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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as many as one-half of the urban inhabitants of England and Wales lived in small towns. In 1801 62 per cent of all towns with populations of 2,500 or more contained fewer than 5,000 inhabitants and in 1901 30 per cent of all towns still contained less than 10,000 persons. Yet despite the strength of small towns within the national urban system these communities are far from proportionately represented in the large body of academic literature directed towards analysing towns and urban growth. Our knowledge and understanding of the forces of change acting upon towns at the lower end of the urban size hierarchy in this critical transitional period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries remains relatively undeveloped, and this is especially true for rural areas untouched by the main wave of industrialization.
1 Law, C. M., ‘The growth of urban population in England and Wales 1801–1911’, Trans. Inst. British Geographers, XLI (1967), 125–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Robson, B. T., Urban Growth: an Approach (1973) and ‘The growth of cities in England and Wales in the nineteenth century’Google Scholar, in Bourne, L. S. and Simmons, J. W., Systems of Cities: Readings on Structure Growth and Policy (New York, 1978) 126–47.Google Scholar
2 For example, Ashbourne Local History Group, Early Victorian County Town: a Portrait of Ashbourne in the Mid Nineteenth Century (1978);Google Scholar Spufford, P. and Eccleshall, M., The Story of a Staffordshire Market Town and its Dependent Villages (1974);Google Scholar Macmahon, K. A., Beverley (Dalesman, 1973).Google Scholar
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8 For a detailed account of this work see Noble, M., ‘Growth and development of country towns: the case of eastern Yorkshire 1700–1850’ (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Hull, 1982).Google Scholar
9 Carter, ‘Growth and decline’, op. cit., 48.
10 Wapentakes were used as a basis for denning the study area. It includes all of the administrative county of the East Riding, the wapentakes of Bulmer, Pickering, Ryedale, Birdforth and Whitby Strand (parishes of Scarborough, Fargrave and Hackness) in the North Riding, and the wapentakes of Osgoldcross lower, Barkstone Ashlower and Strafforth and Tickhill south (parishes of Thome, Hatfield, Stainforth, Fishlake and Sykehouse) in the West Riding.
11 For example, Mayer, H., ‘Definitions of city’, in Bourne, L. S., The Internal Structure of the City (New York, 1970), 28–31;Google Scholar J. W. Simmons and L. S. Bourne, ‘Defining urban places: differing concepts of the urban system’, in Bourne and Simmons, op. cit., 28–41.
12 For a further discussion of this problem see Noble, op. cit, 26–9; Carter, H., The Study of Urban Geography, 3rd edn (1981), 17–19;Google Scholar Everitt, ‘The market town’, op. cit.; Patten, op. cit.; Carter, ‘Growth and decline’, op. cit.
13 Everitt, ‘The food market’, op. cit.; Chalklin, C. W., The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: a Study of the Building Process 1740–1840 (1974);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Clark, P. and Slack, P., English Towns in Transition 1500–1700 (1976);Google Scholar Corfield, ‘Urban Development’, op. cit.; Patten, op. cit.
14 A considerable amount of academic debate has centred on the problems and use of the hearth tax as a source, e.g. Patten, J., ‘The hearth taxes’, Local Population Studies, VII (1971), 111–30;Google Scholar Alldridge, N. (ed.), The Hearth Tax: Problems and Possibilities (papers submitted to the CORAL conference March 1983, published by School of Humanities and Community Education, Humberside College of Higher Education, 1983).Google Scholar Although some 25 years elapse between the compilation of the Hearth Tax and the turn of the seventeenth century, aggregative analysis undertaken for six of the study towns in the period 1675–1700 indicated a baptism/burial ratio of approximately one, and thus no discernible population growth or decline in the last quarter of the century.
15 Noble, op. cit., chs 5–7.
16 Robson, ‘Urban growth’, op. cit., ch. 3. The region's towns were divided into seven size classes, the class limits were <500; 500–999; 1, 000–1, 999; 2, 000–3, 999; 4, 000–7, 999; 8, 000–15, 999; 16, 000>. Standardized growth rates were calculated using the formula
where Gin is the growth rate of the ith town whose population places it in the nth size group of towns, and Gn and on are the mean and standard deviation of the nth size group. Growth scores were grouped into three broad divisions: high rates — scores greater than one standard deviation above the mean value; medium — scores in the range of plus one or minus one standard deviations about the mean; low — scores greater than one standard deviation below the mean. For detailed results of this analysis see Noble, op. cit., 98–119.
17 Robson, B. T., ‘The impact of functional differentiation within systems of industrialized cities’, in Schmal, H. (ed.), Patterns of European Urbanisation since 1500 (1981), 111–30.Google Scholar
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19 A further problem relates to differential fertility among occupational groups and the possibility of double counting individuals within any study period. This means that only the relative, rather than the absolute, strength of individual occupational sectors can be measured. Parish register analysis was not conducted after 1815 for a number of reasons, viz. the availability of directory and census data and the widely acknowledged reduction in the comprehensiveness of parish registers with the growth of nonconformity.
20 Carter, ‘Urban geography’, op. cit., 113.
21 W. K. D. Davies, ‘Towards an integrated study of central places: a South Wales case study’, in Carter and Davies, op. cit., 193–227; Lewis ‘The central place’, op. cit; Lewis, Analysis of changes', op. cit.
22 See note 19.
23 See note 21 and Davies, W. K. D., ‘Centrality and the central place hierarchy’, Urban Studies, IV (1967), 61–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
24 Lewis, ‘Analysis of changes’, op. cit, 56.
25 The directories used were Barfoot, P. and Wilkes, J., The Universal British Directory of Trade and Commerce, 6 vols (1791);Google Scholar Baines, E., History, Directory and Gazetteer of the County of York, 2 vols (1823);Google Scholar also reprinted as Baine's Yorkshire (1969);Google Scholar Slater, W., Yorkshire Directory (1849).Google Scholar
26 Davies, ‘Centrality’, op. cit.
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28 Noble, op. cit, 230–45.
29 Slater, op. cit., 408.
30 Noble, M., ‘Inland navigations and country towns: the case of eastern Yorkshire 1700–1850’, in Sigsworth, E. M. (ed.), Ports and Resorts in the Regions (1981), 79–100Google Scholar
31 Slater, op. cit, 502.
32 Baines, op. cit, II, 454.
33 Barfoot and Wilkes, op. cit, in, 485.
34 Neave, D., South Cave: a Market Village Community in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1974);Google Scholar Slater, op. cit, 52.
35 These are discussed in depth in Noble, ‘Growth and development, op. cit, 5–7.
36 Muller, E. K., ‘Regional urbanization and the selective growth of towns in North American regions’, J. Hist. Geog. III (1977), 21–39, 23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
37 Landowners investing in the Driffield Canal were keen to encourage industrial development in the district by offering concessionary rates to industrialists. As a result several factories were established in the area. See Humberside County Record Office DDX 17/15.
