Urban archaeology, long familiar in Germany and Scandinavia, has come relatively late to Britain, but is rapidly making up for lost time. Evidence is being discovered or re-interpreted for all periods from Roman to Georgian, and the discoveries are especially exciting for the crucial, and usually undocumented, periods when towns were first founded. Publication is not, however, keeping pace with discovery. A few excavations are quickly encapsulated in definitive reports, and others are made available in annual interim reports (e.g. Winchester and York in the Antiquaries Journal, and Oxford in Oxoniensia). For many others, however, scholars have to rely at best on the brief annual surveys in Britannia, Medieval Archaeology and Post-Medieval Archaeology. The Editor believes, as I do, that the importance of recent work justifies a regular review which will attempt to summarize the most significant discoveries for the benefit of urban historians. This first review covers excavations especially of the early 1970s, with a few of slightly earlier date, especially those at Winchester. The terminal date is the time of writing (July 1974), but not all reports drawn on can be equally up-to-date, and there will inevitably be some chronological overlap with the next report.

In the last few years, a new word has gained popularity among historians: ‘pre-industrial’. Specialists in the social and economic history of Europe before 1800 have become increasingly aware that the object of their studies is simply one case among others of what sociologists call ‘traditional society’, and that it is easier to understand traditional or pre-industrial Europe if it is compared and contrasted with other societies of this type. Thus Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane have illuminated English witchcraft by making comparisons with witchcraft in African tribal societies, while Frédéric Mauro and Witold Kula, among others, have compared the economies of early modern Europe with those of the developing countries today. Even Richard Cobb, no great friend to the social sciences, has recorded that he came to understand eighteenth-century Paris better after visiting contemporary Calcutta. In fact, the city is an obvious and splendidly tangible unit of comparison, and it is not surprising that the term ‘pre-industrial city’ is passing into general use.

In the statistical jungle of the twentieth century, the collection of vast amounts of demographic data is an activity as relentless as breathing. We seldom question our impulse to count ourselves, and to ensure that our births, marriages, deaths, and innumerable other events are duly and permanently recorded. For reasons of both practicality and curiosity, historians and demographers have long attempted to possess the same sorts of data for as much of the past as possible, and have devised ever more ingenious ways of obtaining them. Most recently, such efforts have involved systematic analysis of very large numbers of quantitative records, and have borne fruit in studies of family characteristics, population trends, migration, mobility, and the like. As a result, it is now reasonable to discuss age-specific fertility in seventeenth-century Colyton as well as in twentieth-century London. With understandable pride, the practitioners of the new historical demography have described their accomplishment as one of pushing back the boundary which divides our modern, numerical age from a “pre-statistical past”.