July « 2024 « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Archive for July, 2024

Marriage in the Middle Ages

Thursday, July 25th, 2024

Chris Briggs

What do you know about population change in the English Middle Ages (c.1000-c.1500 AD)? Quite possibly, you have an inkling that the couple of centuries or so following the arrival of the Normans in 1066 were an era of steady growth in numbers. Almost certainly you know that that growth came to a juddering halt in the middle of the 14th century with the Black Death of 1348-9, and further outbreaks of plague and epidemic disease in the decades that followed.

Agricultural labourers, 15th century. Source: Wikimedia.

But what about the mechanisms of change: patterns of births (fertility), deaths (mortality), and migration? These are the central concerns of demographers, but they become murky matters when we try to go back before 1500. The limitations of the medieval sources make it hard to speak with confidence on some of the most important questions about demographic behaviour in this early period.

Yet substantial progress has been made over the last 60 years or so, thanks in no small part to work done within Campop. An especially significant contribution has been made by the Group’s former Director, Professor Richard Smith, and several of his former graduate students, most notably L.R. Poos and P.J.P. Goldberg.

This body of research suggests, in essence, that medieval marriage, fertility, and household and family structure was much more like that of later periods, and indeed more like that of the modern world, than was previously thought.

Early modern research

As described in a previous blog, the average age at first marriage was relatively high for both men and women in the British past, and the proportion of people who never married was also relatively high, with between 15 and 20 percent of women remaining unmarried in their 40s. This pattern – known as the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) – has been traced back into the 17th century.

Campop’s work on parish registers of baptisms, marriages and burials, which survive for the period from 1538, showed how T.R. Malthus’s ‘preventive check’ operated in early modern England. Marriage, which was not universal, was delayed until economic opportunity allowed, which (given most childbearing occurred within marriage) in turn shaped population trends.

Campop’s research also demonstrated the prevalence of small, nuclear households in the past, as opposed to complex multigenerational ones; the ubiquity of the institution of servanthood, which saw unmarried young people leave their homes to live and work with their employers and accumulate savings; and the general tendency for the establishment of a new household upon marriage.

Wedding of Louis X of France and Clemance Hongrie (1315). Source: Wikimedia.

Contemplating these findings, scholars interested in earlier periods asked: how far could similar structures be traced in the era before parish registers? Was medieval demographic behaviour fundamentally different, as had often been assumed – or could the EMP be traced back into the Middle Ages?

The questions were clear. Finding the sources with which to answer them systematically for the period before parish registers was a different matter.

Very challenging sources

Quite often, medieval records say a lot about just one or two places, and require us to try to work out how typical or otherwise they may be of an entire region or country. The inventories of male serfs (unfree tenants) and their offspring produced in the 1260s by Spalding Priory (Lincolnshire) for three of their nearby manors are a good example of this. These lists reveal the priory’s desire to track the valuable ‘human capital’ on its estate. They tell us about the whereabouts and occupations of many of the children of serfs, male and female. They also indicate their marital status, and so can be used, for instance, to estimate the proportions married.

Court Roll for the Court of Eusace Grenville in Wotten Underwood, Buckinghamshire (1431). Source: Wikipedia.

Another source that has been prominent in medieval demographic studies is the manorial court roll. This is the record of the manor court, a legal tribunal held by a landlord for his tenants and other local people. In the fullest and most complete series, such as those of Redgrave and Rickinghall (Suffolk) used by Richard Smith, the names of hundreds of peasants appear. There are dozens of data points for the best recorded individuals.

Of course, not everyone in a community appears in the court roll, and women are under-recorded. Despite this, attempts have been made to produce a complete ‘reconstitution’ of the population of a manor, along the lines of those undertaken for the early modern era using parish registers. These have then been used to calculate a variety of demographic measures. Court rolls also often include records of the ‘merchet’ fine, which serfs had to pay for permission to marry. This has obvious value for studies of marriage and fertility.

Court rolls tell us about change over time, unlike our third source, the returns to the three poll taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1380-81. These essentially function as a snapshot of conditions in post– Black Death England.

The poll tax is famous as the trigger for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. Yet for medieval demographic historians, its richly detailed records are most prized for the information they hold on taxpayers, their marital and familial relationships, and their occupations. The three poll taxes were payable by all lay people, male and female. They basically excluded only children and the truly indigent. The best returns are thus somewhat less affected by the problems of omission that bedevil most medieval sources.

