Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface to the first impression
- Preface to the second impression
- 1 Introduction: The history of the family
- 2 Some demographic determinants of average household size: An analytic approach
- 3 The evolution of the family
- ENGLAND
- WESTERN EUROPE
- 8 A southern French village: the inhabitants of Montplaisant in 1644
- 9 Size and structure of households in a northern French village between 1836 and 1861
- 10 Household and family in Tuscany in 1427
- 11 Structure of household and family in Corsica, 1769–71
- 12 Variations in the size and structure of the household in the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- 13 Size of households before the industrial revolution: the case of Liège in 1801
- SERBIA
- JAPAN
- NORTH AMERICA
- Bibliography
- Index
13 - Size of households before the industrial revolution: the case of Liège in 1801
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface to the first impression
- Preface to the second impression
- 1 Introduction: The history of the family
- 2 Some demographic determinants of average household size: An analytic approach
- 3 The evolution of the family
- ENGLAND
- WESTERN EUROPE
- 8 A southern French village: the inhabitants of Montplaisant in 1644
- 9 Size and structure of households in a northern French village between 1836 and 1861
- 10 Household and family in Tuscany in 1427
- 11 Structure of household and family in Corsica, 1769–71
- 12 Variations in the size and structure of the household in the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
- 13 Size of households before the industrial revolution: the case of Liège in 1801
- SERBIA
- JAPAN
- NORTH AMERICA
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
How many persons to a household? Many demographers have asked themselves this since Guichardin, Vauban, and Quételet: hence a considerable literature devoted to the subject. Historians are perpetually brought back to this issue because north of the Alps the practice of numbering households is more widespread than that of nominal censuses. Thus fiscal returns have been preserved which contain the numbers of hearths liable to tax (fouages, haertsteden or tockages) for whole provinces, whereas lists called by clergymen status animarum or censuses of souls, which provide accounts of every individual, household by household, in a single parish were scarcely ever made up by the parish priests of Western Europe. Who can resist the temptation to calculate the ratio of inhabitants to households in a document of this kind where the evidence is certain, in order to use it as a multiplier elsewhere?
Alas, this expedient which seems to be so simple, is full of pitfalls. There are uncertainties in the boundaries which surrounded communities in earlier times; there are the random fluctuations, which are always extreme in societies subject to famines and epidemics; there are exemptions from taxation, omissions of children, or of those not subject to the jurisdiction of the incumbent of a parish. Father Roger Mols has sifted the published results for scores of European towns, and fifteen years after it was delivered his authoritative critical judgement retains its relevance.
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- Household and Family in Past Times , pp. 319 - 334Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1972
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