This is a book about the character, causes and consequences of population change between the late thirteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Its focus is England, but this case is set in context through chapters which compare English material with evidence from Scotland, Wales, various parts of southern and northern Continental Europe, and Russia.

Overall, these five centuries were a period of demographic growth in England and Great Britain. Bruce Campbell’s estimates presented below suggest that the population of Great Britain almost doubled between 1290 and 1801, rising from approximately 5.8 million to around 10.8 million, while that of England rose from 4.75 million to 8.6 million (Table 2.1). Between those two dates, it is possible to identify two separate phases of long-term population change. The first is a 400-year ‘long demographic cycle’, usually described as broadly Malthusian in character and lasting from c.1300 to c.1700, during which the population level declined from its medieval peak, rose strongly in the sixteenth century, and began to plateau once more by the later seventeenth century. The second phase is an eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century era of much more rapid population growth. Commenting on this phase of growth in his chapter below, Tony Wrigley notes that between 1731 and 1821 the population increased from 5.41 million to 11.46 million, or by a striking 112 per cent.

These different phases of England’s demographic history form the essential background to the studies that follow. Yet the primary concern of this volume is not the charting of aggregate population trends, or even the detailed statistical investigation of the demographic processes underlying those trends, a style of analysis that at times causes historical demography to appear to be, as Campbell notes, a ‘technical and highly specialised subject’. Instead, the principal objective of the book is to present new research and arguments which shed light on the historical contexts of demographic decisions broadly defined: decisions about marriage, migration, household formation, retirement, child-bearing, work and saving. In this Introduction, we provide an overview of the chapters which follow, and also tease out a fundamental conceptual question that is present throughout the book as a whole. Drawing on the title of Sheilagh Ogilvie’s chapter, one might say that our theme is the oscillation between choices and constraints in shaping demographic and economic behaviour in the past.