THE PROBLEM

Writing history is a process of inference. We rarely, if ever, know all that we wish to know about a person or event in the past and we are therefore forced to gather scraps of evidence and fit them together into what seems to be a believable pattern. In this respect, information about historical heights is like any other kind of evidence about the past; we do not know, and will never know with certainty, the average height of particular groups within historical populations. Even today, since it is impossible regularly to measure the entire population, inferences about its characteristics and about those of subsets within the population must be made from sample surveys. In studying the past, we can only try to approximate as closely as possible to such modern means of investigation.

Our knowledge of the range of European heights during the past two centuries comes from evidence which approximates to a modern survey, since conscript data relate to most if not all of the male population. In Britain, by contrast, there are no data of a similar kind from a period earlier than the middle of the twentieth century. Britain traditionally relied on volunteers to man its armed forces. Although various forms of conscription existed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain – the impressment of seamen and balloting for the militia are examples – such methods never involved a survey of the whole population.