The Population of an English Village 1086–1801 A Study of Wigston Magna

Abstract

The following study of the population changes in one large Leicestershire village between the eleventh century and the opening of the nineteenth is intended not only as a contribution to the social history of that village, but also as a general guide to other students of English demographic history in the Midlands. It forms, I hope, a guide to the sources which exist for such a study, the special difficulties that each presents to the inquirer, and the methods by which the sources can be exploited for the purpose of discovering what is happening to the numbers of people in a place. The study of population changes is absolutely fundamental to economic history.