The Social Topography of a Rural Community

Abstract The Social Topography of a Rural Community is the first study of any of the two dozen seventeenth-century English communities which have occupational data recorded in a census and analyses that listing in conjunction with a contemporaneous estate map to offer a pioneering experiment in the spatial history of social and economic relations. The approach taken here is influenced by the ‘spatial turn’ in its emphasis on the endowment of specific spaces with ‘a sense of place’ as they were inhabited and experienced; and on the flow of people, goods, and information through space. The substantive chapters take thirteen of the 176 households in the Warwickshire parish of Chilvers Coton as emblematic of the pattern of social, economic, and spatial relations in the parish, and moves between and through them following the itinerary of the jurors of the manorial court of survey who in December 1684 collected information about the names, ages, and professions of each of the householders and the ages and kin relationships of those who were co-resident with them. The studies of each of these households are in part biographical, structured by narratives of birth, migration, marriage, parenthood, bereavement, and death. They are also, however, spatial and material. Particular attention is paid in each case to the location of the specific household in the landscape and its relationship both to its neighbours and to significant sites of authority, labour, leisure, and sociability in the village. Cumulatively, the project reconstructs the lived experience of economic change in a rural community on the cusp of industrialization.