Assessing an Early Modern Fenland Population: Whittlesey (Cambridgeshire)
Assessing an Early Modern Fenland Population: Whittlesey (Cambridgeshire) Heather Falvey Abstract Improvement writers argued that drainage would bring prosperity and population growth to fenland communities; locals counter-argued that their communities were already thriving. The detailed surviving records from early modern Whittlesey, in the Isle of Ely, are analysed here to test the accuracy of these opposing claims. Using the returns of the 1523 Lay Subsidy, the 1563 ecclesiastical census, the Lady Day 1674 Hearth Tax records and the 1676 Compton Census, together with bishops’ transcripts and probate inventories, this article finds that although the population did indeed increase after drainage, the pre-drainage population was also increasing. The Michaelmas 1664 Hearth Tax records are analysed to uncover something of the character of the inhabitants and the 1674 Lady Day returns are then used to test the relative wealth of the community compared with that of sub-regions throughout England identified by Tom Arkell. Finally, there is a discussion of Whittlesey’s housing stock. In 1589 Humphrey Bradley, a surveyor from Brabant, observing the condition of the undrained fens, asserted that, as a result of drainage, ‘a vague, deserted Empire without population [would be] turned into a fertile region; and wild and useless products therefrom into an abundance of grain and pasturage; humble huts into a beautiful and opulent city’.1 Fenmen, however, did not share his negative view of their region. In 1604, commoners within the Isle of Ely, opposing
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