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Chinese genealogies are different

Thursday, September 5th, 2024

Ying Dai

People’s keen interest in exploring their family trees, as evidenced by the popularity of websites like Ancestry.com, is not just a modern Western phenomenon but also has deep historical roots in China. Unlike Western genealogies that track lineage through both paternal and maternal lines starting from the individual upwards (see “What a big family you have, Grandma!), Chinese genealogies typically begin with a common ancestor and document all descendants downwards. This key difference reflects the distinct roles of genealogies in each culture. In the West, genealogical research is often driven by personal curiosity, whereas in China, it has significant socioeconomic functions, deeply intertwined with the transformation of the country.

Illustration of western and Chinese genealogies. Drawn by author.

From imperial roots to modern revival

Chinese genealogical records, originally reserved for royal and noble families, gained broader societal importance during the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1636–1912) dynasties. During this era, lineages were crucial for collaboration in business and the organisation of villages. The lineages owned collective properties, established business networks, and supported education and poor relief. The practice of documenting lineage membership based on common descent was crucial here, leading to widespread compilation and updates of genealogies across wider society.

A Chinese family sit around a small cooking stove eating by the side of the road. Coloured lithograph after W. Alexander. Wellcome Collection.

In the first seven decades of the 20th century, these genealogies were criticized as part of a patriarchal ‘old culture’ that was believed to have resulted in China’s ‘backwardness’. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, with the dominance of class and collectivism in social organisation, the lineage lost many of its traditional socio-economic roles. As a result, the practice of compiling and maintaining genealogies significantly diminished.

In the 1980s, China saw a revival in the practice of compiling genealogies. The reintroduction of market institutions reemphasized the importance of blood and marital ties, both within the country and between domestic and overseas Chinese. Economic progress enabled more families to afford the compilation, maintenance, or updating of their genealogical records. This revival reflects a renewed appreciation for China’s traditional values.

Both photos depict contemporary genealogies. The photo on the left features genealogies bound in traditional covers, whereas the one on the right displays genealogies in modern book formats. Photographed by the author at Zhejiang Library.

Tradition partially transformed

The revival of genealogy compilation is not a return to tradition. Two main trends characterize this new generation of Chinese genealogies:

Occupational information is documented more comprehensively. Traditionally, only notable individuals had their occupations recorded, but now, some of the new genealogies captured the occupational information of ordinary workers like peasants, petty businessmen, and factory workers. The comprehensive recording of occupations in the new genealogies sometimes serves merely to keep a fuller record of lineage members. However, it often reflects a deliberate intent to change traditional practices that highlighted only distinguished individuals. A notable example is the genealogy of the Yang Lineage in Jiangsu, in which “lineage members are all equally included with their biographies so as to change the old norm of making biographies for the [distinct] minority”.
Women’s information is recorded much more comprehensively. Traditional genealogies typically traced only male descendants, answering the question ‘Who is my father’s father’s father’s … father?’ However, a small proportion of the new genealogies now track female descendants and their offspring for one to three generations, allowing some individuals to know ‘Who is my mother’s … mother?’ Furthermore, female lineage members were now given individual entries, instead of being listed under their fathers’ or husbands’ names, and the contents of women’s entries also begun to align with those of men’s.

Registration form of the Qian Lineage for genealogy compilation. Provided by Xiaoqin Qian.

The new trends reflect modern values of occupational and gender equality. However, the transformation of traditional genealogies is only partial. For instance, only about two per cent of the new genealogies I reviewed have comprehensive occupational records. It is also notable that the documentation of women’s information remains less comprehensive compared to men, and female descendants’ offspring are tracked for fewer generations.

Understanding social transformation through genealogies

Despite the partial nature of the transformation, comparisons of the occupational and educational data from the genealogies and censuses for the Yangtze Valley, where more than 40 percent of the national population resided, suggest that genealogies could broadly represent the wider population. The new generation of genealogies allows us to understand the social structural transformations of China in the 20th century, which witnessed devastating wars, radical political revolutions, and, recently, very rapid economic development that lifted hundreds of millions from dire poverty.

The Yangtze Valley and the distribution of individuals with occupational records from genealogies the author collected. Drawn by author.

In 1982, 74 percent of China’s labour force was employed in agriculture. By 2020, this figure had dropped to 21 percent, with the majority shifting to manufacturing and services. This is the fastest economic and social structural transformation ever identified in world history.

Genealogical data from the Yangtze Valley highlights several key aspects of this shift.

Occupational change over a lifetime: For those born before the 1940s, agriculture was the destination of most people who changed their occupations. But for those born after the 1940s, it became more common for peasants to move into non-agricultural occupations.
Dual occupations: A large number of peasants participated in non-agricultural production, playing significant roles in industries such as construction and the production of building materials and woodwork.
Household labour division: Alongside the more traditional arrangement where the husband works outside the home while the wife manages agricultural production, it has become increasingly common for both partners to leave their home to work in non-agricultural sectors while the elderly remain behind to farm and look after the children.
Intergenerational occupational mobility: The linked genealogical data of the Qian lineage from Lower Yangtze suggest that out of the 448 male peasants born in the 1940s, only 32 (seven percent) of their 499 male descendants continued to work in agriculture, while 467 (93 percent) shifted to non-agricultural sectors.

