Top of the CamPops: blog marking 60 years of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure
Home > Top of the CamPops: blog marking 60 years of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population & Social Structure turned 60 years old on 11 July 2024, which happened to be World Population Day. The Group, known colloquially as CamPop, has been celebrating with the Top of the CamPops blog series on ‘60 things everyone should know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages’, authored by CamPop members young and old to explain our most important and sometimes surprising research for a broad audience.
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Founded in 1964 by Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley to conduct data-driven research into family and demographic history, members of CamPop have made a spectacular series of discipline-transforming contributions to social science history. These include: reconstructing the population history of England over the last 500 years, delineating occupational change in the English economy over the same period and reconfiguring our understanding of historical household structures, welfare systems, transport, and energy use.
During last year’s Economic History Society Annual Conference, CamPop made headlines with Professor Leigh Shaw-Taylor’s research on England’s shift to manufacturing more than a century before the ‘industrial revolution’ of 1780-1830. This can be identified in occupational structure – the patterns of people working in agriculture (primary), manufacturing (secondary) or transport and services (tertiary) sectors. The interactive maps of occupational structure in England and Wales can be explored at EconomiesPast.org. This is the third of our interactive atlases: www.PopulationsPast.org explores population and socio-economic indicators; The British Business Census of Entrepreneurs maps employers and self-employment.
The blog series started with four posts:
What was the size of the English population before the first census in 1801 – and how do we know?
Part of the rationale for the first census in 1801 was that politicians couldn’t decide whether the population was increasing or decreasing at that point. We now know that the population was increasing very rapidly. CamPop developed a method to estimate population size based on the lists of baptisms and burials in parish registers, which survive for England from the mid-sixteenth century. Over the 1970s, volunteers around the country transcribed the registers from hundreds of parishes and sent the results by mail to Cambridge for analysis.
How modern is the modern family?
Post-war modernisation theory posited that pre-industrial households were extended and multi-generational, encouraging deference and conformity, while the post-industrial phenomenon of the nuclear family was the cradle of individualism. In CamPop’s earliest significant research project, Peter Laslett and Richard Wall collected xerox copies of household listings from individual parishes, held in the newly established county archives around England. These had been made for a range of purposes – tax collection or to check religious conformity or out of concern over poverty, or simply from clerical curiosity – but collectively they showed that the nuclear family household had been predominant in England since at least the sixteenth century. This arose from the habit of establishing a new household upon marriage: young couples rarely lived with their parents or siblings. Modernisation theory was not correct, and the field of social and family history grew out of the understanding that the average household size was between four and five people.
What age did people marry in the British past?
Many people assume that historically marriage occurred in the teenage years, especially for women, on the basis of either literary examples and royal marriages from previous eras, or current day examples of less developed economies. But in fact, the study of parish registers’ baptisms compared with marriages shows that in England from the mid-sixteenth century the average age at marriage for both women and men fluctuated around the mid-twenties. This long-running ‘European Marriage Pattern’ meant that young women and men spent a decade working, either from their parents’ home or in service with another household, acquiring skills and savings to enable them to set up a new home upon marriage. The average age gap between brides and grooms was only two years, suggesting relatively low spousal inequality. Only in the middle of the twentieth century did the average age at first marriage fall to the early twenties – which was a major contributor to the baby boom.
Mrs Man: Why do women take their husbands’ surnames?
The practice of women taking their husbands’ surnames makes tracing women in historical records extremely complicated. It is often assumed to have been universal, but among European countries the practice was exclusive to England and her colonies for 500 years. It developed in the fourteenth century, from the beginning of surnames, out of the peculiarly restrictive English rule of ‘coverture’ in marital property. Elsewhere in Europe, the husband managed the wife’s property and women retained their birth names until c.1900. But in England the husband owned the wife’s property and women lost their birth names. The only exceptions were where the bride was substantially wealthier than the groom – usually where there was no male heir in her family and it was a condition of the marriage that he take her surname. These exceptions – and almost every aristocratic family in England has such an example – prove the rule that the name follows the property.
Recent posts look at gender divisions in employment, midwifery, disease, the frequency of migration, and more that everyone should know about family, marriage, work and death. Sign up at https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/.
CamPop is grateful for financial support of its anniversary project to the Economic History Society, including its Francesca Carnevali Fund, to the Ellen McArthur Fund of the Cambridge University Faculty of History, to Robinson College, Cambridge, and to Cambridge Reproduction.
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