̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Cambridge experts bust myths about family, sex, marriage and work in English history

ta385 — Wed, 10 Jul 2024 23:01:00 +0000

Sex before marriage was unusual in the past – Myth! In some periods, over half of all brides were already pregnant when they got married.

̽��ֱ��rich have always outlived the poor –Myth! Before the 20th century the evidence for a survival advantage of wealth is mixed. In England, babies of agricultural labourers (the poorest workers) had a better chance of reaching their first birthday than infants in wealthy families, and life expectancy was no higher for aristocrats than for the rest of the population. These patterns contrast strongly with national and international patterns today, where wealth confers a clear survival advantage everywhere and at all ages.

In the past people (particularly women) married in their teens – Myth! In reality, women married in their mid-20s, men around 2.5 years older. Apart from a few decades in the early 1800s, the only time since 1550 that the average age of first marriage for women fell below 24 was during the baby boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

These are just some of the stubborn myths busted by researchers from ̽��ֱ��Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (Campop). Their Top of the CamPops blog (www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog) went live on 11 July 2024, with new posts being added every week. ̽��ֱ��blog will reveal ‘60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages’.

̽��ֱ��initiative marks the influential research group’s 60th anniversary. Founded in 1964 by Peter Laslett and Tony Wrigley to conduct data-driven research into family and demographic history, Campop has contributed to hundreds of research articles and books, and made the history of England’s population the best understood in the world.

Earlier this year, the group made headlines when Professor Leigh Shaw-Taylor revealed that the Industrial Revolution in Britain started 100 years earlier than traditionally assumed.

Professor Alice Reid, Director of Campop and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, said: “Assumptions about lives, families and work in the past continue to influence attitudes today. But many of these are myths. Over the last 60 years, our researchers have gone through huge amounts of data to set the record straight. This blog shares some of our most surprising and important discoveries for a broad audience.”

Myth: Until the 20th century, few people lived beyond the age of 40. Reality: Actually, people who survived the first year or two of life had a reasonable chance of living until 70.

Myth: Childbirth was really dangerous for women in the past, and carried a high chance of death. Reality: ̽��ֱ��risk of death during or following childbirth was certainly higher than it is now, but was far lower than many people suppose.

Myth: Families in the past generally lived in extended, multigenerational households. Reality: Young couples generally formed a new household on marriage, reducing the prevalence of multi-generational households. As today, the living circumstances of old people varied. Many continued to live as couples or on their own, some lived with their children, whilst very few lived in institutions.

Myth: Marital titles for women arose from men’s desire to distinguish available women from those who were already ‘owned’. Reality: Both ‘miss’ and ‘mrs’ are shortened forms of ‘mistress’, which was a status designation indicating a gentlewoman or employer. Mrs had no necessary connection to marriage until circa 1900 (and even then, there was an exception for upper servants).

Myth: Famine and starvation were common in the past. Reality: Not in England! Here, the poor laws and a ‘low pressure’ demographic system provided a safety net. This helps to explain why hunger and famine are absent from English fairy tales but common in the folklore of most European societies.

Myth: Women working (outside the home) is a late 20th century phenomenon. Reality: Most women in the past engaged in gainful employment, both before and after marriage

Myth: Women take their husbands’ surnames because of patriarchal norms. Reality: ̽��ֱ��practice of taking a husband’s surname developed in England from the peculiarly restrictive rule of ‘coverture’ in marital property. Elsewhere in Europe, where the husband managed the wife’s property but did not own it, women retained their birth names until circa 1900.

Myth: People rarely moved far from their place of birth in the past. Reality: Migration was actually quite common – a village population could change more than half its members from one decade to the next. Rural to urban migration enabled the growth of cities, and since people migrated almost exclusively to find work, the sex ratio of cities can indicate what kind of work was available.

Campop’s Professor Amy Erickson said: “People, not least politicians, often refer to history to nudge us to do something, or stop doing something. Not all of this history is accurate, and repeating myths about sex, marriage, family and work can be quite harmful. They can put unfair pressure on people, create guilt and raise false expectations, while also misrepresenting the lives of our ancestors.”

On World Population Day, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge researchers bust some of the biggest myths about life in England since the Middle Ages, challenging assumptions about everything from sex before marriage to migration and the health/wealth gap.

Assumptions about lives, families and work in the past continue to influence attitudes today. But many of these are myths.

Alice Reid

Black and white photograph of a family lined up against a wall in E W Hope, Report on the physical welfare of mothers and children (Liverpool, ̽��ֱ��Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 1917), volume 1

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Britain industrialised much earlier than history books claim

fpjl2 — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 07:41:37 +0000

Millions of historical employment records show the British workforce turned sharply towards manufacturing jobs during the 1600s – suggesting the birth of the industrial age has much deeper roots.

COVID-19: ̽��ֱ��long view

ta385 — Fri, 22 May 2020 12:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��COVID-19 pandemic should only present a short-term interruption to 250 years of improving life expectancy, argues historian Leigh Shaw-Taylor.

