Aggregative Parish Register Analysis

Aggregative parish register analysis is the foundational technique of English historical demography, compiling the simple monthly and annual counts of baptisms, marriages and burials recorded in parish registers into continuous long-run series. Unlike family reconstitution, it does not identify individuals; it treats the registers as a barometer of the community's vital pulse. By assembling such counts from hundreds of parishes, Wrigley and Schofield built national series stretching back to 1538, the year English parochial registration began. From the relation between baptisms and burials one infers natural increase or decline; sharp spikes in burials betray mortality crises from famine or epidemic; the monthly distribution of events exposes the seasonality of marriage, conception and death. The method is comparatively economical, scalable across many parishes, and supplies the raw input series that inverse projection later transforms into full reconstructions of population size and structure.