The illustration shows occupational mobility between generations, occupational changes over the life time (separated by ‘->’), dual occupations (separated by ‘&’), and gender difference. Drawn by the author based on the genealogy of the Li Lineage in Yunnan province.

Chinese genealogies also contain individual biographies detailing the working experiences of a broad social spectrum. The quantitative and qualitative evidence in these genealogies can finally allow us to understand the working lives of 20th-century China from the perspectives of both macro structures and micro experiences.

Further reading

Y. Dai, ‘Lineage genealogies as a new source for researching the occupational structure of twentieth-century China: Tradition (partially) transformed’, Historical Methods, XXX.

Tags: Chinese genealogies, Chinese history, Family history, Family tree, Genealogies, Lineages
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Why were Hansel and Gretel not English?

Thursday, August 29th, 2024

Romola Davenport

Berhardina Midderigh-Bokhorst and Smith’s Fine Arts Publishing N.V. – The Hague. Hansel and Gretel (1937). Image credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum.

In the story of Hansel and Gretel, a famine drives a father to abandon his children in the woods, where they discover a house made of gingerbread and a cannibal witch. In the Magic Porridge Pot tale, a young girl forced by poverty to search for food in the woods and hedgerows is given a magic pot that produces abundant staple food on command.

These types of stories about hunger and famine abound in the folklore of most European societies, and embody folk memories of food scarcity. However, as the historian John Walter noted, these tropes are curiously absent from English fairy tales. Why?

Otto Ubbelohde. Residents eat their way back to the town through a mound of porridge. Illustration to the fairy tale “Sweet Porridge” (1909).

Walter speculated that this reflected the exceptionally early disappearance of famine from England, centuries before the risk of famine had subsided in the rest of Europe. Famine remained a threat in most of Europe until the mid-18th century, and persisted in some areas into the 19th century and even the 20th century, especially in association with war. In England, on the other hand, the last national famine occurred in the 1590s, and the last regional famine in the 1620s.

Famine and dearth

Famine is generally defined both in historical accounts and by historians as a ‘killing event’, that is, an episode of substantial excess mortality caused directly or indirectly by a lack of food. Dearth, on the other hand, refers simply to a scarcity or costliness of food, a much more common occurrence in historical populations.

Historians have argued that while a poor harvest often caused dearth, it required at least two consecutive harvest failures to produce a famine, a relatively rare misfortune.

Jean de Wavrin, Figures lying in the road, by the fields, due to famine. S. Netherlands (1470-1480). British Library, Shelf mark Royal 15 E. IV.

English famines

Famine was clearly a major concern in medieval England. The “Great Famine” of 1315-22 accompanied three successive years of crop failures (1315-17) and a subsequent cattle plague (1319-21), and is estimated by historians to have resulted in the deaths of around 10 per cent of the English population (and similar proportions elsewhere across France, northern and eastern Europe).

Harvest failures and famine accompanied the Black Death in England in 1349-51. Further famines have also been identified in 1437-38, 1557, and 1597.

The famine of 1597 was caused by a run of extremely wet growing seasons that caused widespread crop failures across western and central Europe. In England the famine was most intense in upland and remote areas, and killed around one per cent of the English population.

Two Englands?

After the 1590s, famine seems to have receded from southern and eastern England. Severe harvest failures and famine struck many communities in the northern and upland parts of England again in the early 1620s. But at the national level the mortality impact was relatively slight.

Famine finally retreated from the north and uplands of England after the 1620s. In the 1690s, a series of exceptionally wet and cold growing seasons affected most of western Europe and killed perhaps 10 per cent of the populations of France and Scotland. Remarkably, despite suffering similarly dire weather conditions, the English population experienced no excess mortality. As Walter put it, England had decisively slipped the shadow of famine by the mid-17th century.

The escape from famine

Why did famine peter out so precociously in England compared with other European societies that were often subjected to similar weather conditions and even similar levels of harvest failure?

The answer probably depends on what caused famines, something historians continue to debate.

Jan Steen, “The Lean Kitchen” (c.1650-1655). Image credit: Bridgeman Images.

It is now widely recognised that modern famines often reflect a failure to redistribute existing food supplies, rather than an absolute lack of food availability.

However, it remains unclear whether historical famines were generally caused by natural and manmade disasters (harvest failures or warfare), or whether they could have been averted in many cases by political interventions to obtain and distribute food where it was needed.

In the English case there is evidence for the contribution of both redistribution and increased food production in averting famine. Key factors were the agricultural revolution and the introduction of the Poor Laws.

The agricultural revolution

Improvements in agricultural production since the 17^th century are very likely to have contributed to the decline of famine. These improvements resulted from innovations in farming practices and animal breeding, as well as reclamation of heath, moorland and especially marshes.

