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Gregory King and the Social Structure of pre-industrial England1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

G. S. Holmes
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Extract

Despite the rich and exciting work of recent years, the social history of England between the Restoration and the Industrial Revolution still bears something of a hangdog look, scarcely war-ranting, as yet, the cosmic conclusions and ferocious controversies to which students of early Stuart and early nineteenth-century society have grown accustomed. Yet, thanks to the work of one remarkable Englishman, who was born in 1648 and died in 1712, there is one aspect of this pre-industrial period—its social structure—on which we are all happy to pontificate. Gregory King's table of ranks and degrees, on which in the last resort so much of this confidence rests, has now acquired a unique cachet. The continual reproduction in post-war textbooks of this famous document, which we think of as King's ‘social table’ but which he described as his ‘Scheme of the Income and Expense of the Several Famillies of England’, is just the most obvious symptom of its dominant historiographical influence.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 27 , December 1977 , pp. 41 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1977

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Footnotes

1

A preliminary version of this paper was delivered to the Cambridge Social and Economic History seminar in February 1976. I am grateful for the suggestions made on that occasion by Professor D. C. Coleman and Mr Peter Laslett. I am also indebted to Professors C. D. Chandaman and Henry Horwitz, Mr Clyve Jones, Mr Alan Downie and Drs J. V. Beckett, M. B. Rowlands and W. A. Speck for helping in various ways to further my understanding of King and his work.

References

2 In whole or in part. The sequence runs to at least a dozen, beginning with Trevelyan, G. M., English Social History (2nd edn., London, 1946)Google Scholar and Clark, G. N., The Wealth of England (London, 1946)Google Scholar, and ending with Mathias, P., The First Industrial Nation (London, 1970)Google Scholar and Chambers, J. D., Population, Economy and Society in pre-industrial England (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar.

3 Mingay, G. E., English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1963), pp. 30–22Google Scholar; Mathias, P., op. cit., pp. 25, 29Google Scholar, pointing especially to the concealment of servants and manufacturers (cf. idem, ‘The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century: a Calculation by Joseph Massie’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 2nd ser., x, 1957. See also Laslett, P., The World we have Lost (2nd edn., London, 1971), p. 270, n. 38Google Scholar —an aside which expresses some uneasiness at the danger that ‘our view of pre-industrial social structure as a whole’, being too King-centred, may prove to ‘be true of the 1690s only’; and the general caution against ‘the frankly uncertain statistical foundations’ of much of King's political arithmetic in Brooks, Colin, ‘Taxation, Finance and Public Opinion, 1688–1714’ (Cambridge Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1971), p. 376, n. IGoogle Scholar.

4 Cooper, J. P., ‘The Social Distribution of Land and Men in England, 1436–1700’, Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser., xx, 1967, pp. 432–34Google Scholar.

5 First Industrial Nation, p. 23 (my italics).

6 Introduction to The Earliest Classics: John Graunt and Gregory King (Pioneers of Demography series, London, 1973), pp. [2], [6]–[8]Google Scholar. Mr Laslett adds: ‘He seems to have been commissioned by the Government, and, within certain limits, he was undoubtedly believed by the Government’.

7 For Wilson's work see Camden Society, 3rd ser., Hi, 1936, ed. F. J. Fisher. Colquhoun's treatise (1806) provided for the year 1803 a structural and statistical breakdown of the society of his day as ambitious as King's and evidently influenced by the latter's approach.

8 Notably those of Edward Chamberlayne (social estimates included in the numerous edns. of Angliae Notitia, 1669–1702), and Joseph Massie (see above, n. 3).

9 Notably by Glass, D. V., ‘Two papers on Gregory King’, in Glass, D. V. and Eversley, D. E. C., Population in History (London, 1965)Google Scholar. See Hollingsworth, T. H., Historical Demography (London, 1969), pp. 81–88, esp. 85–87Google Scholar for the only serious recent attempt to blacken King's demographic reputation; Anne Whiteman, ‘The Census that Never Was’, in Whiteman, A., Bromley, J. S. and Dickson, P. G. M. (eds.), Statesmen, Scholars and Merchants (Oxford, 1973)Google Scholar, for a refined but devastating scholarly demolition of Hollingsworth's case.

