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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2009
1 Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S., ‘English population history from family reconstitution: summary results 1600–1799’, Population Studies 37 (1983), 185–205Google ScholarPubMed; Wilson, C., ‘Natural fertility in pre-industrial England, 1600–1799’, Population Studies 38 (1984), 225–40Google Scholar; Wilson, C., ‘The proximate determinants of marital fertility in England 1600–1799’, in Bonfield, L., Smith, R. M. and Wrightson, K. eds., The world we have gained (Oxford, 1986), ch. 8.Google Scholar
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17 I have followed the conventions of family reconstruction set out by Wrigley, E. A., ‘Family reconstitution’, in Wrigley, ed., An introduction to English historical demography (New York, 1966), ch. 4Google Scholar; and Knodel, , Demographic behaviorGoogle Scholar. There were nonconformists in the area in the second half of the century – Wesleyan and Primitive Methodist – but many of them used the Church of England for their rites of passage and there are also surviving Methodist registers of births which could be drawn on. Vaccination registers provided dates of birth for part of the period. So it was possible to complete forms for some nonconformist families, those who would normally escape the net of family reconstitution. Coordination with the decadal census returns for individual parishes provided some added confirmation of births and deaths.
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24 Of course they may have responded by not marrying at all. But because of geographical mobility it is impossible to calculate meaningful celibacy rates at the parish level. The impact of social and economic developments upon nuptiality is something of a scholarly minefield. For an introduction, see Smith, R. M., ‘Fertility, economy, and household formation in England over three centuries’, Population and Development Review 7 (1981), 595–622CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Weir, D. R., ‘Rather never than late: celibacy and age at marriage in English cohort fertility, 1541–1871’, Journal of Family History 9 (1984), 340–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Goldstone, J. A., ‘The demographic revolution in England: a re-examination’, Population Studies 49 (1986), 5–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levine, D., Reproducing families (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; and Hill, B., ‘The marriage age of women and the demographers’, History Workshop 28 (1989), 129–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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37 Ibid., 230.
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45 Following Knodel, I have divided the sample into final numbers of confinements per woman, and have calculated the intervals per woman. This avoids swamping the sample with the intervals of women with large families and avoids obscuring those with smaller completed families who may well have been practising some form of family limitation.
46 Garrett, E. M., ‘The trials of labour’, Continuity and Change 5 (1990), 121–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Simon Szreter will be arguing something similar in a forthcoming re-analysis of the 1911 fertility census. Vann and Eversley have raised the possibility of spacing behaviour among newly married Quakers in pre-industrial southern England: Vann, and Eversley, , Friends, 162.Google Scholar
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53 Ibid., 225.
54 van de Walle, E. and Knodel, J., ‘Europe's fertility transition: new evidence and lessons for today's developing world’, Population Bulletin 34 (1979), 1–43Google Scholar. Woods, (‘Approaches’, 309)Google Scholar also stresses the rapid change in England in the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s.
55 My article can also be read as part of a wider literature which is starting to question the uniformity of the European fertility decline as presented by the demographers of the Princeton European Fertility Project: see , J. and Schneider, P., ‘Demographic transitions in a Sicilian rural town’, Journal of Family History 9 (1984), 245–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levine, D., ‘Recombinant family formation strategies’, Journal of Historical Sociology 2 (1989), 89–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gillis, J. R., Tilly, L. A., and Levine, D. eds., The European experience of declining fertility: a quiet revolution, 1850–1970 (Oxford, 1992)Google Scholar. As Levine has put it, we should think of ‘multiple paths’, ‘not one but many fertility declines’: Levine, D., ‘Moments in time: a historian's context of declining fertility’, in Gillis, Tilly, and Levine eds., European experience of declining fertility, 329.Google Scholar