They also reflected the progressive commercialization of English farming and the incentives provided by the development of a national market for grain and meat.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Harvesters” (1565).

This economic integration of the country encouraged regional specialization and trade. Upland areas increasingly specialised in pastoral agriculture and imported grain from areas of intensive arable farming. This specialization increased average yields in both types of area, and stimulated trade.

However, this specialization may also explain at least partly the later disappearance of famine from the north and west of England, where the soils and topography favoured meat and wool production. In times of harvest failure, demand for grains went up, and most people could no longer afford meat. In pastoral areas which depended on imported grain, this meant that the price of grain rose just as demand for their own exports fell, dealing a double blow to their purchasing power.

Pellizza da Volpedo, Weary limbs (1906).

The poor laws

In tandem with developments in agriculture and trade, England developed a system of poor laws that required local communities (parishes) to raise taxes to support their poor.

Parish officials distributed food or cash to enable the poor to buy food. This provided a safety net for many of the most vulnerable, and helped to reduce famine-induced migration that spread epidemic diseases. The implementation of the poor laws seems to have been more rudimentary in northern compared with southern England in the early 17th century, and this may have contributed to the later persistence of famine there.

Why did the English peasants not starve?

It is likely that all these factors played important roles in securing the English population from famine. Even Thomas Malthus, usually an implacable opponent of the English poor laws, was driven to commend the operation of the English poor laws in averting famine. Returning from a tour of northern Sweden in 1799, where harvest failure had forced families to resort to grinding birch bark to make bread, Malthus noted that the price of grain had doubled there. However, in England, where similar weather conditions had caused widespread crop losses, the price of grain had tripled, but there was no starvation.

Illustration of starvation in northern Sweden, Famine of 1867–1868.

Malthus explained this apparent paradox in terms made famous by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, that the poor laws, by providing the poor with cash to buy bread, ensured that even the poorest retained purchasing power. This drove up the price of bread for everyone but also ensured that food was widely distributed and that no-one starved.

As Malthus put it, without the operation of the poor laws the consequences of the harvest shortfall ‘would have fallen exclusively on… the poorest inhabitants, a very considerable number of whom must in consequence have starved. The operation of the parish allowances, by raising the price of provisions so high, caused the distress to be divided among five or six million, instead of two or three’. In Sweden on the other hand the poor had no money to buy grain, and so their starvation had little effect on food prices.

Crucially, the English poor laws did not extend to Ireland, where the British administration oversaw one of the last great famines in western Europe in the 1840s.

Further reading

John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, disease and the social order in early modern society (Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Guido Alfani and Cormac Ó Gráda (eds), Famine in European history (Cambridge University Press 2017).

References

Healey, J. (2014) The first century of welfare: Poverty and poor relief in Lancashire, 1620–1730 (Boydell & Brewer) .

Hoyle, R. (2017) ‘Britain’, in Alfani, G. and Ó Gráda, C. (eds), Famine in European history (Cambridge University Press).

Smith, R.M. (2017) ‘Contrasting susceptibility to famine in the early fourteenth- and late sixteenth-century: the significance of the late medieval social structural and village governmental changes, in Braddick, M. and Withington, P. (eds.) Popular culture and political agency in early modern England and Ireland. Essays in honour of John Walter (Boydell & Brewer).

Walter, J. (1989) ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’ in Walter, J. and Schofield, R. (eds), Famine, disease and the social order in early modern society (Cambridge University Press), pp. 75-128.

Wrigley, E.A. (1999), ‘Corn and crisis: Malthus on the high price of provisions’, Population and Development Review, 25, pp.121-128. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.1999.00121.x

Wrigley, E.A. & Schofield, R.S. (1989) The population history of England 1541-1871, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press).

Tags: agricultural revolution, dearth, English peasants, famine, hunger, poor laws
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Stuck in the mud!

Thursday, August 22nd, 2024

Kevin Schürer

“Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country…” Thus starts Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village, published in 1824, a bestseller in its day. It continues to describe this idyllic village as a place “with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive… where we know every one, [and] are known to every one”.

The message is loud and clear. Prior to the coming of the railways and mass transportation, rural villages were slow-moving, tight-knit communities – places where people rarely came or went, and where the likelihood was that the majority of the population would live and die in the parish where they had been born and baptised. To all intents and purposes, they were stuck in the mud.

Frederick William Jackson, ‘Sunday Morning‘. Image credit: Rochdale Arts & Heritage Service.

Migration from rural areas to urban areas

It is well known that England and Wales urbanised relatively rapidly over the course of the 19th century, partly as a result of developments in both industrialisation and transportation. Those living in towns and cities increased from around a third of the population in 1801, to just over half in 1851, and reaching just over three-quarters of the population by the end of the century.

This switch from a predominantly rural society to a predominantly urban one could not have happened without migration from country to town. The second half of the 19th century, in particular, witnessed widespread rural depopulation, as people moved into towns in search of work and a better life.

