Apologies if this has been asked before - part of my trouble researching this on my own is I'm not sure exactly how to search for it? Beyond the Domesday Book, which is much earlier than I'm curious about but still helpful, not sure where to look.
Basically, I'm interested in a zoomed-out view of the distances and relationships between cities towns and villages in the 1500s, especially in England. I've got a lot of questions - like how far villages tended to be from each other, how much land in the country was simply unoccupied, population sizes and how they were divided between settlements and to what extent they moved... basically I'm really curious about learning more about this sort of thing, but the only books I have/can find are more specific (eg, village life in detail, but also treated more close up/in a vacuum).
Does anyone have sources or info on this sort of thing? Honestly, just a general search term for looking it up would be helpful at this point.
RenlyWHW:
There are a lot of questions here, but here are a few notes that might help.
First, England's population distribution from 1550-1700 was somewhat unusual for Europe, given that London vastly outstripped every other city in size (it became what demographers call a 'primate city,' a city that vastly larger than the next city in a region/country). Spain, the Netherlands, and France, by contrast, had several large urban areas that were more balanced rather than a single sprawling metropolis and a bunch of small merchant towns, as in England.
If you are interested in population spread across counties, you might look at [this project being conducted at Cambridge] (https://www.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/occupations/englandwales1379-1911/), where they are figuring out population density at the ancient county level and, even smaller, at the parish level for a variety of dates including 1670. That will give you a sense of population density per square mile at a fairly granular level in different parts of the country.
One final note: not a lot of land in England by the seventeenth century was truly unoccupied (remember, the whole modern UK is only the size of Oregon; England alone is slightly more than half that). A combination of the expansion of sheep farming in the sixteenth century and the sale and destruction of the great royal forests in the seventeenth century meant that the areas that had been untouched were slowly eroded by farming and forestry.
Hope this is helpful!