10 See Davis, R., ‘English Foreign Trade, 1660–1700’, Earn. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser., vii, 1954, p. 155, n. 6Google Scholar; Ladurie, E. Le Roy, ‘Les comptes fantastiques de Gregory King’, Annales E.S.C. 23, 1968, pp. 1086–1102 (Professor D. C. Coleman kindly drew my attention to the latter article)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Davenant, Charles, An Essay upon the Probable Methods of making the People Gainers in the Balance of Trade, 1st edn. (London, 1699), pp. 23–24Google Scholar; British Library, (B.L.), Harl. MS. 6944, fo 117: Leibniz to Samuel Stebbing, Hanover, 4 September 1708 (postscript: ‘je vous prie Monsieur de faire mes complimens… à Mons. King qui obligeroit le public s'il publiois ses calculs politiques’).

12 Brief sketches of his life and professional career have been written in this century by Thompson Cooper (D.N.B.) and Barnett, G. E. (introduction to Two Tracts by Gregory King, Baltimore, 1936)Google Scholar. More illuminating and very carefully re-searched is the account by Glass, D. V. (see ‘Two papers’, n. 9 above)Google Scholar. All owe a good deal to King's first and still fullest biographer, Sir George Chalmers (1802). The greater part of King's surviving correspondence is in B.L. Harl. MS. 6815, 68aI, 6837, 6944 and 7525. There are also some items of biographical interest in P.R.O., T. 64/302 (King Papers) and T.1/130; in the unpublished papers of Robert Harley (B.L. Loan 29); in one of King's business letter books for the years 1704–1707 (B.L. Loan 57/73, Bathurst Papers); and in his ‘Staffordshire Notebook’, 1679–1680(Collectionsfor a History of Staffordshire, ed. by Mander, G. P. for William Salt Arch. Soc, 1919, London, 1920)Google Scholar. King's autobiography (Bodleian Library, MS. Rawlinson C.514, printed in Dallaway, J., Inquiries into the Origin and Progress of the Science of Heraldry, Gloucester, 1793)Google Scholar unfortunately stops in 1694.

13 There is not a hint of such an interest in his autobiography, down to 1694; though his ‘Staffordshire Notebook’ (see n. 12 above) reveals an early awareness of the size and social composition of communities.

14 He was by then 54. See p. 50 below.

15 Having earlier spent five years in the 1660s as clerk-assistant to Sir William Dugdale, he was appointed Rouge Dragon Poursuivant in 1677 and Registrar of the College in 1684. King was also a man of many other parts, as his epitaph properly records: an expert map-maker and surveyor; something of a property developer; a most polished etcher and engraver; and a mathematician (his father's occupation).

16 Dallaway, App. p. xlvi et seq.; Mander, G. P., intro. to ‘Staffs Notebook’, he. cit., p. 193Google Scholar.

17 See n. 12 above. The essay parades past achievements as a backcloth for present discontents.

18 The Political and Commercial Works of…Charles D'Avenant, LL.D., ed. SirWhitworth, C. (London, 1771), i, 127Google Scholar [hereafter Davenant, Works].

19 King himself would not have agreed. He looked to John Graunt as his mentor. See Glass, , ‘Two papers’, loc. cit., pp. 162–63Google Scholar.

20 Petty's Verbum Sapienti, in which his original population estimate for England and Wales of 6 mns appeared, was written in 1666 but not published until 1691. Meanwhile he had produced in the 1680s at least three revised estimates, based on Hearth Tax returns, ranging from 7.0 mn to around 7.4 mn. The figure of 7 mn was most widely entertained. Greater London Council Library, the ‘Burns Journal’ of King, Gregory, hereafter cited as B.J., pp. 120, 121 (3), 275Google Scholar. (The Burns Journal is photographically reproduced in The Earliest Classics —see n. 6 above); Brooks, C., op. cit., pp. 312–13Google Scholar. In the early 1690s two members of the Royal Society, John Houghton and Thomas Neale, had supplied Parliament with fresh data, but in the latter's population calculations, at least, little confidence could be reposed. See Horwitz, H. (ed.), Parliamentary Diary of Narcissus Luttrell (Oxford, 1972), pp. 112, 123, 141Google Scholar; W. Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, v, App. x, for Houghton's Account of the Acres and Houses (London, 1693)Google Scholar.

21 ‘In these sort of speculations not only the quantity but the quality of the inhabitants must be duly pondered. They must be divided into their several ranks and classes’. Davenant, , Works, ii, 173Google Scholar.

