From the 1676 compton census to the 1851 census of religious worship: Religious continuity or discontinuity?

Rural History

Volumn 8, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 55-89

  Crockett, Alasdair ^a   Snell, K D M ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CENSUS; DOCUMENTARY SOURCE; HISTORICAL STUDY; NONCONFORMITY; PAPISM; RELIGIOUS TRENDS;

UK;

EID: 0030699249     PISSN: 09567933     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0956793300001138     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. A. Whiteman, 'Compton census', in Schurer and Arkell, Surveying the People, p. 81.
2. Whiteman, Compton Census, p. lxxx, but she doubts that any serious omissions took place.
3. There are many ways of handling such data. For parish-level analyses, the most common method is to express the attendance and sittings data in relation to parochial population, as indexes of sittings or attendances. Thus a denominational 'index of total attendances' is the sum of attendances for the three possible services during the day, over parish population, multiplied by 100. An 'index of maximum attendance' uses only the denomination's maximum attendance for a comparable calculation. An 'index of sittings' uses in a similar way the total figure for denominational sittings in the parish. By contrast, 'percentage share measures' express a denomination's attendance or sittings data as a percentage of the parish total for all denominations. These and other measures have different properties that need not preoccupy us here. One needs to note that the source did not give numbers of attendants, but rather of attendances.
4. See Whiteman, Compton Census, pp. lix-lxxvi.
5. Our wider research analyses all the English and Welsh registration-district data; and secondly the parish-level documentation for fifteen counties, twelve of which are used for this article. The other three counties (omitted here because they lack adequate Compton data) are Dorset, Lancashire and Northumberland. This forms part of an extensive project examining the 1851 religious and Sunday school data in conjunction with a wide array of socio-economic and demographic variables, mainly for the mid nineteenth century, but with some earlier religious sources.
6. . On the Hearth Tax data, see in particular N. Alldridge (ed.), The Hearth Tax: Problems and Possibilities (Hull, 1983); J. Patten, 'The Hearth Taxes, 1662-89', Local Population Studies, 7 (1971), 14-27.
7. . On the Hearth Tax data, see in particular N. Alldridge (ed.), The Hearth Tax: Problems and Possibilities (Hull, 1983); J. Patten, 'The Hearth Taxes, 1662-89', Local Population Studies, 7 (1971), 14-27.
8. See her discussion in Compton Census, pp. lii-liv, lxxxvi-xci.
9. Additional tests were carried out to check for rounding based on multiples of twelve. The results were all negative (i.e. very close to the 8.3% expected by chance alone), confirming Whiteman's judgement on the possibility of this form of tabulation.
10. Probabilities (p) of 0.0000 are of course highly significant results, (p = 0.05 corresponds to a 95% confidence level).
11. The index of total attendances was also used (as well as the percentage share), but the results were almost identical. For reasons of consistency with the Compton ratio measure, only the percentage share measure is reported here.
12. Rank correlation was the preferable method for this data, which is often non-normally distributed statistically.
13. This is probably the best summary measure, given the lack of absolute comparability across all parishes of the Compton data.
14. Spearman and Pearson correlations were also conducted for these religious groups using the 1851 index of attendances against the 1676 data, and the results were very similar to those reported here. In both these exercises, all Compton-documented parishes were included in the analysis, and this involved making use of many places which in 1676 had no nonconformist or Papist presence. Correlations were also undertaken by only including parishes which had Compton figures greater than zero for nonconformists or Papists. One could debate the methodology and historical interpretation of these differing methods, but the overall coefficients resulting were alike for all procedures.
15. The computerised cartography was carried out using ESRI's ARCVIEW software package linked to the SPSS dataset, the parish boundaries having been originally digitised using the GIMMS software package.
16. E.I. Watkin, Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 (1950), p. 110.
17. The Mormons and the 1851 census category of 'other isolated congregations' were excluded from this calculation.
18. This strongly dissenting parish was perched on the border, in the historical county of Warwickshire, but in the registration-district county of Leicestershire: An example perhaps of strategic use of the county boundary to help avoid local authorities' jurisdiction.
19. Parishes like Scalford, Goady Marwood, Waltham on the Wolds, Thorpe Arnold, Saltby, Sproxton, Coston, Edmondthorpe, Saxby or Wymondham.
20. All calculations in this section only use the 1,463 parishes which had data for 1676, so as to keep the parochial basis for comparison over time identical. If however one takes all 1,990 parishes in the same counties for which data is available in 1851, the equivalent figure here would be even higher, at 19.3 per cent for 'old dissent'.