Findings

All these sources have been used by demographic historians for purposes that were never originally intended. To deploy them effectively requires the researcher to combine the archival skills of the medieval historian, with the technical know-how of the demographer. Not surprisingly, therefore, work on these materials has been replete with methodological debate.

Any simplified summary of ‘findings’ comes with a health warning, since in medieval demographic history, the uncertainties and margins for error are higher than usual. Logic, inference, and comparison with better documented periods and places are as important as hard evidence.

That said, there exists a substantial body of work produced by Campop that has helped to push back the evidence for the European Marriage Pattern into the pre-1500 period.

Detail of an historiated initial ‘S’ of a man placing a ring on a woman’s finger. 14th century. British Library Royal MS 6 E VI, fol. 104. Source: Wikimedia.

For instance, work by Smith and others on the 1377 poll tax revealed that around 60 percent of females were married. Similar proportions were found in analysis of the Spalding serf registers of around a century earlier. These figures are close to the proportions of persons identified as married in studies of household listings of the 17th century.

A good deal of this medieval demographic work also focused on servants, both male and female. Their numerical presence in the 14th–century poll tax returns was again like that found in the early modern evidence. In 1377, for instance, some 20 percent of households in the county of Rutland possessed servants.

The picture that emerged from Campop’s work was more robust for the period after the watershed of the Black Death, thanks largely to the availability of the poll taxes. The period before 1348 is generally more obscure. Smith in particular expressed serious doubts about the likelihood of being ever being able to calculate crucial measures of fertility, especially marriage ages. It was argued that there were simply too many unknowns affecting the merchet fines contained in the manorial court rolls.

Nonetheless, by the end of the 1980s, a coherent case had emerged for the existence of the European Marriage Pattern and its related household structures in England before 1500, and possibly before 1300.

Lying behind all this work was the idea of a demographic regime in which marriage, reproduction and the formation of new households was shaped by economic opportunities – including work opportunities for women – in a way that differed from southern and eastern regions of Europe. It had potentially huge implications for understanding long-term patterns of economic growth.

Not everyone agreed, of course. Zvi Razi, in a ground-breaking 1980 study of court rolls, presented a different picture of medieval English demography. His ‘reconstitution’ of the population of Halesowen in the west midlands revealed a ‘high pressure’ demographic regime of high fertility and mortality, comparatively early marriage, and large and complex households. Debate ensued about how far Razi’s findings showed genuine regional differences, as opposed to flawed assumptions about the capacity of his court rolls to support demographic analysis.

The formal part of the medieval marriage ceremony often took place in a church porch like this late fifteenth-century example at Aylsham, Norfolk. Source: Wikimedia.

Recent work

The pioneering studies described above were mostly undertaken 30 and more years ago. The pace of fertility-focused research in medieval demography has slowed since the 1990s, both in Campop and elsewhere.

This is partly the result of the abovementioned scarcity and difficulties of the surviving sources, and the technical demands on the researcher. Nonetheless, some important work has come out recently, undertaken not within Campop, but inspired by its approach and findings.

This includes Judith Bennett’s study of the EMP and its origins based on a reappraisal of the Spalding Priory registers, and an investigation of the relationship between fertility and living standards by Kelly and Ó Gráda. In both cases Campop’s arguments about the early existence of the EMP and the importance of the preventive check receive support.

Despite the challenges, exciting questions and opportunities in this field remain.

And finally: what about mortality…?

Readers may be puzzled as to why a blog on medieval population history has said so little about plague, disease, and early death. The answer is partly that the aim here has been to emphasize the importance and creativity of work on marriage and fertility, even if it is so frustratingly difficult to study.

Medieval deaths are certainly much better recorded than marriages and births. And plenty of scholars would argue that it is changes on the mortality side that are key to understanding medieval population dynamics. But that, as they say, is another story – or another blog.

Further reading

Judith M. Bennett, ‘Wretched girls, wretched boys and the European Marriage Pattern in England (c.1250-1350)’, Continuity and Change, 34 (2019), 315-47.

P.J.P. Goldberg, Medieval England: a social history 1250-1550 (2004), chapter 6.

Andrew Hinde, England’s population. A history since the Domesday survey (2003), Part I.

Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, ‘The preventive check in medieval and preindustrial England’, Journal of Economic History, 72 (2012), 1015-35.