Richard Redgrave, The Emigrant’s Last Sight of Home (1858). Photo credit: Tate. CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

Take the small rural parish of Elmdon in the remote north-west corner of Essex. At the 2021 census it recorded a population of 612, of which just over half were aged 50 or over. Like many small rural parishes, its heyday was the mid-19th century: it recorded a population of 743 in 1851.

However, if we dig a little deeper into the population dynamics of this Essex village, we can see that the overlying trend of rural depopulation masks a more complex pattern of rural migration.

Migration into rural villages

The total population of Elmdon remained fairly constant between 1851 and 1861, but Jean Robin, a former Campop researcher, demonstrated that only half (52%) of the individuals living in Elmdon in 1851 were still present a decade later, in 1861. Some 12 percent had died between the two census years, and about 36 percent had moved away.

So rural migration was not a one–way flow away from rural villages, since in 1861 a fifth of the Elmdon population had moved into the village from elsewhere over the course of the previous decade. Maybe the inhabitants of mid-19th century rural Elmdon were not so stuck in the mud after all!

Pre-industrial migration

But what of earlier periods? What was the situation in pre-industrial rural societies? The pioneering research of one of Campop’s founding fathers – Peter Laslett – has been mentioned in an earlier blog on household structure and the nuclear family.

Peter’s work on the 17th-century household listings for the villages of Clayworth (Nottinghamshire) and Cogenhoe (Northamptonshire) included an analysis of migration and population turnover. For the first of these villages, the total number of residents was little changed between 1676 and 1688 – 401 in the first of these years and 412 in the second. Yet over the 12-year period between the taking of the two listings, some 38 percent of the initial population had moved away, while 40 percent had moved in.

Remarkably similar rates of migration into and out of the village are recorded for the smaller parish of Cogenhoe between 1618 and 1628, with 38 percent of the initial population of 185 moving out, and 36 percent of the later population of 180 moving in since 1618. Movement in and out of rural parishes in the pre-industrial period was therefore not only common, but it was potentially higher than that experienced in the mid-19th century.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘A Family Seen from Behind: A Man with a Bundle and a Woman Carrying an Infant; a Small Girl between them’ (1796). Picture credit: Tate. Image released under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Indeed, work by Larry Poos, a former Campop research student, using an early 14th century set of tithing listings for four Essex parishes, has demonstrated that in the case of the male population aged 12 and over, similar turnover rates to those of the 17th century were experienced. Thus, as far back as it is possible to determine, English rural society has exhibited evidence of being highly mobile.

Reasons for migration

A large proportion of this mobile rural population would have been young people searching for work.

In her pioneering study of servants in husbandry – essentially live-in farm servants – Ann Kussmaul has shown that in the early modern period, servants were usually hired on an annual basis, invariably serving no more than a year at a time on any one farm, and moving from farm to farm within the local area known to them. These servants, both males and females, would have been young and unmarried. One example is Joseph Mayett of Quainton, Buckinghamshire, who worked as a servant on 12 separate farms between the ages of 12 and 19, before joining the local militia in 1802.

Movement within a parish

Population movement was not only widespread between rural parishes, usually within a relatively constrained local area, but also within villages and parishes.

Using a fairly unique set of documents for the Berkshire parish of Binfield between 1790 and 1801, Maggie Escott, a former researcher at Campop, calculated that just under half of the households resident in 1790 remained in the same property in 1801. Of the rest, some 18 percent of households were dissolved due to death, 15 percent moved away from Binfield, whilst 16 percent of the households moved within the parish of Binfield, several moving more than once, and one household moving five times.

Such internal migration was a common feature of urban areas as well, if not more so. A rare survey of the London parish of St George-in-the-East undertaken in 1847 showed that only a fifth of single men had remained in the same dwelling for three years or more, compared to a third of single women and 40 percent of families. A quarter of all families in the parish in 1847 had resided in the same dwelling for only a year or less.

The autobiography of the social reformer Francis Place indicates that between 1785, when he was apprenticed to Joseph France, a maker of leather-breeches in Temple Bar, London, and 1800, when he established his own tailoring business in Charing Cross, he moved ten times – including at least one move in the dead of night to avoid rent collectors.

Coming unstuck?

So rather than being stuck in the mud, residential mobility and migration was the norm for large sections of the population in the past. Rather than migration resulting from the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation, England was already a mobile society in the pre-industrial period.

Indeed, one might argue that a mobile labour force was one of the factors that helped industrialisation.

Hugh Munro, ‘The Stranger’ (c.1931). Image credit: Glasgow Museums.

However, before concluding this investigation into migration, let us return to the Essex village of Elmdon. Whilst movement into and out of the parish was a common feature, it is worth remembering that around half those living there in 1851 could still be found resident in 1861.

Indeed, in her detailed study of the village and its inhabitants, Jean Robin found that a small group of core ‘insider’ families, the Hoys and the Hayes, had been present in the village between the mid-17th and mid-20th centuries, while the Gamgees and the Greenhills had roots in the parish from the 18th century to the 1920s. A clear minority of the whole, but these families are perhaps the best examples of Mary Russell Mitford’s “bees in a hive … known to every one” – the true ‘sticks in the mud’.

