Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

allowing comparison between the different periods. The bias of marriage licences
compared with some other sources is quantified at the end of this chapter.
Parish registers
Tate states that parish registers offer ‘very real possibilities’ for demographic
study, but are patchy in their relevance to an occupational study. 30
All the Anglican
parish registers for baptisms, marriages and burials for the study area during the period
1660 to 1840 have been trawled for occupational information. 31
Occupations of fathers are generally given in baptism registers from 1813; these
have been analysed in spreadsheets. 32
Earlier parish registers do not usually provide
occupational information, but half a dozen parishes do so for certain (usually short)
periods, and it is fortunate that two adjacent parishes, (Studley and Coughton), contain
such information for much of the eighteenth century. 33
The use of Church of England parish registers as a source of information has its
disadvantages, as non-Anglicans, although sometimes mentioned, will be under-
30 W. E. Tate, The Parish Chest, (Chichester, Phillimore, 1983), p. 83.
31 WoRO holds the extant parish registers for all the Worcestershire parishes in the study area, (including
Pebworth, transferred from Gloucestershire). WaRO holds all the registers for the other parishes, except
for the Dorsington Marriage Register from 1837 which was consulted at the house of the present
incumbent.
32 Occupations of mothers are not usually recorded except (sometimes) those of unmarried mothers.
Unmarried mothers are not included in the analysis in my spreadsheets, but their occupations (if given in
the register) are mentioned in the text. Where a baptism takes place in a parish other than that where the
family resided, I have included it in the data for the parish of residence. Only a small percentage of
baptisms took place outside the parish of residence, but I have adjusted figures accordingly as it is more
important to know where they worked at a certain trade rather than where they baptised their children. This
is possible with a local study such as this, but would not be possible in a more extensive study.
33 Parish registers in the study area with occupational information before 1813 are analysed in Chapters 5, 6
and 7, as appropriate. Parish registers which do not record occupations have still proved useful in providing
extra information about individuals whose occupation is known from other sources. There is a discussion
of early parish registers with occupational information, (P. Kitson, ‘The recording of occupations in the
Anglican baptism registers of England and Wales, 1690-1799’), on the Cambridge Group website.
(www.hpss.geog.cam.ac.uk , 20 Aug. 2008).
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