The extent of the population can only be rudely conjectured.  A rough census was taken at the time of the Armada, when it was found to be something under five millions; but anterior to this I can find no authority on which I can rely with any sort of confidence.  It is my impression, however, from a number of reasons—­each in itself insignificant, but which taken together leave little doubt upon my mind—­that it had attained that number by a growth so slow as to be scarcely perceptible, and had nearly approached to it many generations before.  Simon Fish, in The Supplication of Beggars,[1] says that the number of households in England in 1531 was 520,000.  His calculation is of the most random kind; for he rates the number of parishes at 52,000, with ten households on an average in each parish.  A mistake so preposterous respecting the number of parishes shows the great ignorance of educated men upon the subject.  The ten households in each parish may, probably (in some parts of the country), have been a correct computation; but this tells us little with respect to the aggregate numbers, for the households were very large—­the farmers, and the gentlemen also, usually having all the persons whom they employed residing under their own roof.  Neither from this, therefore, nor from any other positive statement which I have seen, can I gather any conclusion that may be depended upon.  But when we remember the exceeding slowness with which the population multiplied in a time in which we can accurately measure it—­that is to say, from 1588 to the opening of the last century—­under circumstances in every way more favourable to an increase, I think we may assume that the increase was not so great between 1500 and 1588, and that, previous to 1500, it did not more than keep pace with the waste from civil and foreign war.  The causes, indeed, were wholly wanting which lead to a rapid growth of numbers.  Numbers now increase with the increase of employment and with the facilities which are provided by the modern system of labour for the establishment of independent households.  At present, any able-bodied unskilled labourer earns, as soon as he has arrived at man’s estate, as large an amount of wages as he will earn at any subsequent time; and having no connection with his employer beyond the receiving the due amount of weekly money from him, and thinking himself as well able to marry as he is likely to be, he takes a wife, and is usually the father of a family before he is thirty.  Before the Reformation, not only were early marriages determinately discouraged, but the opportunity for them did not exist.  A labourer living in a cottage by himself was a rare exception to the rule; and the work of the field was performed generally, as it now is in the large farms in America and Australia, by servants who lived in the families of the squire or the farmer, and who, while in that position, commonly remained single, and married only when by prudence they had saved a sufficient sum to enable them to enter some other position.