English communities. After examing the effect of the ecological adjustments on social structure, domestic and cultural...