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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75.1 (2001) 131-133



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Book Reviews

The Demography of Early Modern Towns: York in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Chris Galley. The Demography of Early Modern Towns: York in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Liverpool Studies in European Population, no. 6. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998. xiv + 220 pp. Ill. £32.50 (cloth), £14.95 (paperbound).

The publication of E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield's monumental study, The Population History of England 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (1981), was undoubtedly a landmark in English demographic history, but it left many questions unanswered and hence bequeathed historical demographers a new agenda. One agenda item was regional analysis, the first major response to which appeared recently in Mary J. Dobson's admirable survey of southeast England (Contours of Death and Disease in Early Modern England, 1997). A second item was urban demography, a topic scarcely addressed by Wrigley and Schofield, and one badly neglected by specialist urban historians from the 1970s to the 1990s. London has received more attention than provincial towns, but as the one great European city in England its experience was never likely to stand as a surrogate for the urban sector as a whole, and extrapolations from the capital to the provinces have often been misguided. Chris Galley's book on the demography of York, a substantial regional center of some twelve thousand inhabitants by the later seventeenth century, is therefore very welcome indeed.

Urban demography is a particularly difficult undertaking because the innate fluidity of towns invalidates many of the conventional measures that demographers employ, whether generated by aggregative techniques or family reconstitution. York presents additional difficulties, for it comprised as many as twenty-three parishes, exacerbating the problems caused by mobility and inevitably resulting in variable register survival and quality (only six registers survive in usable condition from 1561). Galley overcomes the latter problem by extrapolating back from periods for which figures do survive--a procedure that assumes no proportionate change in the contribution made by individual parishes to the whole series, and appears to fail to allow for interparochial variations over time in the balance between baptisms and burials. Only two of the twenty-three parishes have registers of adequate quality to warrant family reconstitution, and even here only partial reconstitution is possible due to the difficulties posed by migration. Galley has made rigorous efforts to test the surviving registers for accuracy, and although he is well aware that there is no test that is watertight, those he has applied suggest no obvious deficiencies--apart from a systematic shortfall in baptisms in the region of 5-7 percent due to the impact of infant mortality, and, more speculatively, a smaller shortfall of baptisms in the later seventeenth century caused by nonconformity. Marriage registers, as is well known, are particularly unreliable in towns because they were often used by nonresidents, and this is amply confirmed for York.

Galley takes constant pains to emphasize the tentative nature of many of his conclusions, some of which are more speculative than others. It is clear, however, that York grew substantially across the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a whole, though the true trend for the later seventeenth century is less easy to [End Page 131] determine. For much of this period natural increase was its characteristic experience, as has been demonstrated for some other large provincial towns, but this gave way to natural decrease at some point in the seventeenth century. Urban mortality levels, however, may still have been relatively high, for although Galley tentatively concludes that adult mortality rates were modest, infant mortality rates were higher than in some rural parishes (if considerably below those found in London). York rarely suffered mortalities of crisis proportions--barring the plague of 1604, which increased the death rate to ten times its normal level--and the underlying level of mortality had greater long-term significance.

The only component of mortality to deteriorate across the period 1561-1700 was childhood mortality (as indicated by the...

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