Further reading

Escott, M. M., ‘Residential mobility in a late eighteenth-century parish: Binfield, Berkshire 1779-1801’, Local Population Studies 40 (1988), 20-36.

Kussmaul, A., Servants in husbandry in early modern England (Cambridge, University Press, 1981).

Laslett, P. and Harrison, J., ‘Clayworth and Cogenhoe’, in Bell, H.E. and Ollard, R.L. (eds), Historical Essays, 1600-1750 Presented to David Ogg (London, 1963) 157-84.

Poos, L.R., ‘Population Turnover in Medieval Essex: The Evidence of some Early-Fourteenth-Century Tithing Lists’, in Bonfield, L., Smith, R. M. and Wrightson, K. (eds.), The World We Have Gained: histories of population and social structure (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986) 1-22.

Robin, J., Elmdon: continuity and change in a north-west Essex village, 1961-1864 (Cambridge, University Press, 1980).

Thale, M., (ed) The autobiography of Francis Place, 1771-1854 (Cambridge, University Press, 1972).

Whitelaw, J., ‘A statistical return of the district of Christchurch in the parish of St George-in-the-East’, Royal Statistical Society (1847).

Tags: industrial revolution, migration, rural life, urbanisation
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Three score and ten?

Thursday, August 15th, 2024

Romola Davenport & Jim Oeppen

Campop’s studies of mortality suggest that, in England, average life expectancy at birth varied between 35 and 40 years in the centuries between 1600 and 1800. It is a common misconception that, when life expectancy was so low, there must have been very few old people. In fact, the most common age for adult deaths was around 70 years, in line with the Biblical three score years and ten. So what does ‘life expectancy’ actually measure?

George Paul Chalmers, “An Old Woman”, National Galleries of Scotland.

What is life expectancy?

To understand life expectancy, we can imagine a group of 1,000 babies born at the same time. We can measure how long each one lives. Figure 1 shows the lifespans for these infants as horizontal bars that indicate the length of life, arranged from top to bottom in order of lifespan. Their lifespans follow the pattern of mortality in England in 1841.

Figure 1. Lengths of life and percent remaining alive of 1,000 babies born into a hypothetical population in England and Wales in 1841. Source: Human Mortality Database.

As you can see, in 1841 a lot of children died in the first five years of life. Of 1,000 babies, 138 (nearly 14 percent) died before reaching their first birthday. By age five, over a quarter of the original 1,000 babies were dead.

However, after the first five years, the rate of attrition eased. Children who made it to their fifth birthday had a 50:50 chance of making it to their 60th birthday. Of the original 1,000 babies, 38 percent survived to age 60, and nearly 10 percent to age 80.

So why was life expectancy only 42 in 1841? Because life expectancy is the average of all the different lengths of lives in the population. When mortality is high in infancy and childhood, then many of these lives are very short, and these many short lives really bring down the average age at death.

Richard Tennant Cooper, “A Ghostly Skeleton Trying to Strangle a Sick Child; Representing Diphtheria”. Image: Wellcome Collection.

Calculating life expectancy

To calculate life expectancy, we take all the ages at which people died, add them up, and then divide by the number of people. For example, if we had a ‘population’ of two people, one of whom died on their first birthday and the other who died on their 100th birthday, their average life expectancy would be their ages at death added together and divided by two (101/2 = an average life expectancy of 50.5 years). But neither individual died in their 50s, or anywhere near their 50s. The average is not a good indicator of mortality risk in this case, because the length of life is so variable in this population.

On the other hand, if we have a population of two people, one of whom died on their 80th birthday and the other on their 100th, then average life expectancy would be 90 years, a much more representative estimate of average years lived. The latter case is much more like most populations in the world today. As life expectancy has risen, the benefits have been felt first at younger ages, and death has become increasingly concentrated in late adulthood.

Changing life expectancy over time

In the early 1600s (the first period for which we can calculate life expectancy in the English population) there was a huge peak of deaths in infancy, but then deaths were strung out across the whole life course between birth and 110 years of age. That is, the length of life was very unpredictable in the 1600s, and the risk of death was fairly high at all ages.

David des Granges, “The Saltonstall Family”, c.1636–7. The painting has been interpreted as depicting Sir Richard Saltonshall and his two wives and children. His first wife Elizabeth Basse, in the bed, died in 1630 leaving two young children, and Richard married Mary Parker in 1633. Image credit: Tate.

By 1800, this pattern had begun to shift. Mortality had become more concentrated at the oldest and youngest ages. In personal terms, this meant that fewer young children experienced the loss of their parents, fewer young adults were widowed, and fewer elderly parents experienced the untimely deaths of their adult children.

By the 1960s, deaths in childhood and early adulthood were relatively rare, and most people could expect to live into their 60s, 70s or 80s. Life expectancy was around 72, and this is a much better reflection of the ages to which most people could expect to live.