L.R. Poos, A rural society after the Black Death: Essex 1350-1525 (1991).

Richard Smith, ‘Some emerging issues in the demography of medieval England and prospects for their future investigation’, Local Population Studies, 100 (2018), 13-24.

Tags: demography, marriage, medieval, medieval history, middle ages, poll tax, social history
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Why was high family size in the British past so low?

Thursday, July 18th, 2024

Alice Reid

Today most of the world’s population lives in places where, on average, women have fewer than two children over their lifetime, but this level of childbearing is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Before the demographic transition – the change from high and variable birth and death rates to low birth and death rates (usually taken as 1870-1930 in the UK) – women had higher numbers of children, and it is generally accepted that they did not deliberately restrict the numbers of children they had.

Given that before the demographic transition in other parts of the world, women had an average of around six or seven children, it is surprising that British women have never had more than five children, on average, over the course of their lifetime.

Sir Thomas Remington of Lund in the East Riding of the County of York, Knight, Dame Hannah his wife, daughter of Sir William Gee of Bishop Burton, Knight, and their issue. 1647. Image courtesy of York Museums Trust. Public Domain.

How high is high fertility?

Theoretically a woman could fit in over 30 children during a roughly 30-year reproductive period between menarche and menopause. Although there are instances of individual women having between 20 and 30 children – for example Sir Thomas and Lady Remmington of Lund in Yorkshire, illustrated in the image above with their 20 children – this is very unusual, and there are very few societies, past or present, where the average number of children per woman exceeds eight. The highest documented fertility of any community is associated with the Hutterites, a small North American religious sect, where in the mid-20th century women had an average of 8.9 children.

There are a number of physiological and behavioural factors which can reduce the number of children born to each woman. These include miscarriage and stillbirth (which are generally not included in calculations of birth rates); the fact that some women lose the ability to conceive earlier than average through birth complications, disease, or early menopause; the fact that new mothers generally do not ovulate for some months after the birth of a child, and the longer and more intensively they breastfeed, the longer it takes for ovulation to return; and the fact that if the timing of sexual intercourse is random, couples might miss their fertile window in some months.

These factors together tend to reduce the number of children an average woman might have even if she was in a sexual relationship throughout her childbearing years, and not using any form of contraception, to around eight children.

Marriage patterns reduced fertility in historic Britain

Time spent outside sexual relationships reduces fertility still further in populations where no or few couples were trying to prevent conception, and this is the major factor reducing fertility levels in historic Britain. Before the demographic transition, when mortality was still relatively high, the death of either a woman or her husband would curtail her opportunity to have children.

More important for reducing numbers of children born in England and Wales to levels lower than many other parts of the world, however, were late ages at marriage and substantial proportions of women who never married.

Although sexual intercourse outside marriage did happen in the British past, most children were born to married couples until well into the last quarter of the 20th century (watch out for future blogs on this topic).

Photo from E. W. Hope, Report on the physical welfare of mothers and children (Liverpool, The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1917), volume 1.

Both late ages at marriage and a substantial portion of the population who never married have the ability to considerably reduce the number of children born to a woman. We saw in a previous blog that the age of first marriage in England ranged between 24 and 26 until the post-2WW marriage boom, when women married younger than ever before. Given that the chance of conceiving reduces with age, particularly beyond the age of 30 or so, relatively late age at marriage means that women spent many of the most fertile years of their life unmarried and therefore with little chance of becoming pregnant.

In addition, a relatively high percentage of women (on average 13.5 percent) remained unmarried throughout their childbearing lives. When age at marriage was higher, more women never married at all, with as many of 27 percent of women born in the mid–17th century remaining single at age 50. There were very few time periods when less than five percent of women remained unmarried, and this occurred when age at marriage was low, for example among women born in the mid– 18th century.

In contrast in most South Asian countries (e.g. India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan) until the 1980s women married before age 20 and only one or two percent remained unmarried at age 50. These differences in marriage patterns are the main reason for considerably higher average numbers of children per woman before the demographic transition in South Asia than in Britain (and other parts of North-West Europe where marriage patterns were similar).

Fertility levels and population growth

Populations grow when there are more births than deaths (not counting the influence of migration). The relationship between fertility in terms of the number of children per woman and the number of births per 1,000 people is not a simple one, as it also depends on the age structure of the population. High fertility in the recent past can produce large cohorts of women in the childbearing ages, and these can contribute to a high number of births in relation to deaths even if the number of children each woman has is low.

