Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
This project examines the crucial role of family and household in the social and economic transformations that took place in London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Population growth, immigration, urbanisation, and commercialisation produced new patterns of sociability, gender relations, employment, and domestic lifestyle. The family was central to all these developments, but has been little studied in detail. The project will reconstruct and analyse the dense matrix of families, households, properties, and buildings in sample areas of the capital, and trace their evolution over time, gaining new insights into social structures and the agents and circumstances of change.
Main Topics:
The digital resource comprises a series of datasets which contain information about individuals, households and properties transcribed and extracted from a wide range of sources from the period 1540-1710 (a complete list of sources is included in the documentation for the database). The project database contains information on over 60,000 individuals, as well as over 24,000 records of 'listing type' information for five parishes at the eastern end of Cheapside, and 5000 such records for Tower Hill precinct in the parish of St Botolph Aldgate. The information provided in these records comprises names, titles, places of residence (by ward and/or parish and/or street), occupations, and where appropriate an assessment of sums owed according to the function of each particular list. The datasets also include family reconstitutions for the five Cheapside parishes and Clerkenwell, and derived from parish register entries (there was almost complete and continuous register coverage). In all, the data covers 22,324 instances of people experiencing a baptism, marriage or burial in Cheapside, and 19,095 instances of persons related to them; 140,713 people experiencing a vital event in Clerkenwell and 95,927 'related' people. These data have been used for the reconstitution of 3,809 biological/nuclear families containing 9,027 unique children in Cheapside and 26,324 reconstituted families containing 44,052 unique children in Clerkenwell. In addition to the project database and the family reconstitution data, a number of sources have been transcribed in a structured format which allows for the viewing of the individual sources used in the database without the need for viewing any related data from other sources.
No sampling (total universe)
Transcription of existing materials
Compilation or synthesis of existing material
