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7 - The Admiralty Connection: Port Development and Demographic Change in Portsmouth, 1650–1900
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- By Barry Stapleton, University of Portsmouth
- Edited by Richard Lawton, Robert Lee
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- Book:
- Population and Society in Western European Port Cities, c 1650–1939
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 17 June 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2002, pp 212-251
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- Chapter
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Summary
INTRODUCTION
In south-east Hampshire the population centre of Portsmouth is a relatively new settlement. Non-existent in 1086 at the time of the Domesday Book (Stapleton, 1989), it was founded in the late-twelfth century during a prolonged period of medieval population growth. As a new community it was much smaller than its more established neighbouring market towns at Titchfield and Fareham, or even markets such as that at Havant created at about the same time. Even as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century it seems likely that Portsmouth was still only the fourth or fifth largest parochial community in the region. The parishes of Titchfield, Fareham and Hambledon, all holding markets, apparently contained larger numbers than Portsmouth, and Havant was approximately the same size.
During the seventeenth century, however, Portsmouth's population growth, alongside that of its neighbour across the harbour, Gosport, began to dominate that of the south-east Hampshire region. In the sixteenth century Portsmouth had grown at a rate very similar to that of the region as a whole. During the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, when the region's population grew by 83.5 per cent (from over 10,000 to over 19,000 inhabitants), Portsmouth and Gosport accounted for 64.7 per cent of the total growth. While the two harbour communities were growing rapidly, the evidence from the rest of the region suggests that population growth was slowing down. This divergence between Portsmouth and Gosport and the rest of the region was even more heavily marked in the last quarter of the seventeenth and the first quarter of the eighteenth century. The Bishop of Winchester's Visitation Return of 1725 indicates that the regional population grew by about 24 per cent from over 18,200 to over 22,600 people. However, if Portsea Island and Gosport are excluded from these calculations, the remainder of the region's population appears to have declined by 6 per cent, whereas that of the two harbour communities rose by 56 per cent—eloquent testimony to the increasing importance of the Portsmouth harbour settlements to the whole region. By this time Portsmouth and Gosport constituted 52.7 per cent of the region's population, or 14,500 out of 22,649, thus consolidating the position of 1676 when they contained some 47 per cent of the region's inhabitants.
Family strategies: patterns of inheritance in Odiham, Hampshire, 1525–1850
- BARRY STAPLETON
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- Journal:
- Continuity and Change / Volume 14 / Issue 3 / December 1999
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 01 December 1999, pp. 385-402
- Print publication:
- December 1999
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In recent years the analysis of individual communities in England has shed increasing light on their economic, social, demographic, cultural and religious development during the three centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. Contemporaneously, and to some extent resulting from these local studies, there has been a growing interest in the family and patterns of inheritance. Similarly, among social anthropologists there has been the development of the concept of ‘strategy’ with writings on marriage, fertility, inheritance and migration strategies, although these may be regarded as components of general family strategies. Whereas in some writings strategies are shown as being pursued by individuals for their own purposes, others focused on family strategies, particularly ones designed to keep a family landholding from being divided. However, whether these studies of social organization in continental Europe and Asia can be applied to the English experience remains to be seen. To begin with they are all concerned with peasant landholding and as such may not be appropriate to the English experience where the debate on whether a peasantry even existed was begun by Macfarlane's The origins of English individualism in 1978.
Secondly, there is no universal agreement on what kind of strategies were being followed, either individualistic or familial. Thirdly, there remains the question as to whether the strategies were intentional and the outcome of rational decision-making, or subconscious and rooted in implicitly accepted and long-established principles. These could have been that a landholding should remain undivided, that men had primacy over women in inheritance, that primogeniture would be practised and that younger brothers would not challenge their eldest brother's inheritance. A refinement of these approaches has been the view that family strategies could be very different. Some may have wished to hold on to the family estate and pass it on to the next generation. Others wanted to enlarge it and may have needed to do so for familial reasons, and yet more families may have wanted to create an estate where none yet existed. But in all cases, it is stated, there were families consciously planning and pursuing a strategy for the benefit of future generations. Furthermore, it is said that these strategies could only be pursued by families above the level of the poor and only became possible in western Europe in the sixteenth century as a result of changing attitudes and growing individualistic commercialism.