Nevertheless, there is a widely used measure – the ‘replacement rate’ – that indicates the number of children a woman needs to have to ‘replace herself’ and therefore keep the population from either growing or shrinking. Globally, today, this number is around 2.1; just over two because although around half of all children born are female, slightly more children born are male, and also because not all children reach adulthood.

In the past, however, this number was considerably higher, principally because mortality was higher, so more children needed to be born in order to ensure that one female born survived to childbearing age. Therefore although women had between four and five children each in Britain, this did not mean the population grew rapidly. For most of the pre-industrial period, the British population grew slowly, if at all, because fertility and mortality were more or less in balance.

Unknown artist, Five Children of the Pigott Family (1740). Courtesy York Museums Trust.

Moderate fertility as part of a low-pressure regime

In other pre-demographic transition populations with low population growth, higher fertility levels were accompanied by higher mortality levels. When Tony Wrigley and Roger Schofield at Campop produced the long-run series of fertility and mortality for England, they suggested that this was part of a ‘low–pressure’ demographic regime. Such a regime was characterised by moderate levels of both fertility and mortality, with low fertility achieved through marriage as described above. In contrast, ‘high–pressure’ regimes were characterised by higher levels of both fertility and mortality.

How do we know?

Fertility, or birth rates, can be measured in a number of different ways. The simplest measure is the crude birth rate, the number of births in the population in a year, per 1000 people. This is easy to calculate, particularly since the state started to register births (1837 in England and Wales and 1855 in Scotland).

However, this blog has talked mainly about a different measure, the total fertility rate, which is defined as the number of children each woman could expect to have over the course of her childbearing life. We can measure this for actual cohorts of women (women born in particular years) by waiting until they reach the age of around 50, when further childbearing is unlikely, and counting the numbers of their children.

However, this means it is necessary to wait until a cohort has reached the age of 50, as it is not possible to derive this information from birth certificates. Instead most total fertility rates are ‘period’ rates, calculated by calculating fertility rates for age groups of women (numbers of children born to women in a particular age group and dividing by the number of women) and assuming that women go through their childbearing life experiencing those rates in sequence.

Period total fertility rates can be calculated for England and Wales since 1938, when the age of the mother started to be recorded on birth certificates. Between 1851 and 1938 they have to be estimated. Here we have estimated them from census data by working out the age at childbirth of women living with their children and making various adjustments for children who died or were not living with their mother (this technique is called the ‘own children method’).

For the pre-industrial period, total fertility can be estimated from parish registers which recorded baptisms, marriages and burials. Linking the births to different women, and to her own baptism, allows age–specific fertility rates to be constructed, and the numbers of births to women across their lives can be counted.

Photograph taken 1900 © Reproduced by permission of Oxfordshire County Council

Further reading

Bongaarts, J. (1975) Why High Birth Rates Are So Low. Population and Development Review, 1(2): 289-296.

Wrigley, E.A. and R.S. Schofield (1989) The Population History of England 1541-1871. CUP.

Tags: Demographic transition, demography, Family history, family size, fertility, marriage
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How modern is the modern family?

Thursday, July 11th, 2024

Kevin Schürer & Simon Szreter

Today the small nuclear family dominates across much of the world. Following World War II this prevailing family form was associated with modernity – the product of a post-industrial society. But just how modern is the modern nuclear family?

George Cruikshank, Taking the Census (1851), plate 3 from The Comic Almanack for 1851, published by David Bogue, London. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.

Whilst the scene of George Cruikshank’s cartoon “Taking the Census” (1851) is exaggerated for comic effect, the underlying message is still clear. Taking the census in mid-19th-century England was wrought with difficulties, not only because of the potential size of the families being enumerated, but also their complexity.

The family depicted here is not only multigenerational, but also extended by the presence of co-residing aunts, uncles and cousins. The family is far removed from ‘modern’ nuclear families consisting of just parents and unmarried children which have dominated most of Europe and North America since the mid-20th century.

The nuclear family was once believed to be a product of the post-industrial age, and this is an assumption still held by many people. However, one of the earliest and most significant revolutionary findings of Campop was the discovery that the nuclear family household existed as the predominant pattern throughout English society for many centuries in the past long before the modern, post-industrial era.

