Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 230

Colyton is without doubt the spiritual home of English historical demography, and symbolizes both the frustrations and the achievements of this branch of the discipline, both of which are reflected in the latest interpretation of demographic developments in the parish offered by Pam Sharpe. The frustrations are inherent in the sources and basic methodologies of historical demography; the achievements in the ability of demographers to come to terms with, and often transcend, these frustrations. This is exactly what Sharpe has managed to do in this stimulating, if at times somewhat speculative, study.

The problem with Anglican parish registers upon which historical demography depends is that you cannot always trust them. The secret is to choose parish registers of particularly high quality, preferably for a parish large enough to minimize the impact of short-distance migration, and then to identify any remaining shortcomings history review and allow for them. When he chose Colyton to pioneer for England the technique of family reconstitution, Tony Wrigley was confident that its registers were comprehensive: it now appears that the early registers cover only the wealthier section of the population, and there is a significant shortfall in marriages registered in the century after 1650, persuasively explained here as the product of the nonconformist tendencies of both labouring and ‘middling’ groups in the parish. A second cause of frustration is that reconstitution, despite its time-consuming nature, remains a blunt analytical tool without context, offering only limited insight in the absence of knowledge of the broader economic, social and cultural identity of the community to which it relates, and the specificity by social class of the various measures to which it gives rise. It is in these latter respects that Sharpe makes her major contribution, providing a ‘total reconstitution’ of the parish of Colyton that draws upon some 80 sets of additional sources to supplement the extant reconstitution of the parish’s Anglican registers. The key novelty is the identification through these sources of four broad social groups – gentry, crafts, labourers and the poor – and the subsequent elucidation of the demographic experiences of each through nominative linkage to the reconstitution data.

Despite the chronological range advertized by the title of this book, there is little here on the sixteenth or nineteenth centuries, and a very heavy focus indeed upon the second half of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when interesting things were happening in the parish. It was this period that witnessed a substantial rise in the age at marriage of women, particularly among the poorer social groups who also exhibited low rates of remarriage, features which are explained in terms of a skewed sex ratio which is itself the product of sex-specific in-migration to take up opportunities in the expanding lace-making industry, a similar hypothesis to that offered to explain relatively late female ages at marriage in the mid-nineteenth century in those parts of Hertfordshire where the straw plait industry flourished. In this period too birth intervals grew, and Sharpe finds evidence of ‘stopping’ behaviour which is consistent with family limitation, particularly for those groups below the level of the gentry, explained in terms of deteriorating economic circumstances and the discipline of dissent. Economic polarization, allied to a rise in infectious disease, also helps to explain rising child and (subsequently) infant mortality after 1650, as well as the onset of disparity between social groups, but the overall conclusion to this central section of the book is that economic factors must be considered alongside the cultural context of population change.

The key demographic analysis is confined to just 47 pages, with much of the rest of the volume providing economic, social and cultural context. A wide range of fascinating material is included on matters such as pauper apprenticeship, education, the incidence of poverty and its alleviation, the structure of local government, the changing nature of the local agrarian regime and farming practice, land reclamation, the rise of dissent and involvement of Colyton residents in Monmouth’s rebellion, and much more. In these sometimes rather discursive discussions, Sharpe reaches out to the wider economy of east Devon, even including a section on the fishing industry despite the fact that it was of very little importance to Colyton itself. The section on the rise of dissent, which unfortunately she had to ‘piece together . . . from a disparate set of sources’ (p.30), is central to her subsequent demographic explanations. Her reinterpretation of the development of Colyton’s economy, however, is of even more crucial importance, for not only does it underpin the explanation of the skewed sex ratio which emerged in the seventeenth century, but it also fundamentally contradicts the chronology and composition of economic development previously offered by David Levine. What a pity it is that the sources are lacking to provide a clear picture of the changing occupational structure of the parish over time.

The final substantive chapter of the book, ‘Viable Households’, returns to examine demographic matters in more detail, tracing the inhabitants of Colyton through from birth to old age, emphasizing the correspondence between domestic industry, poverty, singlehood and illegitimacy, and offering particularly valuable insights into the limited extent to which the ‘nuclear family’ model encapsulated the long-term experiences of the parish poor. In many ways the most stimulating of all the discussions, it is merely one more fascinating chapter, bold in interpretation, rich in detail, and as firmly rooted in evidence as the documentation allows. That documentation is frequently disappointing, as Sharpe is well aware; the social categories adopted are rather amorphous, difficult to define and variable in their representation over time; even a ‘total reconstitution’ can achieve no more than very partial coverage of even a single parish. Much remains ultimately unknowable, but we are unlikely to get much closer to the ‘truth’ about Colyton than Pam Sharpe has done here.