The Distribution of Personal Wealth in English Towns: A Reply

Abstract

IT IS, as ever, gratifying to learn that one's published work has excited the interest of someone somewhere. We can only feel flattered, though somewhat surprised, that Homan and Rowley consider our paper sufficiently important to merit a comment. However, since, in that comment, they display a rare talent for misrepresentation, misinterpretation, and error, we welcome the opportunity to reply. We must begin by offering Homan and Rowley our congratulations on their observation that the paper is based on one (and only one) national tax assessment. It was not our intention to mislead our readership about either the source or the relatively limited nature of the conclusions which could be drawn from it. In fact, the paper was never presented as anything other than a single-source study. If it was not explicitly stated that this would limit both the range and depth of our findings, then it was only because we expected our readers to have sufficient acumen to realize it. Clearly, we over estimated some of them in this respect. It does not say a great deal for our critics' powers of perception that they appear to regard the single-source character of the paper as a major discovery. As Homan and Rowley may be aware, cross-sectional studies, heavily dependent on single sources of information, are by no means uncommon in historical geography and, at one time, could have been considered to dominate the work of British historical geographers. We have no wish to make a spirited defence of this genre, nor is this an appropriate place for sustained methodological discussion. However, Homan and Rowley may like to note some of the reasons for the popularity (or erstwhile popularity) of the cross-sectional approach which, we believe, are as follows. The sources on which the historical geographer depends were infrequently collected (and less frequently survive) in continuous series, and are often unique. This is true, for example, of the Domesday Book: it is also true of the tax return used in our paper. The information available to the historical geographer is often such that it is, at worst, impossible, or, at best, extremely inconvenient to offer anything other than a cross-sectional study, substantially based on one source. For a number of years, the natural tendency of historical geography to yield studies of this type was sustained by the belief that, whilst the historian was concerned with the understanding of process and the nature of change through time, the historical geographer was directly concerned with the description of pattern at particular points in time, and only indirectly with process.1 It does not require recourse to the works of Berry and Harvey to appreciate that one outcome of a methodological shift in geography from description to analysis has been that this distinction can no longer be considered valid.