Today, when the death distribution is compressed and dominated by the adult peak, average life expectancy at birth is a much more representative statistic than in the past when the average fell between two peaks (infancy and old age). Nevertheless, most people die above the average age, and the most common age at death is almost 90.

It’s a bit more complicated…

So life expectancy is a kind of summary measure of mortality patterns in a population. It allows us to compare mortality trends over time, and between populations. But it is not a measure of the lifespan of a population, or even of the most common age at death.

Calculating life expectancy in real populations is also not quite as straightforward as we have suggested. Take the life expectancy of the English population in the 1960s. This doesn’t actually apply to the cohort of people born in 1960, because to calculate life expectancy for a real cohort we would have to wait until they were all dead in order to know how long they had lived!

So to calculate life expectancy for the people born in 1960, we would take all the deaths that occurred in that year and use these to measure the risk of dying at each age in 1960. We then apply these risks to an imaginary population that was born in 1960 and work out the average age at which they would have died if they had faced these risks at each age. This captures the particular mortality patterns of the year 1960, and is given the technical term ‘period life expectancy’. This is what people usually mean when they refer to life expectancy.

Demographers are, however, also interested in the life expectancy of cohorts of real people. For example, we can follow cohorts with unusual experiences, such as men born in the last years of the 19th century who were of recruitment age in World War I, and compare how they fared compared with other cohorts born before and after them.

William Blake, ‘Songs of Innocence and of Experience’.

Great expectations

The modern rise in life expectancy has provided enormous social and economic benefits. Not only do we live longer, but there has been a massive reduction in uncertainty with respect to both our own lifetimes and the lifetimes of our family and friends.

Further reading

Davenport, R.J. (2021) ‘Patterns of death, 1800 – 2020: Global rates and causes’ in P.N. Stearns (ed.) The Routledge History of Death Since 1800. Routledge.

Wrigley, E.A., R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen and R.S. Schofield (1997) English Population History from Family Reconstitution. Cambridge University Press.

Tags: demography, economic history, life expectancy, mortality, old age, social history
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Women have always worked – for pay

Thursday, August 8th, 2024

Amy Erickson

It is commonly assumed that women entered the workforce in significant numbers only after the World Wars of the 20th century. While women may have been occupied with household duties in previous centuries, the assumption goes, they were much less likely than men to engage in paid labour. This blog explains why a) that’s wrong, and b) the issue is much more complicated than simply a progressive increase in women earning their own salary.

The Woman Shopkeeper, British School. Photo credit: People’s Palace and Winter Gardens, Glasgow, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND.

In 2018 the female labour force participation rate reached a record high of 74 percent. Reliable figures began in 1851, with the first census in which it is possible to discern anything like a labour force participation rate. In 1851, 43 percent of women were reported to be in ‘regular employment’. ‘Regular’ was not defined, so that figure should be taken as a minimum of those engaged in paid employment, with no indication of hours worked.

Mid-19th century concepts of full-time employment were very different from our own: agricultural work was from dawn (or earlier in the case of milking) to dusk, so varied seasonally; textile factory or mining or blast furnace shifts were 12 hours; shops were open in all daylight hours, six days a week. Today’s full time eight-hour day and 40-hour week would have been considered part-time for the last 500 years.

If 43 percent of adult women were in regular employment in the mid-19th century, then women constituted nearly one third of the total labour force (not counting unpaid domestic work). Single women and widows were much more often employed than married women, only 10 percent of whom were in regular employment.

However, while the great majority of women married, and most of those who married had children whose upbringing was certainly their mother’s responsibility, nonetheless more than half of all adult women (usually counted as 15+) were not married at any given point in time.

The industrial revolution

The effect of the industrial revolution on women’s employment has been hotly debated for the last century. The current consensus is that the effects varied by type of manufacturing.

The largest manufacturing sector, by number of people employed and by exports, was textiles. The mechanisation of spinning from the late 18th century had a catastrophic effect on women’s employment levels nationwide: yarn that was previously produced by hand by women all over the country was now produced in factories highly concentrated in particular towns, and much of the labour was men’s.

J. Hinton, The Art of Stocking-Frame-Work Knitting, engraved for the Universal Magazine, 1750. Science Museum Group, © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum.

The mechanisation of weaving in the early 19th century partially compensated for the earlier technological unemployment caused by the mechanisation of spinning, since factory weaving was largely female. But factory weaving, like factory spinning, was not evenly spread but geographically concentrated: cottons in Lancashire; woollens in West Yorkshire and the West Country; silks in Essex and Cheshire.

The census evidence, available for the period 1851-1911, shows that female labour force participation rates were demand-led – that is, wherever paid employment was available in the period 1851-1911, women took it. So regional differences were marked. That situation probably applied earlier too.

The best place to measure employment rates prior to 1851 is London, using court records which asked witnesses how they supported themselves. Around 1700, these records show a minimum of 65 percent of married women in employment, six and a half times the 1851 rate. Nearly all single and widowed women were in employment.

