Abstract
In AD 1836, the General Register Office (GRO) was established to oversee the national system of civil registration in England and Wales, recording all births, deaths, and marriages. Additional data regarding population size, division size, and patterns of occupation within each division permit urban and rural areas (and those with both urban and rural characteristics, described here as “mixed”) to be directly compared to each other. The annual Reports of the Registrar General summarize the collected data, including cause of and age-at-death, which is of particular value to historical demographers and bioarcheologists, allowing us to investigate demographic patterns in urban and rural districts in the nineteenth century. Overall, this chapter aims to highlight how documentary evidence can supplement osteological and paleopathological data to investigate how urbanization affected the health of past populations. It examines the data contained within the first Registrar General report (for 1837–8), in order to assess patterns of mortality of diverse rural, urban, and mixed populations within England and Wales during a period of rapid urbanization. It shows that urban and mixed districts typically had lower life expectancy and different patterns in cause of death compared to rural areas. The chapter briefly compares how the documentary data differ from information regarding health from skeletal populations, focusing on the city of London, highlighting that certain age groups (the very young and very old) are typically underrepresented in archeological assemblages and reminding us that, while the paleopathological record offers much in terms of chronic health, evidence of acute disease and importantly cause of death can rarely be ascertained from skeletal remains.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter focuses on documentary data that relate to England and Wales specifically; however, throughout we discuss broader research which relates to Britain as a whole, and in some cases, more specifically to England.
- 2.
It is important to note that these mixed divisions do not only represent the rural non-agricultural groups discussed earlier.
- 3.
The Wellcome Osteological Research Database (WORD) provides skeletal data for cemetery populations curated by the Museum of London. These data are publically available: https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/collections/other-collection-databases-and-libraries/centre-human-bioarchaeology/about-osteological-database
- 4.
Richard Arkwright is known as a father of the modern industrial factory system and developed the water powered spinning frame and a rotary carding machine.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Justin Lowry and Ben Jennings for producing the and editing map in Fig. 16.1, using data from the Populations Past website. The Wellcome Library in London provided excellent access to the documents used in the preparation of this chapter, and we truly recommend their coffee shop. We thank Eddy and Steph for their unending support during our research trips. This research was funded by the Royal Society of London (Grant Reference IES\R1\180138) and supported by the University of Bradford and SUNY Plattsburgh.
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Crane-Kramer, G.M.M., Buckberry, J. (2020). Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword? Exploring Urban and Rural Health in Victorian England and Wales Using the Registrar General Reports. In: Betsinger, T.K., DeWitte, S.N. (eds) The Bioarchaeology of Urbanization. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53417-2_16
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