A real piece of work

tdk25 — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 13:06:53 +0000

There comes a point when talking with Dr Leigh Shaw-Taylor at which it seems necessary to go over the facts again, if only to establish that he really does mean what he appears to have just said.

While many historians will spend their careers chipping away at the past with gentle care, 12 years into his research project, ̽��ֱ��Occupational Structure of Britain, 1379–1911, Shaw-Taylor seems to be calling for a wholesale rewrite. If his emerging results are correct, then they have the potential to transform not only the most important chapter in our social and economic history – the industrial revolution (so-called) – but with it the wellspring of much of our local and national identity.

So isn’t this a little drastic? “We’re talking about a fundamental change in what we understand about the past,” he says. “That is a fairly widespread view of our work. I’ve always felt that you can do more with historical research than people think, but I never thought that we could do this much. And it’s nothing compared with what we could achieve if we can keep the project going.”

̽��ֱ��project, as its name suggests, is a hugely ambitious, wide-scale attempt to reconstruct the picture of how working life changed and developed in Britain from the late Middle Ages through to the early 20th century. Co-directed by Shaw-Taylor and his Cambridge colleague Professor Sir Tony Wrigley, the research team has spent years assembling information about matters such as population size, transport infrastructure and sector-by-sector employment, at different points in time.

It’s a complex job and, before this, nobody had really tried it. Much of what we know about social and economic history is based on records such as wills and parish registers, which are patchy, inconsistent or highly selective. As well as collating information, the team therefore had to develop a method of controlling for this lack of coherence, to avoid distorting the resulting picture of the past. “We had to develop a system of weighting the importance of the data when analysing it,” Shaw-Taylor explains. “We still can’t be sure that it’s right, but it puts a limit on the extent to which we can be wrong.”

Textbook orthodoxy says that, before the industrial revolution, most people in Britain worked in primary sector employment, overwhelmingly in agriculture. During the ‘revolutionary’ 80-year period starting in about 1760, this landscape was transformed as secondary industries – like processing and manufacturing – took off. Only in the 1950s did Britain supposedly begin to evolve into the tertiary, service-based economy that we have today.

On such things are national and local myths founded – tales of a green and pleasant land that rapidly became black with the smog of industry, for example, or of a country that used to make things, but doesn’t any more.

When Shaw-Taylor and colleagues looked at the data that they had assembled, however, they found that it didn’t fit the existing picture. Nationally, for example, secondary sector employment seems to have grown more between 1500 and 1750 than between 1750 and 1850. “We’ve always presumed that the major structural shift in employment from the primary to the secondary sector took place between 1750 and 1850,” he says. “Well, according to what we’ve found, that change took place about 100 years earlier than we thought.”

Similarly, the data transforms our picture of the evolution of tertiary, service-based industries in Britain. Rather than taking off in the mid-20th century, these seem to have been growing all the way through the 18th and 19th. By 1911, one man in 10 was, for example, working in transport – others were shopkeepers, merchants, clerks or professionals.

If this is true, it means an adjustment to our ‘island story’ that has some radical implications for the history of places far beyond these shores as well. For instance, it is often argued that Britain’s industrialisation was made possible thanks to the raw materials gathered by the slaves of Empire. If industrialisation began before the Empire existed, however, as these findings suggest, the story changes. “Moreover, for a small island off the coast of north-west Europe to start projecting its power around the world, something unusual must have happened internally before that, not after,” Shaw-Taylor points out.

Equally, if the shift to secondary sector employment happened before the dark, Satanic mills that populate the nation’s consciousness as temples of the industrial revolution even existed, then we need to modify our picture of what people were actually doing. If not farming, then what?

It seems likely that more early-modern Brits than we thought were carpenters, shoemakers, bakers, butchers, tailors and masons. This, in turn, raises puzzles about when and why agricultural and primary labour ceased to be dominant. ̽��ֱ��likelihood is that the evolution of more productive, less labour-intensive farming led to a decline in the relative importance of primary work. Over time, the children and grandchildren of agriculturalists would have been drawn to new opportunities in the secondary sector, or even tertiary, service industries.

Much remains to be done and there are still significant gaps in the research, most notably around the role of women in British employment history. Many historians associate the industrial revolution with new opportunities for female employment; others believe, just as fervently, that female employment collapsed. Only with more work and more funding will the team be able to establish exactly how women’s lives, and the family, changed during this period, and the consequences that this had for women’s social status.

What exists at the moment is, nevertheless, a compelling case for a data-led approach to writing the story of the past. “Methodologically, explaining why things happened in history is very difficult because it only happens once and you can’t run it under controlled conditions,” Shaw-Taylor observes. “Yet the processes historians are trying to describe are often vastly more complex than those described by science. Our approach has been to eschew questions of why until we have the data at our disposal. Until you have those patterns, you’re just trying to explain things that may or may not have happened, and that’s a waste of time.”

In 2003, researchers embarked on a project to piece together a picture of changes in British working life over the course of 600 years. ̽��ֱ��emerging results seem to demand a rewrite of the most important chapter in our social and economic history.

We're talking about a fundamental change in what we understand about the past

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

Science Museum

Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg in 1801

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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