Why was this so significant? Put simply, because it completely over-turned a central assumption of ‘modernisation theory’.

Modernisation theory

During the immediate post-war decades of the Cold War era, modernisation theory provided a crucial conceptual underpinning which justified the US-led west in believing it had a self-appointed mission to bring liberal democracy and its capitalist version of development to the world’s new postcolonial nations.

Modernisation theory envisaged a tight relationship between family forms and economic change. American sociologist Talcott Parsons saw the family as the crucial mechanism forming and transmitting cultural values from one generation to the next. According to Parsons, small nuclear families were the quintessential ‘modern’ form which inculcated the liberal, capitalist, democratic and economically dynamic values of individualism, independence, aspiration and social mobility.

These ‘modern’ families resided in households containing just the one or two adults, their own pre-adult children, and no other kin. The contrast was with extended family households in the ‘traditional’ (non-modern) past, and apparently still visible in the mid-20th century in various forms around the ‘undeveloped’ world. These were typically vertically or horizontally extended in kinship terms: three-or even four-generational households; with wider lateral kin (brothers and sisters and their partners and children) co-resident together or in adjacent housing.

These households were thought to transmit the anti-individualist values of respect for the authority of elders and for tradition, collective solidarity, mutual support and social stasis.

Parsons saw his theory as ‘structural functionalist’, combining Emile Durkheim’s insistence that societies were like organisms composed of interacting parts, with Max Weber’s idea that there could nevertheless be a source of structural change in this self-sustaining system. For Weber, the prime mover of this change was the rise of Protestantism, from which individualist values emerged, and consequently the legitimacy and spread of the capitalist system.

A demographic transition from the traditional to the modern family?

Parsonian modernisation theory quickly came to be understood by influential policymakers in the Cold War era as a justification for the anti-communist development economics project of the post-war liberal west. It demonstrated that all the postcolonial ‘undeveloped’ peasant societies around the world needed to be transformed from their traditional extended family households into modernized nuclear family households.

Leading US demographers Frank Notestein, Kingsley Davis and A.J. Coale all came fully on board with this project through their adaptation of the theory of demographic transition, a general historical and policy-relevant model of demographic change in line with modernisation theory.

L. S. Lowry, Family Group, 1958. Image credit: Colleges in the University of Cambridge. CC BY-NC-ND.

Due to the relative absence of much serious scholarly attention in the Anglophone world to investigating what actually were the family household forms found in the pre-industrial past, it was not difficult for this representation of the ‘traditional’ west – as being essentially similar to the contemporary ‘traditional’ east and south – to be accepted as fact.

The nuclear family household in the English past

However, these ideas were about to change. Prior to the foundation of Campop in 1964, Peter Laslett, one of the Group’s co-founders, was already an acknowledged authority on the history of 17th-century political philosophy and political thought. His interest in patriarchal systems led him to consult the late-17th-century Rector’s Book for the Nottinghamshire village of Clayworth. The book contains two census-type listings of the 400 or so inhabitants of the village, for 1676 and 1688, compiled by the parish priest. The impact of these two short listings on Laslett’s thinking and subsequent writing was phenomenal. It was a genuine eureka moment.

The Rector’s Book Clayworth, Notts., 1672-1701.

As he scanned the pages Laslett was puzzled that he could see no evidence for the sorts of large multigenerational patriarchal families that he expected to be present in 17th-century England. In his own words, it was an ‘intellectual shock’ that he could see no sign whatever of the extended co-resident domestic group.

Rather than being large and extended, the households of Clayworth were small, simple and predominantly nuclear. Could this be right? Could the so-called ‘modern’ nuclear family have been present in such large numbers in pre-industrial England? With these questions in mind, Laslett immediately felt the need to search out similar sources in order to discover if the picture sketched by the Clayworth documents were representative or atypical.

Illustration from the 1563 Whole Book of Psalms published by John Day. Source: Wikimedia

Laslett therefore devised a project to collect as much evidence as possible – no small feat given that in the 1960s such materials tended to be available only from county record offices.

Aided by a new recruit to Campop, Richard Wall, Laslett established that the English evidence showed a consistent pattern of nuclear household formation, both spatially and temporally. In Laslett’s words: ‘the present state of evidence forces us to assume that its [the family’s] organisation was always and invariably nuclear unless the contrary can be proven’.