22 See Luttrell's Parl. Diary, pp. 144, 160, for the Commons' finance debates of January 1692 during which Paul Foley and Sir Edward Seymour differed by an incredible 100,000 in their estimates of the number of gentlemen in England.

23 The first was addressed to Godolphin, First Lord of the Treasury, ‘in obedience to your Lordshipp's commands’, and the second to the Treasury Commissioners in general. There are copies in London Univ. Library, MS. 60, Davenant's MS. tracts, 1695–1696; also in B.L. Harl. MS. 1223, fos 71–95, 115–56, which suggests they either came into Robert Harley's possession directly, in the 1690s, or were acquired by him later, via Gregory King (Harley acquired many of King's papers after the latter's death in 1712).

24 See, e.g., a letter from Davenant to King, dated ‘Nov. 17th, 1710. My birthday’, and signed ‘Your most affectionate servant’, in P.R.O. T.64/302.

25 The full extent of Davenant's indebtedness is revealed by comparing his unpublished tracts—for example, the two cited above (n. 23) and the ‘Essay on Publick Virtue’ (London, 1696Google Scholar: submitted to Godolphin and Shrewsbury)—with King's notebooks and Observations. In the ‘Essay on Publick Virtue’ wholesale borrowings which had started out purportedly as a common endeavour, or as what ‘upon a nice & strict inquiry wee find very strong reason to believe’ (see London Univ. MS. 60, pp. 113, 114) ended, rather disgracefully, as ‘these observations [which] I have gathered by long enquiry and study in these matters …’Ibid., p. 370.

26 King began the first chapter of his Natural and Political Observations with the statement, taken directly from Davenant, that ‘the number of houses in the kingdom, as charged in the books of the hearth office, at Lady-day, 1690, were … 1,319,215’. Chalmers, G., An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain (London, 1804), App., p. 33Google Scholar. (All references to the Observations hereafter are to the Chalmers version, 1804 edn., cited: Chalmers, App.) That King never checked this figure personally (see p. 58 and n. 81 below) is a truly extraordinary fact in view of John Houghton's conflicting evidence on the same point, published in 1693 (see n. ao above).

27 Under three heads: (a) the rental and capital value of its lands and property (calculated at 18 years' purchase), (b) the annual produce of its trade, (c) the ‘stock of the Kingdom’ in a variety of commodities, from coin and plate to livestock and industrial products.

28 Though much of it was probably drafted a month or two earlier. See B.J., p. 231 etseq.

29 E.g. to George Stepney in April 1696, and (in an earlier and somewhat different version) to a prominent peer in the government, probably Lord Godolphin, late in 1695. B.J., pp. 171, 269, 271, 275.

30 Cf. London Univ. MS. 60, pp. 113–19 passim with Chalmers, App., pp. 47, 49, 61 and B.J., pp. 247, 261, 270–71.

31 P.R.O., T.64/302: ‘[Comjputations of the Numbe[r] of People, etc. by Gregy. King 1695’, pp. 14, 18v. (hereafter P.R.O., T.64/302: notebook).

32 See n. 20 above. The journal continues into 1696, with some entries added as late as 1700.

33 The pagination runs from 1 to 291, but the unnumbered page opposite p. 1 is utilized and three sets of ‘pages 120–21’ are included, only one of the four super-numerary pages being a blank.

34 B.J., pp. 65–67, 70–75, 209, 246, 265, 270, 280–81.

35 B.J., pp. 280–81. It occurs among a long series of ‘Conclusions or Aphorisms’ drawn up in the last 2–3 months of 1695 (the statistical conclusions concerning England relate explicitly to Michaelmas 1695). Although in many respects fuller in information than the ‘social table’ of the Observations it omits such crucial occupational groups as freeholders and farmers, army and navy officers, soldiers and seamen.

36 Or perhaps in June–King does not seem quite certain which month, on recollection. See B.J., pp. 221–30, inclusive: indexed on p. 285 ‘Observations upon the People of England in a kind of Treatise as given to Dr. Davt.’.

37 Dallaway, xxxvi, xxxviii–ix; cf. Chalmers, , op. cit., App. 'Notices of the Life of Gregory King’, pp. 16, 18Google Scholar.

