A trio of publications made 1964 an auspicious year for historical population studies. Hollingsworth’s innovative reconstruction of the demography of the British peerage over four centuries linked information on birth, marriage and death for a clearly defined and well-documented social group. Lawton deployed census returns for Great Britain in 1801 to map the distribution of population across the entire island at the earliest date for which comprehensive and relatively reliable data are available. And, in Tenure and mobility, Raftis made pioneering use of manorial court rolls to reconstitute the social and demographic experience of latemedieval customary tenants. That same year, Wrigley and Laslett founded the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (CAMPOP), dedicated primarily to researching the demographic history of England. Then in 1965, in The world we have lost, Laslett explored many of the themes that CAMPOP researchers would subsequently investigate and in 1966, reconstitution studies were launched in earnest with the appearance of Wrigley’s path-breaking demographic analysis of Colyton (Devon) from 1541 to 1871.

Scholarly priorities quickly shifted from description of population trends and patterns to analysis of demographic behaviour, with a corresponding change of focus from national populations to individual communities and social groups. Medievalists responded with a spate of manorial case studies. Thus, Razi’s 1980 reconstruction of social and demographic trends on the manor of Halesowen (Worcestershire) from 1270 to 1400 explicitly attempted to achieve with court rolls the kind of analytical insights into individual life-cycle decisions and actions which early modernists were demonstrating could be obtained from parish registers. Henceforth, aggregate studies, such as Wrigley and Schofield’s Population history of England, would be painstakingly constructed from the bottom up based on detailed microstudies and individual reconstitutions. The methodological rigour demanded by this approach meant that historical demography shed the popular appeal with which Laslett had endowed it and became a technical and highly specialised subject.

The earlier enterprise to quantify and map the country’s population at benchmark points in time, championed above all by Darby, fell out of favour. In any case, its main tasks had largely been accomplished (or so it then seemed). The first British censuses had been mapped, albeit at the scale of English and Welsh registration districts and Scottish counties, by Lawton.