Population and Society in an East Devon Parish: Reproducing Colyton 1540-1840 (review)

232 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) Sharpe, Pamela, Population and Society in an East Devon Parish: Reproducing Colyton 1540-1840, Exeter, University of Exeter Press, 2002; hardback; pp. xv, 408; 49 tables, 17 figures, 6 maps, 8 b/w plates; RRP £45.00; ISBN 0859896552. Fifty years ago, J. D. Chambers predicted that for generations to come, the growth areas in Early Modern studies would be historical demography and the study of literature. They promised a view of the whole society. Early English local records were susceptible to serial, quantitative, study. They could be used to resolve uncertainties about the long haul of ‘pre-industrial’ England, and would lend greater precision to studies of all aspects of community life. Parish registers, tax lists, churchwardens and overseers of the poor accounts, settlement records, and other ubiquitous local sources could be aggregated and serialized to plot long-term trends, but in Chambers’ view only literary texts – not necessarily printed or published ones – gave substance, colour, personality and will to impersonal numbers. Quantitative studies of social and economic development, in his view, would be complemented by the study of literary texts. The challenge has always been to put the two together. Pamela Sharpe succeeds. This is an important book for a lot of reasons. Devon was one of the most industrialized areas of late medieval and early modern England. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, increasing demand for wool from local cloth makers led to the emergence of a confident class of yeomen with aspirations to dress like gentry, their finery sometimes personally purchased in London. Capitalist clothiers with fulling mills, dyeing vats and specialist finishing workforces organised the Devon cloth trade from the early sixteenth century, maybe earlier. ‘The woollen industry largely determined the shape of social relationships in east Devon parishes in the early modern period … As the mercantile element wrested control over production processes, the corollary was an increasing class of landless proto-industrial workers.’ (p.81) In the seventeenth century this nexus was complicated by the rise of largescale lacemaking. Sharpe shows that this gave the Colyton district a very distinctive culture, in which women were numerically and culturally predominant. If Breughel or Hogarth had painted it, there would be slightly more women’s faces than men. Many of them would be smoking tobacco in white clay pipes. Reproducing Colyton is a state of the art ‘reconstitution’ of the manuscript sources of one of the most intensively researched localities of early modern Reviews 233 Parergon 20.2 (2003) England. Critical Cambridge Group quantitative scope and rigour are brought to life with ‘glimpses’ and vignettes drawn from the whole range of extant ‘literary’ sources, scraps of continuous prose like witness depositions, letters, diaries and even a printed pamphlet or two. A court case of 1652 gives a glimpse of market day in seventeenth-century Honiton. Many individually unpromising sources come together in a portrait of ‘the diverse economies of small scale producers’, and the lives of cottagers like Henry Clark and the labourer Thomas Blackmore, who was ‘suspected of consuming a sheep’. Colyton had its share of stolidity, but in both sexes and in all classes, ranks and status-groups Sharpe finds at least as many cases of enterprise, cunning, discipline, industriousness, piety, unconformity and resourcefulness. Sometimes what we get is no more than a name, like Thomasina, wife to William Wyett, labourer, and the bare fact that she watched her husband rise ‘a little after daylight and went to worke, but where she remembreth not’. The tables, graphs and maps are an essential part of the narrative, but what we remember are the hundreds of glimpses this book gives us into the personalities and relationships of the people, and the changing flavour of the community over the centuries. Sharpe notes limitations of source-linkage techniques. Interesting trails often peter out because ‘the independent-minded make poor reconstitution subjects.’ They avoid being documented. Interesting events generate document, but also imply bias, deliberate avoidance or destruction of documents. Nothing written down is complete or totally reliable. Sharpe’s sceptical ‘reconstitution’ of thousands of never totally reliable documents yields an account of an epic cycle, spanning seven or eight generations...