It doesn’t count unless you count it! This website, Histpop – The Online Historical Population Reports Website, is the accounting of England Scotland and Ireland. Since William I came and did the first comprehensive survey, the Domesday Book, leaders have recognized the importance of enumerating the populous. This website gathers together published census reports for England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, for the period 1801-1937; the registration reports for England, Wales and Scotland, from 1837-1920; many documents from the National Archives from 1841 through to 1901; legislation relating to population counts from 1800-1937; and a bibliography. All of this is readily browsable or searchable; searching can be done on one of the component parts or the entirety. It is easy to navigate within documents and from one document to the next.
This covers the basics – births, deaths, weddings. Looking for information about Bampton, where the town scenes of Downton Abbey are filmed, it is easy to find that in 1871, there were 1,264 inhabited houses and 5,454 souls, an increase of 863 from the previous decade.
The difficulty in enumerating the causes of death is complicated but important for historians to be able to understand changing population stories. The nosology, as the classification is known, was improved in 1845, when the General Register Office (GRO) sent out standard medical certificates and asked them to used terms in a “statistical nosology” so that the historical picture of death and disease could be enumerated and tracked. We can look at causes of death in 1838 and see everything from tetanus to “mortification”. Scarily, we can see deaths attributed to intemperance (7), starvation (18) and violent deaths (777) for the counties of Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and Worstershire combined in that year.
Besides purely statistical information, the user can readily search by themes. Madness and “idiocy” are intermingled in the reports and it makes for interesting reading. There’s an exposition about why loving mothers are not going to report their children as idiots and that being the reason given for more idiocy later in life than earlier. Also, as women live longer, the authors note, it’s not that more females are insane, but that men die younger, so statistically there are more insane females due simply to their longevity. The statisticians of old were certainly more holistic in their treatment; one essay about the causes of death in 1876 quotes Shakespeare, Plato and Goethe while discussing the contributions of alcohol to the mortality rate.
This resource is well worth noting by any librarian wanting to point historical researchers to the critical data that are part of telling a nation’s story. It’s also the history of census-taking itself, and the many changes that evolved in the accounting of life and death.
