The Problem of Pauper Marriage in Seventeenth-Century England (The Alexander Prize)

Abstract

Over the last thirty years the work of historical demographers, spearheaded by Sir Tony Wrigley, Roger Schofield and others at the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, has demonstrated the centrality of marriage to explanations of early modern English demographic change: ‘a history of English population in this period in which nuptiality did not figure prominently would resemble the proverbial production of Hamlet without the prince of Denmark.’ Although their ‘neo-Malthusian’ or ‘neo-classical’ model of population levels kept in ‘dilatory homeostasis’ by negative feedback relationships between living standards, age at first marriage and the proportion of the population never marrying has not been immune from criticism, it is now generally accepted that changes in fertility rather than in mortality account for population stagnation in mid-seventeenth-century England, and for its renewed and rapid growth from the 1730s. Moreover, having flirted with, and subsequently discarded, changes in marital fertility as a proximate cause of fluctuations in the birth rate, Wrigley and Schofield are now convinced that nuptiality was decisive. For Wrigley, ‘the crucial importance of the tension between production and reproduction which affected all pre-industrial societies’ explains why marriage had a ‘significance…far wider than the purely demographic.’ ‘Marriage,’ he argues, ‘was the hinge on which the [early modern English] demographic system turned.’