Comparatively little peculiar to the county is known of the early inhabitants of Hertfordshire.  They seem from the earliest times to have been scattered over the county in many small groups, rather than to have concentrated at a few centres.  Singularly enough, this almost uniform dispersion of population is still largely maintained, for, unlike so many other counties, Hertfordshire has not within its borders a single large town.  The larger among them, i.e., Watford, St. Albans, Hitchin, Hertford and Bishop’s Stortford, are not collectively equal in population to even such towns as Bolton, Halifax or Croydon.  Another feature to be noted is that, owing to the county’s proximity to London, it is now the home of persons of many nations and tongues, and only in the smaller villages between the railroads are there left any traits of local character or peculiarities of idiom.  It is hardly necessary to say that this conglomeration of peoples is common to all the home counties, though mostly so, as I venture to think, in Hertfordshire and Surrey.  The Essex peasant is still strongly differentiated from his neighbours.

Grose, writing towards the end of the eighteenth century, stated that the population of Hertfordshire was 95,000.  They must have been well dispersed, for he tells us that the county contained at that period 949 villages; by the word “village,” however, he seems to mean any separate community, including small hamlets.  Some interesting figures are to be found in Tymms’s Compendium of the History of the Home Circuit.  He states that in 1821 the county contained 129,714 inhabitants, comprising 26,170 families and living in 23,687 houses.  Of these families no fewer than 13,485 were engaged in agriculture.  From the same source I quote the following figures relating to the year 1821:—­

Houses.    Inhabitants. 
Hemel Hempstead         1,012       5,193
Watford                   940       4,713
Hitchin                   915       4,486
St. Albans                735       4,472
Cheshunt                  847       4,376
Hertford                  656       4,265

In 1881 the population of the county was 203,069; in 1891 it had increased by about one-eleventh to 220,162; in 1921 it was 333,236.

In the days of William I. the whole of the possessions and estates of Hertfordshire belonged to the King and forty-four persons who shared his favour, amongst whom may be mentioned the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishops of London, Winchester, Chester, Bayeux and Liseux, and the Abbots of Westminster, Ely, St. Albans, Charteris and Ramsey.

To go as far back as the Heptarchy, we find the land mostly owned by Mercians, East Saxons and by the Kings of Kent, and thus there gradually sprang up that “Middle English” population which for so long formed a large proportion of the inhabitants of Hertfordshire, Middlesex and Essex.  How thoroughly such persons separated into small communities and settled down in every part of the county may be ascertained by the many “buries” found at a little distance from the town or village—­Redbourn-bury, Ardeley-bury, Bayford-bury, Langley-bury, Harpenden-bury, etc.