38 Especially striking was the second, in 1709–10, when his claims to the plum vacancy of Glarenceux King of Arms were rejected in favour of Sir Joh n Vanbrugh, the Marlboroughs' architect at Blenheim and the darling of the politically-influential Kit-Cat Club. See Chalmers, App., pp. 25–26; B.L. Harl. MS. 7525, fos 40–41: King to Harley, , 2 01 1710[–11]; ‘Staffs Notebook’, loc. cit., p. 197Google Scholar, for King's 1679 estimate of Clarenceux's total emoluments as second only to those of Garter King, viz. at £230 p.a. ‘clear’, plus lodgings and visitation fees, and a Herald's income, ‘clear’, at only £50 p.a., plus lodgings valued at £20 p.a.

39 See his draft letter to Sir Stephen Fox, 19 December 1695, in B.J. p. 241.

40 The Commission's first Secretary in the 1690s was George Toilet. King's appointment, worth £100 p.a., was made in April 1702. (See Downie, J. A., ‘The Commission of Public Accounts and the formation of the Country Party’, Eng. Hisi. Rev., xci, 1976, p. 38, n. 3Google Scholar; Luttrell, N., A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs, Oxford, 1857, v, 160Google Scholar; B.L. Add. MS. 29568, fo. 89: King to Hatton, 18 August 1702.) He held the post in both periods of this Tory-dominated body's operation in Anne's reign, 1702–1704 and 1711–1712, In between times he served in a £300-a-year job as Secretary to the Commissioners of Army Accounts, and in 1708 was ap-pointed one of three commissioners to state the debts of King William III. (Bodl. MS. Rawlinson A.a8g, for his official correspondence 1705–1706; Luttrell, , Brief Hist. Rel. vi, 314Google Scholar.)

41 See letters from King to Harley, 1697 and 1711, in B.L. Loan 29/298M, especially that of 8 December 1697; B.L. Harl. MS. 7575: King to Harley (copy), 2 January 1711; National Lib. of Australia, Kashnor MSS: copy of the Natural and Political Observations, 1697, bearing Harley's ‘Queries and Observations’ and King's replies to them. This latter document has been consulted on microfilm, hereafter cited, Kashnor MSS., X.P.O.

42 For all his furious activity with the pen in the 1690s, Davenant did not re-enter government service, as Inspector General of Imports, until 1705. He had, however, refused Godolphin's offer of a post in the Excise in November 1702. H.M.C. Portland MSS. iv, 52: Godolphin to Harley, ai November, 24 November 1702. In general see Waddell's, D. A. G. biographical essay in Econ. Hist. Rev.. 2nd sen, xi, 1958–1959, pp. 279–88Google Scholar.

43 Chalmers, App., pp. 61–62 (my italics). King firmly believed that the war had caused a decline in population to set in. See ibid., pp. 42–43; Kashnor MSS. N.P.O., in which King elaborates his reasons for this conviction, for Harley's benefit.

44 See n. 11 above and Works, i, 135.

45 By ‘long mortgages and anticipations of the flower of the revenue’. P.R.O. T.1/130/15E, endorsed ‘Observations on the Two Lotteries of 1694 and 1710– Sent to Dr Davenant circ. 8 Dec. 1710’.

46 P.R.O., T.64/302. Francis Scobell, the experienced High Tory M.P. for Launceston, had made his proposal to the Commons' Committee of Ways and Means.

47 E.g. he claimed the general national income was in 1711 only 39 mns, 4½ mns less than he had believed it to be at the Revolution. Such evidence as that in 1709 it had taken a mere four hours to attract £2 mn in subscriptions to a new Bank loan to the government—more than Charles II's ministers could normally expect from the produce of two years' ordinary revenue—apparently left him unimpressed.

48 He appears to have calculated that the population had fallen by 1711 close to 5,300,000.

49 Davenant's attitude was much the same: see Works, i, 132 (written October 1697).

50 Of Cambridge and Huntingdon. He later attended Clarenceux on the final London Visitation of 1687. Chalmers, App., pp. 16–17.

51 See especially B.J., p. 275.

52 Ibid., p. 241: draft to Sir Stephen Fox, 19 December 1695.

53 Ibid., pp. 1, 240.

54 For my hypothesis about King's methods, and further comments on his total income figure, see below pp. 61–62 and n. 90.

