ABSTRACT
Every epoch is in some degree an age of paradox. It was a time when the influential Society for the Reformation of Manners sprang up: a local association, founded in Tower Hamlets in 1691, claimed to have been instrumental in convicting two thousand persons for drunkenness, swearing and the like in the year 1698. The official census in England is a nineteenth-century development. The national economy would have collapsed without it; and though some shift of population northwards was already taking place, the belt of thickly peopled counties running through the midlands looked to London far more than they did to Lancashire or the West Riding. The great majority of English men and women, however, lived as they always had in small communities. Village life as yet was less affected by economic developments, though the enclosure movement was well under way in some counties.