Married women in employment still bore all of the domestic responsibilities, but they were likely to pay other women to do the required cooking, cleaning, washing, and childcare – either as live-in servants or on a casual daily basis as charwomen. This left the wealthier women who had received skilled training from their parents or an apprenticeship free to operate their trade. Both their activities and the servants’ employment increased the female labour force participation rate.

For married women, the drawback of earning was that technically their husbands owned all of their property, although there were ways around that draconian rule.

Sketch book of Paul Sandby (1745-1809), photo credit: Trustees of the British Museum.

Entrepreneurs

Given sufficient capital, running one’s own business was infinitely preferable for women, whose wages stuck at the biblical ratio of one half to two thirds of men’s wages for over 500 years (Leviticus 27:2-4). Both piecework and entrepreneurship were therefore preferable to wages. The censuses of 1851-1911 suggest that historically women were more likely than men to be entrepreneurs – whether they chose self-employment through necessity or to take advantage of opportunities.

Before the 19th century, most work was domestic in the sense that it took place in or around someone’s home. Of course, all of the labour that we now refer to as unpaid domestic work was still necessary, but to a large extent women were paid to undertake it.

Unknown artist; Esther Hammerton (1711-1746).
Hester succeeded her father as sexton at All Saints’ Church in Kingston, which required her to dig graves and ring the bells. By the end of the 18th century, every parish within London’s city walls and several without the walls had employed a women sexton at one time or another.

Labour force participation rates

In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, around one third of all households employed servants. By 1851, only 12 percent of households employed servants, which necessitated much more unpaid labour in the home. The mid-19th to the mid-20th century marked a historic low point in what we now call labour force participation rates, and of course saw the campaigns for women’s education, reforms to married women’s property law, and access to the professions of medicine and law.

It is these campaigns that are often referenced as ‘opening up’ employment for women, but the story is considerably more complicated and by no means a simple progression from bad to better. Investigating women’s employment in the pre-census era puts into perspective the ‘record’ labour force participation rate of 2018: it looks now more like a return to an earlier status quo, rather than an achievement of equality of opportunity.

Women gutting and salting herring for export in Wick, c.1900, photo credit: Johnston Collection, Wick.

Further reading

Open access

Xuesheng You, ‘The missing half: female labour force participation in Victorian England and Wales’, in The Online Historical Atlas of Occupational Structure and Population Geography in England and Wales 1600-2011, ed. L. Shaw-Taylor, A. Cockerill and M. Satchell (2017).

Economies Past lets you explore female and male employment by local area 1851-1911.

On Populations Past you can disaggregate women by marital status and relate their employment to households, to infant and child mortality, and to children’s employment by local area 1851-1911.

The British Business Census of Entrepreneurs maps women and men in business 1851-1911.

Paywall

Amy Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’, Continuity & Change 23 (2008), 267-307.

Wanda Henry, ‘Hester Hammerton and women sextons in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England’, Gender & History 31:2 (2019), 404-21.

Carry van Lieshout, Harry Smith, Piero Montebruno & Robert J. Bennett, ‘Female entrepreneurship: business, marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911’, Social History 44:4 (2019), 440-68.

Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse experiences: The geography of adult female employment in England and the 1851 census’, in Women’s Work in Industrial England: Regional and Local Perspectives, ed. Nigel Goose (2007).

Jane Whittle, ‘A critique of approaches to “domestic work”: Women, work and the pre-industrial economy’, Past & Present 243 (2019), 35-70.

Xuesheng You, ‘Women’s labour force participation in nineteenth-century England and Wales: evidence from the 1881 census enumerators’ books’, Economic History Review 73:1 (2020): 106-33.

Tags: domestic labour, economic history, gender pay gap, industrial revolution, social history, women's employment, women's history, women's wages, women's work
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What a big family you have, Grandma!

Thursday, August 1st, 2024

Alice Reid & Jim Oeppen

Looking backwards in time gives a mistaken impression that family sizes in the past were larger than they actually were. This blog explains why this happens, and explores the differences between the picture of the past painted by genealogies and the past as it actually was.

Looking backwards at our families

Alice’s grandmother, Margaret, had six children, of whom five survived to adulthood. She had 14 grandchildren and (so far) 25 great-grandchildren. She also had two sisters, Kathleen and Moira. Moira had two children, four grandchildren and six great grandchildren. Kathleen remained single and childless throughout her life. On average, the three sisters (Margaret, Kathleen and Moira) had 2.7 children apiece.

Kathleen, Moira and Margaret with their mother Agnes (also known as Nan) in 1929. Family photograph, courtesy of Colin Reid.

Of the seven offspring in the next generation who survived to adulthood, five of them came from a family of six, and two from a family of two. If you were to gather them all in a room and ask how many children their mothers had (imagine they were not related and therefore did not worry about whether or not siblings should all answer the question), the answer would be 4.9 children. The view from the children’s point of view is very different, because there are more of Margaret’s children to remember their big family. The fact that Kathleen had no children means that her family size (of zero) cannot be represented in a calculation of mothers’ family size as reported by children.

