ABSTRACT
It may be assumed that there was a considerable growth of population during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and that this levelled off after 1660.1 At first sight this trend seems to mirror that of witchcraft prosecutions in Essex, and a causal connexion could well be suggested. Growing pressure in economic resources led to increasing tentions and hatred towards the old and the poor. Unfortunately, it is not possible to demonstrate any direct connexions. At the village level there was no obvious correlation between population growth and witchcraft accusations. An analysis of the parish registers of two of the sample villages, Little Baddow and Boreham, has failed to show any significant connexions betweeen the fluctuations in deaths, births, or marriages and years of prosecution in those villages. Certainly there was, or would have been without migration, enormous growth. In both Little Baddow and Boreham the surplus of births over deaths between 1560 and 1600 would have nearly doubled the population by the latter date. There was an average surplus of six persons per year, rising as high as fifteen in 1577, in Borham. The traditional social organization, the groups of neighbours and kin, must have come under cosiderable strain in the attempt to absorb the new children. In Little Baddow, a group of roughly sixty adult males in 1560 there were working for an extra six mouths a year: without migration they would have been feeding and extra child each by 1566, for already births had exceeded deaths by sixty. However, there are no known witchcraft prosecutions in Little Baddow after 1570, despite continued population increase.
