Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Priors (143) appears to record the number of households rather than adults, so I have used
multipliers of 4 and 5 for that parish’s population estimates. 30
Before 1801 evidence regarding population numbers has to be approached with
caution. However, it appears that numbers in this zone had grown significantly between
1563 and 1660, followed by stagnation in certain parishes some time before 1730. No
figures are available in 1730 for Worcestershire parishes, but for those in Warwickshire
we can use Dugdale. 31
The 1730 figures for the Gloucestershire parishes (marked * in
Table 3.5) are actually from Bishop Benson’s diocesan survey of 1735. 32
Sir Robert Atkyns in his The Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire,
published in 1712, gives rounded numbers of houses and inhabitants for the
Gloucestershire parishes circa 1700 as follows: Dorsington 20 houses and 100 people,
Long Marston 40 and 190, Pebworth 95 and 400, Welford on Avon 98 and 450, Weston
on Avon 14 and 60. 33
The figures included under 1780 for Gloucestershire parishes (marked *) are
actually circa 1779 from Rudder, whose estimates Gowing generally considers to be
30 The 1670 Hearth Tax lists 133 households for Salford Priors. Numbers of households known for other
parishes in the 1670 Hearth Tax are as follows: Bidford 168 and Weethley 15. C. Elrington, ‘Survey of
Church Livings in Gloucestershire 1650’, Trans. of Bristol and Gloucestershire Arch. Soc., 83, (1964), p.
89, records the number of families in Dorsington (22), Long Marston (38) and Pebworth (75) in 1650.
31 The number of houses multiplied by 4 and 5 for lower and higher estimates.
32 J. Fendley, ed., ‘Bishop Benson’s survey of the diocese of Gloucester 1735-1750’, Bristol and
Gloucestershire Archaeological Soc., Record Series, 13, (2000). This survey gives rounded population
figures.
33 R. Atkyns, The Ancient and Present State of Gloucestershire 1712, (Wakefield, EP Publishing,
Wakefield 1974), pp. 550-808. The numbers of houses and inhabitants given in Atkyns circa 1700
suggests that multipliers between 4 and 5 are in the right range. T. Rudge, General View of the Agriculture
of the County of Gloucester, (R. Phillips, London, 1807), pp. 354, 356, also quotes the figures for c. 1700
from Atkyns. Circa 1700 Chancellor Richard Parsons states that Dorsington had 16 families, Welford on
Avon 107 families (including 4 in Little Dorsington), and the hamlet of Milcote (in Weston on Avon) had
13 families. (J. Fendley, ed., ‘Notes on the Diocese of Gloucester by Chancellor Richard Parsons c.1700’,
Bristol and Gloucestershire Arch. Soc., Record Series, 19 (2005)).
56