Population and Society in an East Devon Parish. Reproducing Colyton, 1540-1840.

Levine, David

Population and Society in an East Devon Parish. Reproducing Colyton, 1540-1840. By Pamela Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002. xv, 408 pp.).

Colyton proved to be a most interesting choice when E.A. Wrigley analysed its parish registers by following the Fleury/Henry method of family reconstitution. The early returns on this work were most exciting: upon the publication of Wrigley's articles on "Family Limitation" and "Mortality", our understanding of the population dynamics of early modern England was transformed. (1) Wrigley's early articles provided systematic evidence of late ages at first marriage for women, fertility control in the late 17th century, and surprisingly low levels of mortality. Taken together, this material provided the basis for theorizing about a "low pressure" demographic system that was quite unlike both the contemporary Third World and also the imagined organization of reproduction in the pre-modern western world. However, Wrigley's demographic analysis was never integrated with any consideration of Colyton's social and economic history. Pamela Sharpe has done an admirable job of addressing this lacuna.

Colyton was not a village; it was at once both a market-town and a series of deeply-rural hamlets; Colyton was also divided into several manorial regimes which breathed life on into the nineteenth century. The Elizabethan reorganization of local government, which gave primacy to parochial boundaries, thus fit uneasily on top of Colyton's earlier systems of social, economic, religious, and political control. Furthermore, the spatial complexity of this place was enhanced by the diachronic evolution of its material structures. Colyton in the first century of this study was a wheat and wool economy, the next century was dominated by pastoral farming and intensive rural industrialization, and the final century was characterized by the deindustrialization of its lace-making industry and the emergence of a new emphasis on dairy farming alongside a revitalization of its grain-growing sector. Like many English communities of the early modern period, Colyton was socially polarized; its "openness" to immigration meant that most of the action took place on the margins so that "the interface between the rural and industrial sectors of the parish ... determined the demographic history of Colyton." (316) Its demographic history was "inseparably linked [to its economic evolution] through the nexus of the sex ratio." (306)

Sharpe's focus on the changing configurations of class and gender are the most significant parts of this most-excellent local study. The book's fifth chapter, "Demographic Experiences," is really the fulcrum on which its novelty swings. It is not so much based on a re-interpretation of Wrigley's original statistical information as an excursion beyond it. Early industrial Colyton attracted large numbers of female immigrants--using the parish register's burial information, Sharpe makes it clear that there seem to have been four women for every three adult men from the 1630s to the 1770s. The shift away from its early wheat and wool economy and towards both pastoralism and lace-making, which took place in the 1620s, meant that Colyton had a low demand for the labour of adult males just as its new sectors had a voracious demand for women workers. So, men left and women arrived--a lot of "extra women" arrived; so many "extra women" that they transformed the marriage market. These extra "extra women" filled up the social pyramid at the bottom; their marriage chances plummeted as there were not enough men available for them to marry. Quite literally, these extra "extra women" became life-long spinsters. By linking the community's economic evolution "through the nexus of the sex ratio", Sharpe provides a compelling answer to one of the puzzles of Wrigley's original analysis.

Sharpe's clever assessment of Colyton's sex ratio provides a useful reminder that out-migration was a significant factor in early modern England; nearly one million people--mostly male and mostly youths--slipped outside the 'observation universe' of demographic and economic analysis. Clearly, the maintenance of the early modern English "low pressure" system of reproduction was massively reinforced by its ability to ship the excess population overseas where they could make their own histories and, not coincidentally, make wealth for the English political economy. Colyton provides us with a variant on this theme since it was one of those left-behind places in which in-migrating but left-behind women massively outnumbered men and in which women's work was industriously deployed in creating new forms of wealth. Sharpe's discussion delineates many of the twists and turns in which local historical experience provides a probing--if fragmented--insight into national processes. Obviously, most people lived in local communities like Colyton and so the variants on the larger themes bulk large in any account that gives primacy to lived experience in the world of work, class formation and gender relations--as opposed to neo-classical generalities and model-building

What about the issue of fertility limitation? Once again, Sharpe's story draws us into the fine-detail of the various systems of production and reproduction that waxed and waned in Colyton. The key point here is that it was the poor who married late and when--or if--they married they were likely to have lower fertility, through a combination of prolonged breast-feeding which led to extended birth intervals and the "probability ... that abortion and infanticide were more common than historians have assumed." (193) Admittedly the evidence for this latter claim is skimpy--but, nonetheless, it is compelling. The 1682 story of Mary Pease's searching examination by village matrons--they found her breasts heavy with "such milk as women with child usually have" and took off her shift to have "the view of her & tryed her" so as to confirm that "it was not wth her as wth a virgin"--provides a unique insight into both popular knowledge about reproductive rituals and physical evidence. (195-6) The "culture of fertility suppression" to which Mary Pease belonged provided this reader with a sense of deja vu: recalling Angus McLaren's arguments about the role of abortion and the culture of reproduction. (2) The fertility-suppressing impact of sex-specific employment, which worked "through the nexus of the sex ratio", was also abetted by the rise of religious Dissent that was of primary--but not exclusive--interest to the middling sort of people. Sharpe advances a neo-Weberian argument here: a culture of discipline was a way of imposing order on the chaos of everyday life--punctuated in Colyton by plague, economic upheaval, civil war, and recurrent moments of rebellion culminating in the Monmouth episode in the 1680s--while stressing self-discipline and probity for those unmarried youths (many of whom were women engaged in mass-producing lace) whose life of semi-dependency was prolonged into their late twenties and even into their thirties. Late seventeenth century Colyton was a religiously-serious place and that seriousness presented Sharpe with a close 'fit' with its system of family limitation since both were elements in the "prevailing culture of restraint." (207)

Colyton was not a miniature of the national population, like it in everything but size; rather, Colyton was a fragment of a gigantic mosaic. Sharpe has provided us with an additional variant on the main themes of English population history which puts the larger whole into a new perspective. (3) Drawing our attention to the role of gendered work, migration, and the sex ratio, she provides a welcome refocussing of our attention on the peculiarities of the Colytonians. This is a rich, complex and deeply-researched work that deserves to be read by anyone who is interested in the multi-faceted processes of social reproduction in early modern England.

ENDNOTES

1. "Family Limitation in Pre-Industrial England," Economic History Review 2nd. Ser., 19(1966): 82-109; "Mortality in Pre-Industrial England," Daedalus, 97(1968), 546-580.

2. Birth Control in Nineteenth Century England (New York, 1978); and Reproductive Rituals (New York, 1984).

3. I am paraphrasing Thomas Smith's words from his book on the Japanese village of Nakahara (Stanford, 1977, 13) which Sharpe quotes on page 161.

David Levine

OISE/UToronto