Light on a rich country

Rosalind Mitchison

• The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction by E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield
  Edward Arnold, 779 pp, £45.00, October 1981, ISBN 0 7131 6264 3

The title of this book means what it says: it is about England, not England and Wales. The exclusion of the Celtic fringe can be explained by the very real difficulties which arise for some forms of historical reconstruction from the narrow range of Welsh surnames and the weakness of the Established Church in Wales. The work is based on the extraction of figures from parish registers, the Census, once it was established, ‘family reconstitution’ carried out for a dozen parishes, a central group of experts using sophisticated numerical methods in Cambridge and the strengths of computerisation. So we have chapters in which the figures of events and base population are built up, and then chapters in which social and economic conclusions, based on these figures, are worked out. The figures are tucked away into an enormous structure of appendices, 16 in number, amounting to over a third of the whole book, but everything hinges on them, so the book has to be taken as a whole.