55 The Crisis of Aristocracy (1st edn., Oxford, 1965), p. 762Google Scholar.

56 P.R.O., T.64/302: notebook, p. 14. Office-holding alone was a major element in aristocratic wealth. In 1714 at least 42 English peers held office (civil or military) or pension: the emoluments were very rarely less than £1,000 p.a. (the minimum pension for a nobleman). In many cases the rewards amounted to £3,000–4,000 p.a. Holmes, G., British Polities in the Age of Anne (London, 1967), pp. 436–39Google Scholar.

57 Dukes of Newcastle, Bedford and Beaufort.

58 Dukes of Ormonde, Somerset and Devonshire (the latter with the aid of the Lord Steward's office) and Lord Brooke.

59 This was the version printed as ‘Scheme D’ in Davenant's Essay on the Probable Methods of making the People Gainers in the Balance of Trade (London, 1699)Google Scholar. The table is omitted from the Whitworth edition of Davenant's works. The differences between this revised version and the original version (in the form reproduced by Barnett, G. E., from B.L. Harl. MS. 1898 in Two Tracts by Gregory King, Baltimore, 1936)Google Scholar are laid out below in an appendix to this paper.

60 Chamberlayne, Edward, Angliae Notitia (18th edn., London 1694), p. 442Google Scholar.

61 Aylmer, G. E., The King's Servants (1st edn., London, 1961), p. 331CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This estimate is for 1633. It is amply borne out by local studies: e.g. the 31 baronets of Kent, c. 1640, had average incomes of £1,405 p.a. and the 28 baronets of Yorkshire £1,536 p.a. Everitt, A., Change in the Provinces: The Seventeenth Century (Leicester, 1969), p. 55Google Scholar, drawing on his own work on Kent and that of J. T. Cliffe on York-shire. Cf. Cliffe, J. T., The Yorkshire Gentry (London, 1969), chs. 2, 5Google Scholar, passim.

62 Beckett, J. V., ‘Landownership in Cumbria, c. 1680 – c. 1750’ (Lancaster Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1975)Google Scholar.

63 £450 P.a.

64 This margin may be conservative. It is based partly on early seventeenth-century evidence (e.g. Aylmer's estimate for 1633, op. cit., p. 331, is £500 p.a.), partly on my own awareness of the sizeable flock of esquires in the ‘great commoner’ class of the county élites (£2,000–£15,000 p.a.) by c. 1700. I hope to develop this point in a forthcoming essay on the early eighteenth-century gentry.

65 Cf. Aylmer and Everitt, loc. cit.

66 Among the tycoons of the 1690s who had been knighted before the Revolution were Henry Johnson, William Ashurst, John Eyles, John Parsons, Benjamin New-land, John Bludworth, John Lethieullier, Robert Clayton, Patience Ward and Basil Firebrace. Even for the landed knights Chamberlayne estimated an average of £800 p.a. (Angliae Notitia, London, 1694 p. 442)Google Scholar. A Norwich brewer was thought to have earned a knighthood in 1711 when he had achieved £2,000 p.a. H.M.C. Portland MSS. v, 29.

67 Cf. the life-style of the attorneys, notaries, proctors and other officials who served the duchy court at Preston, of the local lawyers who handled most of the business of the assize towns, such as Leicester, and ‘the rich attorneys in great practice’ who clustered round the Cornish Stannary towns. On the other hand King presumably omitted knighted lawyers—most of them, by definition, success-ful—from this category.

68 Everitt, A., ‘The English Urban Inn, 1560–1760’, in Everitt, A. (ed.), Perspectives in English Urban History (London, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 The category of ‘merchants and traders by land’ which occurs in the frequently-quoted version of the table printed by Chalmers, App., pp. 48–49, is a copyist's freak peculiar to the manuscript version of the Observations which Chalmers used.

70 See note 3 above.

71 B.J., p. 280.

72 Especially as he admitted including householding dissenting ministers in his 10,000 clergymen. See Kashnor MSS., N.P.O., ch. 6, reply to Harley's ‘Clergymen 10,000. These too few…’

73 P.R.O., T.64/302: ‘Upon Mr. Scobel's Proposition…’ In this paper he postulates for fiscal purposes no fewer than 151,000 ‘traders’ (including overseas merchants), vintners, brewers and public-house keepers, and it is inconceivable that only a third of them were deemed heads of households. About a year earlier artificers in London, who were householders and who also kept apprentices. P.R.O. T.1/130/15F: paper endorsed ‘1709/10. Computation of the amount of the money taken with apprentices’.

