Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

of the poor and lists of parish apprentices. Although women may figure in probate and
property documents and parish registers, they are often referred to by their marital status
rather than their occupations. To a lesser extent this also applies to unmarried men, often
referred to as bachelors, their trade going unrecorded. The occupations of children and
adolescents are also largely absent from the historical record apart from apprentice lists.
Thus the focus is inevitably on adult male workers.
Different records present a different occupational bias. For instance quarter
sessions records may give the names and occupations of criminals (often poorer folk),
and in the late seventeenth century papists and dissenters too figure prominently in such
records. Some occupations are well represented in the records, for instance there are lists
of licensed victuallers in the quarter sessions records, and clergy appear in all manner of
documents. So the historian’s quest for occupations is rather like a naturalist’s search for
different birds. Some, such as priests and publicans, proclaim themselves loudly from the
archival treetops, while others, such as cobblers and carpenters, often lurk, hidden in the
dense, documentary undergrowth. These biases are taken into account when discussing
the statistics. Birds which change their feather also create problems of identification: folk
who pursued more than one trade certainly complicate analysis of occupational structure.
Spreadsheets and database
Though many sources were trawled for occupational information, the only local
records found to be consistent enough for analysis across all parishes from 1660 to 1840
were probate records, marriage licence allegations and (from 1813) baptism registers.
The parishes have also been compared using the 1841 census. Spreadsheets have been
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