An Introduction to English Historical Demography from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century

by E. A. Wrigley

It is a remarkable fact that most of English history--or any other history, for that matter--is usually written without attention to such key questions What is the average life span? What is the average size of family? To what extent do people move about, from place to place, from occupation to occupation? What is the average age of marriage? Is the over-all population increasing or declining? What are the proportions of young and old in this population? It is to such questions as these that the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure is devoting a series of studies, inaugurated by 'An Introduction to English Historical Demography.

283 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an adaptation of Louis Henry’s methodology onto the English early modern context. The centerpiece of the book is an outline of the “family reconstitution” method, which undoubtedly was helpful to local historians in the ‘60s, but is less interesting today because the method has already been utilized and the resulting data analyzed by Wrigley and Schofield.