This null hypothesis was to become one of the most commented-on features of the book Household and Family in Past Time, and one which was often subsequently misinterpreted and taken to mean that the nuclear family was the only form of residential unit across all societies, something which was never intended.

A. Devis, Family Group, 1756. Image credit: The Courtauld. CC BY-NC-ND.

Despite this, or maybe even in part because of it, Household and Family in Past Time became a landmark publication for the study of historical social structures. It became, in a sense, a manifesto.

Due to the pioneering work on household structures led by Laslett and Wall, the previously held notion that the nuclear family was the product of forces shaped only in the post-industrial age has been consigned, as it were, to history.

Further reading

P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost (Routledge Classics edition, London and New York, 2021) – especially chapter 4.

W. Coster, Family and Kinship in England, 1450-1800 (Longman, Harlow, 2001).

M. Abbott, Family Ties: English families 1540-1920 (Routledge, London and New York, 1993).

K. Schürer, E. M. Garrett, H. Jaadla, and A. Reid, ‘Household and family structure in England and Wales (1851–1911): continuities and change’, in Continuity and Change vol. 33 no. 3 (2018), pp. 365-411. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0268416018000243

S. Szreter, ‘The idea of demographic transition and the study of fertility change: A critical intellectual history’, in Population and Development Review, vol. 19, no. 4 (Dec. 1993), pp. 659-701.

Tags: extended family, families, households, modern family, modernisation theory, nuclear family
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What age did people marry in the British past?

Thursday, July 11th, 2024

Alice Reid

Famous examples suggest that people married at very young ages in the European past. Shakespeare’s Juliet was ‘not [yet] fourteen’ and Romeo probably not much older. Lady Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Henry VII, was either 12 or 14 when she married Edmund Tudor, and gave birth to Henry not much more than a year later. The marriage age for British nobles increased over time, but members of the royal family were still marrying fairly young in the 19th century. Both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were 20 when they married in 1840, and Victoria’s eldest son, the future King Edward VII, and his bride Princess Alexandra of Denmark, were 21 and 18 respectively when they married in 1863. Such examples encourage people to think that young ages at marriage must have been the norm.

Sleeping Beauty tile panel, designed by Edward Burne-Jones for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Earthenware. England, 1860s. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In fact, the majority of women and men married considerably older than this in the past. The graph below shows the average age at marriage over the long sweep of English and Welsh history. Apart from a few decades in the early 1800s, the only time since 1550 that the average age of first marriage for women fell below age 24 was during the baby boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Why didn’t people marry younger?

Relatively late marriage in Britain and across a swath of North-West Europe is linked to something called the ‘European Marriage Pattern’. The key characteristic of this is that young couples usually set up a new household on marriage.

Establishing a new household involved the considerable expense of purchasing the cooking pots, blankets and tools they would need to equip their new home, and consequently both men and women would spend their late teens and early twenties earning money and saving some of it in preparation for marriage. Sometimes they would continue to live with their parents while doing this, but it was quite common to take a position as a domestic or farm servant which involved lodging with their employer.

Albert de Belleroche, “The Servant“; Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries.

This process of working and saving pushed marriage ages into the mid-twenties for both men and women. It also had the effect of making marriage responsive to the economy, as when wages were low it took longer to save for marriage, but when wages were high people were able to marry a bit earlier. In this way the long fluctuations in marriage age until about 1750 have been attributed to extended economic cycles.

The period referred to as the industrial revolution was characterised by a large increase in factory labour, and the comparatively high wages of factory work, together with the security it offered, meant that people could afford to marry at younger ages.

After not much more than 100 years of relatively low marriage ages, the fertility and marriage phase of the demographic transition started in Britain. The demographic transition is a concept used to describe the change from relatively high to relatively low birth rates (fertility) and death rates (mortality).

Fertility in Britain declined consistently between about 1870 and 1930, and increasing ages of marriage contributed to this by delaying the effective start of a woman’s childbearing career and reducing the number of children she had time to fit in.

The Baby Boom and beyond

The big spike in births which began during, and continued after, the second world war across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand is generally referred to as ‘the baby boom’. A large part of the baby boom was driven by an increase in the percentage of people marrying and having at least one or two children, and it was accompanied by a fall in the age at which people married, to levels which for Britain were unprecedently low.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The causes of the baby boom and this drop in marriage age are not well understood, but they have been attributed to a catching-up of births delayed due to the depression and war, a period of economic prosperity, and the coming of the sexual revolution which, in the absence of reliable contraception, meant that more young couples were rushed into marriage by an unplanned pregnancy.

