Population Density and Land Values in County Durham during the Mid-Seventeenth Century

Abstract

The seventeenth century in England is increasingly being recognized as one of special interest in the evolution of both landscape and economic system. Unfortunately, analysis of data of the period is often rendered difficult because both landscape and documentary evidence is fragmentary in character, contemporary neither in date nor in area, and often not quantifiable. The fortunate survival of several series of county-wide numerical data relating to population and land values in County Durham for the mid-seventeenth century allows a general picture of the county to be formed which may be used to underpin more detailed local studies. By correlating population density with the rateable value of land it was found that three agricultural regions could be recognized, together with six places where a special relationship between the variables suggested urban status. B. H. Slicher van Bath wrote in I963 that 'data concerning farming practice from I550 to I850 are indeed available, but not in sufficient quantity to enable us to trace a clear line of development. Just as in the Middle Ages we must make do with glimpses, usually of farms in widely different areas'.1 In the area of the English border between highland and lowland, only a short distance need separate places widely different not only in farming practice but in many other aspects of the physical and cultural environment,2 and as J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay noted, 'differences in farming practices could even be very marked within a single county, according chiefly to relief and the character of the soil, the nature of farms and the availability of communications with markets'.3 Accordingly, several writers have divided the country into farming regions, with varying degrees of success,4 and certainly County Durham cannot be seen as a homogeneous area. The high Carboniferous moorlands of the west offer a different series of opportunities and constraints to human action from the Triassic-based till lowlands of the south-east of the county; similarly, the coal-bearing banks of the Tyne are not comparable with the wooded, gently rolling countryside of the vale of the Tees. We must, then, take account of these differences fundamentally important to an understanding of the glimpses of the past afforded by manuscript and landscape survivals. In I957 the doyen of scholars working on the seventeenth century noted that 'If the student of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is deficient in the statistical techniques now being applied to the nineteenth, he is almost equally deficient in the more esoteric methods by which the truth about the Middle Ages is discovered'.5 Although the period is perhaps no longer as dark as it appeared in the middle I950s, it is still almost possible to agree with B. E. Supple that 'For the historian of the early seventeenth century there can be no choice: such sophistication of analysis is beyond his reach; the quantitative data are