Reconstituting families and their demographic behaviour in intra- and extra-mural London parishes c. 1550-1750
Introduction | Cheapside | Clerkenwell
Cheapside
This location concerns an intra-mural set of contiguous parishes that form part of the Cheapside district of the City of London.
These parishes, containing in toto c. 1500 residents in the late seventeenth century, constitute a relatively affluent zone in which a high proportion of households were of above average size containing significant numbers of servants and apprentices. They did not exhibit much demographic growth in the decades immediately following the Great Fire.
Births, marriages x 3 and deaths 1540-1720
Like the residents in most London households their members were highly mobile in the short term, a feature exacerbated by the presence of so many individuals hired on short-term contracts. For this reason the family reconstitution of the parish registers is based upon nominative analysis that is plagued by low linkage rates. This work forms a novel attempt to employ this methodology in early modern London and is aided by use of additional data in a point-in-time listing, in the form of a Marriage Duty Act assessment from 1695.
Some striking demographic characteristics are displayed by married women in this district. They are shown to have very short birth intervals which are likely to reflect the use they made of wet nurses, many of whom resided outside the city and formed a practice which resulted in the resumption of ovulation after birth much sooner than was the case among mothers of lower social status who breast fed for at least a year
Birth Intervals
The absence of very young children in such families, who were with wet nurses at some distance from the natal hearth, is reflected in the absence of such individuals in the listings of residents recorded in the Marriage Duty Act returns.
Ages of Resident Children in 1695
Notwithstanding the prevalence of high status families in these wealthy districts, infant mortality rates in the late seventeenth century are estimated at c. 220 per 1000. These had risen from considerably lower rates estimated for this area in the early seventeenth century and can be regarded as under-estimates, since infants at nurse were likely to have died elsewhere and these deaths to have gone un-recorded. The worsening of mortality in part reflects an epidemiological shift that London was experiencing, since there is little evidence to suggest that housing conditions in this area worsened greatly.
Infant Mortality Rates 1670-1720