74 P.R.O., T.64–302: notebook, pp. 14, 18v.; B.J., pp. 65, aog; ibid., p. 270, where the figures eradicated and the alternatives inserted are equally revealing. It seems highly likely that King's final choice of 330,000 (amended in 1698 to 310,000) was reached by a process of elimination, working downwards from a total number of solvent householders; though his figure of 40,000 for the ‘freeholders of the better sort’ was fixed at an earlier stage.

75 The ‘pseudo-gentry’ of modern historians' usage. See , B.J., pp. 67, 70Google Scholar.

76 E.g. B.J., pp. 59, 64,91.

77 Aylmer, G. E., The King's Servants, p. 331Google Scholar.

78 There were in 1688 approximately 30 holders of Scottish and Irish peerages whose main estates and normal residences were in England. Their numbers, and wealth, increased during William III's reign. In one of his early tables, dating from autumn 1695, King rightly included these peers, bringing his total for the lay nobility to a realistic 200. (B.J., pp. 280.) Subsequently, however, they slip out of the reckoning into some undiscoverable limbo.

79 George, D., England in Transition (Pelican edn., London, 1953), pp. 10, 16Google Scholar.

80 Cf. ibid., p. 16, with Davenant, , Works, ii, 203–04Google Scholar.

81 No other deduction seems possible from King's replies to two of Harley's queries and objections in 1697: viz. ‘Are these [King's figures for inhabited houses in provincial towns] estimated or numbred from the Hearth Books?’, and ‘It is to be doubted these Assessments [on Births, Marriages and Burials] are of no very g[ood] foundation’. Kashnor MSS., KP.O., ch. 1.

82 These were the Single Polls of 1689 and 1690 and the Quarterly Polls of 1692 and 1694.

83 Essay upon … the Balance of Trade. See Davenant, , Works, ii, 175Google Scholar.

84 One or two contacts in the Exchequer can surely be assumed; one ‘good friend’ we know of (Sansom) in the Customs, and another (George Stepney) in the diplomatic service. Also King himself was named a commissioner for London (one of over 300) in the 1694 Act for levying new duties on births, marriages and burials. B.L. Loan 57/73, fo 83; B.J., p. 171; Chalmers, App., pp. 23–34; London Inhabitants within the Walls (London Record Society, 1966)Google Scholar, intro. (by D. V. Glass), p. xvii.

85 This was more than strongly hinted in the earlier Burns Journal. Cf. Thirsk, J. and Cooper, J. P. (eds.), Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents (Oxford, 1972), pp. 770n. I, 785–86, 798,802–03Google Scholar. Harley proceeded to make corrections in King's (i.e. Davenant's) figures, adding for good measure the yield of the two remaining Polls; and King significantly began his reply: ‘In the consideration of the Poll bills (the true produce whereof you having favour'd me with, requires my particular acknowledgments) those two which I examined [i.e. the statutes themselves] were the first Twelve penny Poll and the first Quarterly Poll’. Kashnor MSS., N.P.O., ch. 9.

86 The pattern for William's reign was established by the first Poll Act of 1689 (1 Gul. and Mar., sess. 1, c. 13) which required the Exchequer to receive, in addition to the proceeds of the Poll, and the Receivers' accounts, (a) (from the Commissioners) ‘a true duplicate of the whole summe charged within every hundred, lath, wapentake, parish [or] ward … without naming the persons’, and (b) (from the Receivers-General) full schedules of defaulters, drawn up by the Collectors. The accounts are now in P.R.O., E.181, the duplicates and defaulters' schedules mostly in E.182. It is clear that the detailed assessments of individuals and families were intended to remain in the counties, and almost invariably did so. Under the vast umbrella of P.R.O., E.179 there are a fair number of detailed assessments relating to the first post-Restoration Poll Tax, 13 Chas. II (e.g. for parts of Devon, Cornwall, Lanes. Glos. etc.) and distinctly fewer relating to the levies of 18 and 29 Chas. II (e.g. for Hunts.); but by the 1690s the cupboard is almost totally bare.

87 For 1689 and 1692, see King to Harley inn. 85 above. For 1690, B.J., pp. 71–72.

88 B.J., pp. 59, 64 and passim: cf. Chalmers, , App., p. 59Google Scholar; Glass, ‘Two papers’, he. tit. King saw the assessments for 18 London parishes and 7 ‘outparishes’; some of them listed occupations, one (for St. Mary Le Bow) being a superb social document. London Inhabitants within the Walls 1695, pp. xvii–xix.