In the next generation the difference is larger still, with the grandchildren’s point of view suggesting that their grandmothers’ generation had 5.2 children on average, nearly double the real number of 2.7.

Looking back at previous generations of our own families can therefore give an inflated view of how large family sizes were in the past, and can produce distorted impressions of families and family formation.

Alice’s grandmother Margaret (centre), with her surviving children and her husband. Family photograph, courtesy of Colin Reid.

Family history and genealogy

Demography takes a “descendant” viewpoint. The average family size is calculated from the mother’s viewpoint – the 2.7 children in the example above, not the ascendant 5.2. By contrast almost all genealogies are ascendant: i.e. a survivor works backwards, recording the generations in their main line of ascent. (Descendant genealogies select a person in the past and follow their kin forward in time – a future blog will discuss Chinese genealogies, which are usually descendant.) The extent to which a genealogist follows collateral kin in each generation, such as aunts and uncles etc., is variable – depending on the available records and enthusiasm.

King Henry IV of England, in armour and wearing crown, wielding his sword so as to cut Richard II from the Plantagenet family tree (England, 1460 – c. 1470). British Library Harley 7353.

Campop’s work on reconstructing the demography of English families allows us to calculate the ascendant bias in family size from 1550 to 1850 (i.e. the extent to which ascendant genealogies overstate family sizes). The simple formula that links the averages for the ascendant and descendant views has been known for over a century.

To simplify the picture, we start by removing the effect of celibacy (women remaining unmarried) and mortality. Assume that every woman married, and both she and her husband survived to at least her 50th birthday. The descendant average number of children over the period varied between about four and six children, but the ascendant view adds 1.5 to two extra children. This is like comparing the average number of children from Margaret and Moira (four) with the average from their children’s point of view (5.2).

Including women such as Kathleen in the example above, who did not marry or have children increases this bias still further. Celibacy in the past among females surviving to age 50 is thought to have been about 10-15 percent. Adding these women with no descendants to the calculation raises the ascendant bias to about 2.5 children. Similar biases have been found for Basque villages 1800-1969, Brazil 1960-2000, France 1830-1896, the USA 1867-1955, and a variety of late 20th century, high fertility populations.

Genealogy showing the descendants of Adam and Eve (London, 1611). British Library C.35.l.13.(2).

So, women with descendants, who are more likely to appear in genealogies, are not typical of women in general. Their experience should not be used to characterise the experience of the overall population.

Nevertheless, these women with descendants did exist, and it is also worth considering how they managed to fit larger than average numbers of children into their child-bearing histories.

The maximum reproductive span for a woman is 35 years (between the ages of 15 and 50). But women in the British past were aged about 25 when they married for the first time (see blog on marriage), and the typical age at last birth in a non-contracepting population of women surviving to age 50 is 41 years, reducing the average fertile period to 26 years.

Tony Wrigley and colleagues at Campop calculated that average inter-birth intervals were 2.5 years: typical of a population with long breast-feeding. Thus, women in an ascendant genealogy would need an extra 6.25 years of reproduction. They must have married young, lived to 50, or had short birth-intervals (or multiple births), or all three.

Children born to Andrew and Janet Gray, great great grandparents of Agnes (Nan) in the photograph above. Janet’s young age at marriage, survival beyond age 50, and very short birth-intervals enabled her to have 16 singleton births. Image courtesy of Colin Reid.

How do we know?

This knowledge uses ‘family reconstitution’: the reconstruction of families by linking the baptisms, marriages, and burials recorded in parish registers. This process starts with a marriage and locates the baptisms of bride and groom to establish their birth dates and age at marriage. The births of their children are identified, enabling the age of the mother at birth to be calculated. Finally, the deaths of husband and wife are located in the records, yielding age at death.

The same process is undertaken for the marriages of each of the children of the original couple, making inter-generational comparisons possible. Campop created a number of family reconstitutions for a variety of communities across England. These have to be treated very carefully to yield accurate demographic measures, but they are our best source of information about the population of England between the mid-16th and mid-19th centuries.

The bias in ascendant genealogies can be calculated by comparing the average number of children per woman using all women in the population (the descending point of view), with the sibship sizes of those women who had children. In other words, by performing a similar comparison to the example in the first section of this blog.

Further reading

E. A. Wrigley, R.S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen, and R.S. Schofield, English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Tags: demography, Family history, family size, Family tree, fertility, Genealogies
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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.

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
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

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The escape from famine

The agricultural revolution

The poor laws

Why did the English peasants not starve?

Migration from rural areas to urban areas

Migration into rural villages

Pre-industrial migration

Reasons for migration

Movement within a parish

Coming unstuck?

What is life expectancy?

Calculating life expectancy

Changing life expectancy over time

It’s a bit more complicated…

Looking backwards at our families

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Early modern research

Very challenging sources

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Moderate fertility as part of a low-pressure regime

How do we know?

Modernisation theory

A demographic transition from the traditional to the modern family?

The nuclear family household in the English past

Why didn’t people marry younger?

The Baby Boom and beyond

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

Reading history sideways

Note on sources: How do we know?

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