"ECW: County populations?" Topic

Has anyone got a rough idea of what the population of each county was in 1642?

I doubt it.

There's this for 1600 and 1700 link

might be worth a look through their site to see if the figures are available?

Too quick on the draw again, Major.

Too quick on the draw again, Major.

I said "I doubt it" meaning that I was sceptical that such data existed.

"shows estimates of population density at county level for 1600" (my emphasis)

Timbo W's link is a partial answer but to arrive at county populations you would need more accurate figures than just the range shown in the link (most counties are shown as having a population density of 50 – 100 per sq. mile). Then you would need to know the size of each county in square miles, also bearing in mind the fact that county boundaries in 1600 were in some cases a lot different to the modern county boundaries.

… z z z z ……

Or that some counties no longer exist. You also have to be careful because some figures give populations for England alone (estimates of total pop. were 4.1M in 1600 and 5.3M in 1650), others for England AND Wales.

I think the fact that Timbo's link is to research published in 2011, and that nothing more detailed has appeared since then, suggests that either the data is simply not available, or it is extremely difficult to locate/process.

As a rough rule-of-thumb, men of militia age were generally considered to account for 10% of a typical population, so finding militia estimates and adding a zero on the end might give a close(ish) representation at county level. According to an old (1970s) article by George Gush, the English militia theoretically numbered 1M by mid-Tudor times, but this seems a bit of an over-estimate and would surely have to include Wales in order to even get close to that figure.

I doubt the figure of one million men available for the militia, even theoretically! All the estimates I have seen of the population of England in the 16th and 17th Centuries have been around the 4 to 6 million mark. Even at the top estimates that would mean 1 in 3 of ALL males eligible for militia service, including children and old men!

Another thing to remember about population statistics in any pre-industrial society is the much greater proportion of children to adults. So for any given population figure, a much smaller percentage would be men of military age than might be expected.

The map shows just how concentrated the population around London was even back then.

Whilst it shows Middlesex with a density of 500-1000 persons per square mile, the majority of those would have been in the expanded London (Middlesex began at boundaries of the old medieval Corporation) and the outer areas were probably similar to the counties just north on Middlesex.

Even at the top estimates that would mean 1 in 3 of ALL males eligible for militia service, including children and old men!

The age range for militia service was 16-60 at that time, so given child mortality rates and shorter life-spans (both of which discriminate heavily against males) it seems probable that a figure of 1M militia would require almost half of all males to be under arms, given a total population in Tudor times ranging from 2.1M when Henry VII came to the throne, to 4.1M at the end of Elizabeth's reign!

Fair point!

So Tudor England had access to a shed-load of militia then….

Trained Bands pre ECW were around 120,000 iirc, but of course these were the select rather than the whole mass of military age men, theoretically liable for the posse comitatus.

Cerdic – just to be clear, I was suggesting that the "million militia" idea it was even more unlikely than you were saying.

I should have added that it was able-bodied 16-60 year-olds, which again, would apply more to men, so even further reducing the pool of men actually available.

Yes, it is obviously theoretical figures we are talking about!

It is not really my period, so I don't know much about actual use of the militia. But it would seem that the number of men serving in the militia was way below the potential maximum. So were militiamen the pick of the bunch, or were people able to buy substitutes or otherwise avoid service leaving just the dregs to serve?

Either way, even 120,000 was a fair old number…

Hm – I'll need to think on this one for a bit. I suppose I'll have to make educated guesses for the most part.

SV – Good luck with that!!! The trouble is, with a variable of 50-100 people per square mile over the vast majority of England, even if you find the actual land area of any county in 1642, you still have a massive differential to contend with.

To take Surrey as an example – leaving aside how much it has shrunk due to the expansion of London (Lambeth, Southwark, Wandsworth, and parts of Lewisham and Bromley in 1889; then Richmond, Kingston, Croydon and Wimbledon as recently as 1965, at which time Surrey gained part of Middlesex which had been abolished), it has gone from being a rural county with few people, to having a population of 1.2M. Even using the modern-day area (642 sq miles), you would have anything from 32,000 to 65,000 people at 1642 population levels.

I suspect that your best bet would be to contact county museums and ask the curator for a "best guess" as to land area and population for the 1640s, and compare with a rough calculation by population density from the Cambridge map. There is also an "Association of British Counties" that might be helpful, but given it was founded by the astrologer Russell Grant, perhaps not……

Another idea might be to start with the Compton Census of 1676.
link
link
link

This was intended to return a list of Anglicans, Catholics and nonconformists in every parish subject to Canterbury. It has several problems – doesn't include the North (which was the ecclesiastical Province of York), is 30 years after the date you want, and some collectors actually seem to have counted different things – some adults, some everyone, for instance. But it may be the only way you will get direct access to someone in the 17th century actually counting local numbers.

I'm sure that this information must be available somewhere. There have been exhaustive demographic studies done of England in the period covering this one, and even with scantier evidence Ian Mortimer was happy to provide estimated county populations for the 14th century.

What makes this period tricky, I suppose, is that big demographic changes were going on in the middle of it. London nearly trebled in size between 1600 and 1700 so even if you can find reliable data for the beginning or end of the century, that doesn't necessary correspond to the mid-century figures.

JSTOR isn't cooperating right now but I'll have a look for any journal articles I can find on the subject when it's letting me log in.

I've had a search and it seems the information is indeed pretty sketchy and hard to come by. In particular records for the period of the war itself are dreadful and historians have tended to focus their attention on the period post-1660 which is not helpful for our purposes.

Still, I've turned up a bit.

Wallace T. MacCaffrey's history of Exeter cites ecclesiastical records from 1603 which give a figure of 375-380,000 people for Devon and Cornwall combined, of which he estimates 227,000 in Devon and 151,000 in Cornwall.

MacCaffrey gives population density figures – but not gross population figures – on the same basis for other dioceses which correspond roughly but not exactly with county: Bath and Wells (Somerset) at 92 (slightly lower than Devon and Cornwall); Canterbury (Kent) at 93; London (London, Middlesex and Essex) at 180, and York (including Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire) at about 60. Working backwards from those, it might be possible to reconstruct populations for those counties: by my calculations, Kent would have a population of about 144,000 on that basis.

The census itself or detailed studies of it are unavailable for free, so far as I can tell, but if you're keen to determine local populations that is probably the best source.

The figures given above would suggest an increase in population of between two and three times since 1377, going by poll tax records for the two counties then and if Ian Mortimer's estimate of 40% poll tax exemptions is accurate. It would also mean that Devon's population increased slightly more quickly than Cornwall's over that period, but only by a factor of a few percentage points.