89 See Chalmers, App., pp. 59–60; Kashnor MSS., N.P.O.: King's replies to Harley's queries on ch. 9, ‘A Calculation of the Poll-Bills and some other taxes …’. Cf. , B.J., pp. 156–57Google Scholar.

90 For King's curious calculations on national wealth, see Kashnor MSS., N.P.O., ch. 6. Much of this long passage is conveniently reprinted, with some textual corruptions, in Thirsk and Cooper, pp. 791–95, but a key section on the land tax yield, including King's euphoric, unwarrantable deduction that ‘the omissions, the fraud, the favours and the great underrating complaind of in the North West is nothing so considerable as we are apt to believe’, is omitted. Modern economic historians would do well to look again at King's £43.5 mns, bearing in mind not only the dubiety of his methods but later figures for c. 1800 (both contemporary and otherwise), e.g. Deane and Cole's estimate for the total national income in 1801 at £232 ran. Even an error in the region of 3 mns was crucial for King's purposes, since it would be reflected overwhelmingly in his estimates for the higher income groups in his table.

91 E.g. he told Harley that he had based the number of ‘common seamen’ [50,000] on Sir Francis Brewster's estimate of merchant seamen in 1687. King's notes on Brewster's, Essay on Trade (London, 1696), pp. 75–80, are in B.J., p. 209Google Scholar.

92 ‘That the Poors rate exhibited by the Author of Wayes and Means p. 77 and 79 being at the latter end of K. Cha. ad reign abt. £665,000, we may estimate the same anno 88 at £680,000 and anno 95 at £740,000 …’ King to Harley, comments on ch. 9, Kashnor MSS., JV.P.O.

93 By applying a ratio appropriate to ‘poorer houses’. Ibid.

94 This was a point he was at great pains to emphasize to Harley: e.g., on the clergy, ‘I state them only with respect to “Heads of Families”’; on the common seamen, ‘so as to denominate them Masters of Families, in wch respect only they are here inserted’.

95 See. e.g., P.R.O., T.64/302, notebook, p. 17V: 21, 24 June 1695. The same sources, the Burns Journal suggests, may also have led him to make suppositions about the relative proportions of knights and baronets to esquires and of both to ‘gentlemen’.

96 Ibid., pp. 15V–17. He surveyed 395 households, including 206 in Sevenoaks town on 10–11 June.

97 B.J., pp. 280–81.

98 Among the detail jettisoned as superfluous or subsumed elsewhere in the table were such titbits as that King believed there to be 500 dissenting preachers in England, 800 goldsmiths (300 in London) and 200 London doctors. For these estimates, those cited in the text above, and others, see B.J., pp. 70–73, 365, 280–81.

99 B.J., p. 209.

100 On this point cf. Cressy, David, ‘Describing the Social Order of Elizabethan and Stuart England’, Literature and History, no. 3 (March 1976), p. 32Google Scholar.

101 See Davenant, , Works, i, 149Google Scholar; ii, 168—two very important, and largely un-noticed passages written in 1697 and 1699, in the second of which he speaks for his fellow political arithmeticians as well as for himself.

102 Chalmers, App., p. 31.

103 As Davenant recognized at the time, this was the table's most important message for contemporaries. Works, ii, 198.

104 Professor Donald Coleman first drew my attention to the significance of this continuity. Cressy argues, however (see n. 100 above), that ‘King's is the first ranking of the social order which combines reference to economic circumstances with a system of esteem’.

105 For example, we need many more social anatomies of provincial communi-ties, following the admirable models of G. H. Kenyon's work on Petworth and Marshall's, J. D. on Kendal. See Sussex Arch. Collections, xcvi (1958), xcviii (1960)Google Scholar; Trans. Cumberland and Westmorland Antiq. and Arch. Soc., lxxv, New Series (1975)Google Scholar.

106 The surviving poll tax assessments of 1661–1698 warrant a sustained assault. So do the lists of Land Tax commissioners incorporated in successive Aids and Land Tax bills from 1689: by 1700 they represent a nearly complete roll-call of the upper and middling gentry of every shire. Freemen's registers; jurors' lists; poll books for some of the large boroughs (e.g. Norwich, Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle) which supply voters' occupations as well as names; poor rate books; the militia muster rolls of the Seven Years' War—all await the systematic scrutiny of the social historian.