Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Eversley detected a population increase of ‘a phenomenal 17.7%’ in the first ten
years of the eighteenth century in twelve Worcestershire parishes. 6
Martin argued that
parishes in the Forest of Arden and in the Arrow and Avon valleys (including several in
the study area) increased at a faster rate than the parishes in the East Felden, and more
generally that population growth in ‘different localities, and even individual parishes,
displayed a marked variability, even within a narrow geographical compass.’ 7
Much of the study area suffered high mortality in the period 1727-30, which
Martin describes as ‘the most fearsome mortality crisis to show up in many ecclesiastical
registers since the sixteenth century.’ 8
He demonstrates that Bidford took a long time to
recover from this ‘Great Death’ as it had earlier with the high mortality of the mid-1680s.
In both periods the crisis years reduced the numbers of marriageable adults for decades to
follow. In Eversley’s parishes the period 1725-9 is the only quinquennium in the period
1690-1794 in which burials exceed baptisms – ‘the most startling feature of the whole
eighteenth century’. However, he portrays a time of opportunities for young adults after
the crisis, with more marriages and a younger, more dynamic population. 9
Parish
registers and probate records reveal other smaller population crises which affected the
study area from 1710-12 and in 1744.
6 D. Glass and D. Eversley, eds., Population in History, (London, Edward Arnold, 1965), p. 406.
Eversley’s study is of twelve parishes centred on Bromsgrove (adjoining my Zones C and D).
7 Martin, ‘The rise in population in eighteenth-century Warwickshire’, Dugdale Soc., OP23, (1976), pp. 12-
13. Martin, whose data was less complete than Wrigley’s, suggests a rise of only 28% for Warwickshire’s
population in the first half of the century.
8 Martin, ‘The rise in population in eighteenth-century Warwickshire’, p. 30. He attributes the deaths to a
combination of smallpox which killed many children and fever which killed many adults. On p. 28 he
states that mortality in Stratford upon Avon, (bordering the Study Area) was noticeably higher than in the
impoverished North Warwickshire colliery parish of Bedworth during this period.
9 Glass and Eversley, Population in History, pp. 408-410.
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