1 - Introduction

Summary

This book is intended as a complement to the Population history of England. The two books are offspring of the same overall research project: to make as full use as possible of Anglican parish registers to throw light on the population history of England during the period when the registers are the prime source available. When the project was instituted more than a quarter of a century ago, it seemed likely that family reconstitution, the technique used to produce the results presented in this book, would be the chief method for the whole enterprise. Family reconstitution had then recently been perfected by Louis Henry as a technique for articulating and analysing nominal data to produce demographic information, and he had shown in his pioneering study of the parish of Crulai in Normandy that, where suitable sources existed, it could sustain a very detailed and searching examination of many aspects of the population history of a community.

At that time, however, it was still not certain that English parish registers could be used for family reconstitution since the information routinely recorded in each entry was characteristically less complete than was true of the better French registers. To test the point was of crucial importance since family reconstitution is possible only if the life histories of individuals and families can be built up accurately from the records of their birth (baptism), marriage, and death (burial); and this in turn hinges on the quality and quantity of information routinely recorded in the registers.