Population Distribution in Norfolk and Suffolk during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Abstract

Sources for the estimation of the distribution of English population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries usually survive for widely separated dates. Moreover, they were invariably not compiled for the direct purpose of counting people, but are taxation lists or religious surveys which record different portions of the population, and do not give the demographic detail of surviving parish registers. As such, they permit only the crudest estimation of growth rates, and are of most use in facilitating the fairly rapid plotting of distributions on a local, regional or national scale. Analysis of parish registers, when carried out to obtain broad estimates of vital trends and distributions, involves immense labour. Changing population distributions within Norfolk and Suffolk for both town and country are examined to illustrate the usefulness of the different sources, and a standardized method of approach to them is advanced, based on the use of estimates derived from inferred contemporary age structure. The two counties are shown to have experienced a relatively slow overall growth and to have had a stable population distribution throughout the two centuries. Population density seemed strongly related to agricultural activity, and the presence or absence of textile manufacturing. Towns, however, particularly the larger ones, were growing much faster than the countryside by the seventeenth century. AT the beginning of the sixteenth century the population of England had probably not yet recovered to the level of the early fourteenth century, and the economy and towns had not yet fully regained prosperity after the nadir of the fifteenth century. But records giving both direct and indirect information on population were becoming ever more plentiful and detailed. By the end of the seventeenth century, after two hundred years of change in population, as well as in the economy and in society, the country was poised on the brink of great interrelated advances in agriculture, industry, trade and population that were to transform it. Yet still, remarkably little is known in detail about population movements during these important years of the modernization of the kingdom, despite marked advances in the analysis of parish registers by aggregative and nominative techniques.1 The broad outline of successive advances and retreats in population is now reasonably firmly established.2 But it will be many years before surviving parish registers will reveal accurate and detailed information3 at a regional, rather than strictly local, scale about both population distributions and dynamics. Meanwhile, discussion of any aspect of the historical geography of this pre-industrial period will usually demand at least some information about population totals or distributions. Two English counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, are examined to illustrate the sources and methods available by which these may be achieved. Interesting in themselves as making up an area of high population and marked, if erratic, prosperity compared to much of pre-industrial England,4 they also provide a good case study in the population geography of the times, the lessons from which may be applied to other parts of the country. The flavour of this examination may seem more in the tradition of old-style 'political arithmetic' as practised by Gregory King5 and his contemporaries, than that of the new historical demography; yet such an approach is still necessary to provide both basic information and a framework for analysis, given the available sources.