Since the 1970s, ages at first marriage have increased rapidly, attributed to an increase in education which delays the start of partnership formation, a rise in cohabitation before or instead of marriage, and the declining cultural relevance of the institution of marriage. The average age of first cohabiting partnership, however, has risen much more slowly than the average age at marriage.

Why is it so tempting to think people think married younger than they did?

The balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, Courtesy British Library, 11764.s.1

Given that people married late in the British past – so late that it’s only in the last few decades that the average age at first marriage has exceeded the historic norm – why is it so common to think that people married young in the British past?

One possible reason relates to the examples from literature, drama, and Europe’s real noble families mentioned at the start of this blog. The marriage patterns of the elite were far from typical of society in general, but there are very few literary examples or details of ordinary weddings to inform the popular imagination.

Another reason is the use of misleading starting points for comparisons over time. Demographic time series often start no further back than the mid-20th century, and even when longer term time series are available, many historic comparisons take a relatively short time span.

It is very common, here in the UK, to start historic time series in the 1960s or 1970s when age at marriage was unusually young (see, for example, this blog from the Office for National Statistics). This creates an impression of a constant increase, even before the time series began.

Reading history sideways

These factors contribute to a tendency to ‘read history sideways’, a phrase coined by the sociologist and demographer Arland Thornton.

This practice involves looking at contemporary societies across the world and assuming they are all at different stages on the same developmental trajectory, from ‘less-developed’ places with early marriage, to ‘more-developed’ places with late marriage. This leads to an assumption that marriage in the European past must have been as young as in parts of Africa and Asia in the mid-late 20th century.

Thornton argued that not only does this practice lead to a misconception of the history of demographic change, but contributes to a ‘developmental idealism’ which encourages ethnocentric ideas that the ‘western’ family is some sort of ideal. In this case, age at marriage for the majority of the population in the British past does not map onto that seen in late-20th or early-21st-century ‘less developed’ countries, so a better knowledge of history can be an important corrective to reading history sideways.

Note on sources: How do we know?

Working backwards from the present, today every marriage – whether it takes place in a registry office, church, or other venue in the UK – is recorded in the civil register of marriages. The age of both parties is recorded, as is their civil status – i.e. whether they are single, widowed or divorced.

A young couple are being married in church. Stipple engraving by R.M. Meadows, 1806, after R. Westall. Source: Wellcome Collection 28863i.

This system began in 1837 in England and Wales, and the data in the graph above are generated from calculations done at the time using the average (mean) ages of all the marriages of unmarried men and women in opposite sex marriages. We don’t include same-sex marriages here because these are so recent, and the ages of participants may be influenced by ‘catch-up’ marriages by people who would have married earlier if it had been legal.

Between 1538 and 1837, the data on marriages are derived from the parish registers kept by the Church of England. For most of the period the majority of the population were C of E, so these registers are considered quite representative of the general population.

However, parish registers are not easy to use – to be useful they must be consistently recorded, and the surviving series must cover a long time period with no or few gaps. Transcribing them can be challenging and time-consuming (today much transcription has been done and is available on platforms such as Ancestry, FindMyPast, and FreeReg).

Crucially, however, parish registers rarely recorded ages at marriage, so to find out ages of marriage, the researcher needs to link the bride and groom in a marriage register to their entries in a baptism register. This linking, part of a process called family reconstitution, is complicated and time-consuming, and careful attention has to be paid to the influence of out-migration on the averages. Therefore only a relatively small number of parishes contribute to this data, but careful comparisons suggest that they are a good representation of England as a whole.

Baptismal register for St Stephen’s Church, Norwich, 1796-1797.

None of the reconstitution parishes were located in Wales, so the early data only cover England. On the other hand, the older civil register data are only available for England and Wales combined. This is unlikely to make much difference to overall averages, however, as the population of Wales has always been very small compared to that of England.

Similarly the parish register set used here don’t include any Scottish parishes. However we do know that in the second half of the 19th century, Scottish men were about a year older at marriage than English and Welsh men, and Scottish women were about half a year older than the English and Welsh (see PopulationsPast.org).

