Sources for the History of the English Family | 9

Chapter

Historical investigation generally is complicated, first, by the uneven survival of source materials; second, by their nature and quality; third, by problems of interpretation. Historians of the family face a particularly severe and stimulating challenge: the range of materials is immense but their quality is variable and debated; the evidence is often oblique. The sources the historian emphasises and the questions she asks of them have a profound effect on her conclusions: personal testimonies of various kinds lie at the heart of this account, and almost inevitably, therefore, there is a sharper focus on the experience of more recent generations. The paragraphs which follow review these sources and others which have been used to reconstruct the experience of families of past times. Generally speaking, historians are more at ease with documentary materials and it is with these that I begin.

ABSTRACT

Parish registers are a memorial to the bureaucratic energies of Thomas Cromwell, who was executed by his ungrateful master, Henry VIII, in 1540. Cromwell’s project, launched in 1538, was designed to record every baptism, marriage and burial which took place under the auspices of the newly-independent Church of England – in theory, that is, every baptism, marriage and burial in the country. Parish registers are a good example of oblique evidence. In recording ceremonies associated with birth and death, parish registers provide evidence of these events at one remove. An unguessable and inconsistent but rising proportion of births in particular went unlisted: frail newborn babies baptised at home might be omitted; when the parish church was hard to get to, in the Essex marshes for example, baptism might be delayed – sometimes a clutch of siblings was christened together. Both the shifting population of the very poor and those whose parents opted out of the Church of England for reasons of conscience – the Catholic remnant and Protestant dissenters (Baptists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, the Quakers, and the Methodists, who separated from the Anglican church in the eighteenth century) – went unnumbered. And, as the penalties for nonconformity diminished after 1690, the number of dissenters rose: by 1851 nearly half the regular worshippers in England were chapelgoers.