Counting People in Early Modern England: Registers, Registrars, and Political Arithmetic

Abstract

Abstract Although there was no complete census in England until 1801, there had been counts of people for various purposes in towns and villages since the sixteenth century, and by the end of the seventeenth century political arithmeticians were trying to calculate the total population and its demographic characteristics from a range of documents, old and new. There had even been projects to collect new data from parish registers which in some respects anticipated the civil registers of vital events finally established in 1837. The aim of this paper is to look again at the invention in the sixteenth century of the sources later used for demographic investigation, especially parish registers and bills of mortality; to demonstrate that their value for such purposes was appreciated by contemporaries earlier than has often been assumed; and to show why, when their utility declined in the eighteenth century, it proved impossible to reform them. Pressure from political arithmeticians and a growing sector of the medical profession to redesign the established machinery of registration had no effect because it had become a monopoly in the hands of an ecclesiastical establishment determined to defend it. In the 1530s England acquired a precocious system of national registration, potentially adaptable to multiple uses, but it scarcely changed at all for three hundred years because there was no agreement on how to adapt or replace it.