PRELIMINARY

This study is concerned with the household in England from the time that Gregory King provided the first authoritative summary of English census material in 1695/6, until the publication of the first state Census in 1801. Unlike many of the contributions to this volume no attempt has been made to analyse documents in which every individual of a particular settlement is listed according to the household in which he belongs. Instead, the publications and important manuscripts of the leading political arithmeticians (and under this head are comprised all those interested in the state of England's population), together with works by other prominent authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have been examined with the object of eliciting the extent of their knowledge of the social structure of which they formed part. Their opinions and, perhaps even more important, their assumptions about household size are valuable in their own right. It is possible, however, to use some of the statistics that they provided not only to confirm their statements but, as in the latter part of this chapter, to account for the fact that the mean household size of one type of settlement differs considerably from that of another. Their evidence is, however, of even greater value, for whatever the views of later writers, it is now clear that eighteenth-century observers did not suppose that multiple family households, or extended family households, were present in any significant numbers.