ABSTRACT
The Rotherbridge Hundred which contains both the large, but controlled town of Petworth and the large but more open parish of Kirdford, saw ten out of twelve parishes lose population in the years between 1851 and 1881 including both these large settlements as well as some of the smallest. The returns showed that the population was divided almost exactly equally between ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ areas, but, since an administrative definition of ‘town’ was used rather than one based on size, the ‘urban population’ included many people in towns like Lewes in Sussex or Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire which were predominantly rural in character. Payment in kind remained a central feature of the Northumberland system as it did elsewhere where hamlet settlement predominated, well into the 1920s. In Nor.