Data on cohabitation come from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey, a sample survey which ask interviews the same people every few years and asks about dates of entry into cohabitation and marriage.

Thomas Falcon Marshall, “The Young Squire’s Wedding” (1845). Lytham Art Collection of Fylde Borough Council.

Further reading

Chao S., Blom N., Berrington A., Perelli-Harris B., (2020) How partnerships have changed in the UK over the last 30 years. Centre for Population Change Policy Briefing 50.

Hajnal, J. (1982) Two kinds of preindustrial household formation system, Population and Development Review 8(3): 449-494 [An early formulation of the European Marriage Pattern]

Thornton, A. (2001) The developmental paradigm, reading history sideways, and family change, Demography 38(4): 449–465.

Van Bavel, J. and D. Reher (2013) The baby boom and its causes: what we know and what we need to know. Population and Development Review 39: 257-288.

Tags: Age at marriage, Baby boom, Demographic transition, European marriage pattern, marriage, Marriage age
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What was the size of the English population before the first census in 1801 – and how do we know?

Thursday, July 11th, 2024

Jim Oeppen

Campop’s estimated series of population totals for England from 1541 to 1871 are the longest and most detailed available for any country. The associated age-structures have been used to provide summary measures of fertility and mortality, such as replacement rates and life expectancy. The opportunity they present for extending per capita analysis into the past means that they have become a standard reference for historical demography and economic history, and have been cited in over 1,500 academic publications.

Why do we need to calculate population size?

Expressing data “per capita” is an essential part of how we understand social and economic statistics today, but this kind of calculation relies on knowing the population total. Before 1860, the term “per capita” was extremely rare. (Try typing “per capita” or “per person” into Google Books Ngram Viewer.)

This is not surprising when you consider that there was no census of England and Wales before 1801, and age-breakdowns only began in 1821. Part of the rationale for taking the first census was that politicians couldn’t decide whether the population was increasing or decreasing. It is surprising that they didn’t know, as we now know that the population was increasing very rapidly!

So how do we calculate historical population size without a census?

In the absence of census data before 1801, Campop’s population estimates are derived from annual counts of baptisms and burials. After adjustment, these can be used as proxies for births and deaths. Official registration of births, deaths, and marriages began in 1837, but the established Church in England had been registering baptisms, marriages, and burials since 1538.

Ascension parish burial ground Cambridge. Source: Wikimedia.

Campop encouraged their army of volunteers to find local parish registers and count the events in each month. The initial aim was not to estimate the population, but to find registers without gaps that might be suitable for Family Reconstitution (a technique for the detailed analysis of family demography).

However, once the counts started coming in, it became apparent that they were an important resource in their own right. It was decided that they could be used as a sample that could be inflated to represent national estimates of births, marriages and deaths.

A total of 404 parishes were identified that satisfied a suite of criteria for accuracy and completeness. These represent a four percent sample of the 10,000 ancient English parishes. They provide 3.7 million baptisms, marriages, and burials in monthly totals.

Problems and adjustments

These 404 parishes were not a random sample. The biggest issues were that large parishes were over-represented; there were no London parishes; and the series started and stopped at different dates. For example, between 1662 and 1811 all 404 parishes were in observation, but in earlier and later years the number declined.

Going from baptisms and burials to “national” totals of births and deaths involved a long series of adjustments. These included inflating the births to allow for deaths before baptism; and adding under-counted non-Conformist births and events for London. Finally, the sample was re-weighted so that the large parishes lost their dominance in the counts.

Validating the estimation method

Sweden has records of deaths by age, censuses, and life tables from 1751. It also has high levels of net-outmigration in the 19th century. We can pretend we don’t know about the censuses, and only use the totals of births and deaths with the 1901 census as targets. The estimation method was able to satisfactorily match the observed censuses from 1751 onwards, and the net-migration rates.

The estimated values for English life expectancy derived from totals of births and deaths are remarkably consistent with those derived from subsequent research on individual life histories in Campop’s English Family Reconstitution studies.

Figure 1 (below) shows Campop’s estimates of the population of England from 1536 to 1796, together with the decadal Census counts for England from 1801. The period from 1541 to 1651 exhibits rapid exponential growth, followed by a period of stagnation, before exponential growth returns in the 19th century, but with a slower rate after 1901. The population doubling time was about a century in the first growth period, but became even more rapid in the 19th century, shortening to 50 years.