An eighteenth century ‘census’ of Hexham.

Dr Greg Finch is a historian based near Hexham who has written on various early modern North-East of England topics. He is currently preparing a book on the rise of the Blackett family in seventeenth and early eighteenth century Newcastle for publication later this year.

Amongst the papers of the Allgood estate in the Northumberland Archives is a fragile and unexplained listing of over 600 households giving, for each of them, the name of the head of household, the number of men, number of women and number of children under the age of sixteen (ZAL 84/16). Such counts are rare for this period, certainly in Northumberland. When first catalogued in 1960 it was described only as ‘Census? Nunwick [the Allgood country seat at Simonburn on the North Tyne]?’ More recently a typed transcript of the document by Sue Wood, Head of Archives, also filed with the Allgood catalogue, described it as ‘Unidentified census, probably Hexham, n[o] d[ate] c.1740.’ As I live near Hexham I’ve been exploring this further in the hope of confirming its identification and date.

As far as the location is concerned, many of the names given of heads of households are found elsewhere as residents of Hexham. 70 of the 620 heads of households listed also appear as Hexham residents who voted in the 1748 Parliamentary by-election, as shown in The Northumberland Poll Book… 1747-8, 1774, 1826, (1826). Other names appear in the parish registers (NRO EP/184) and these also help to narrow the range of dates within which the census must have been drawn up.

Mary Bearpark, the twelve-year-old daughter of William Bearpark, was buried at Hexham in May 1740. William’s household can be found in the census, but it contained no children under the age of sixteen, so it seems almost certain that the document was drawn up after May 1740.

Only two months later, the burial of ‘Mr. Skurfield, minister of the meeting house’ was entered in the register, which can perhaps be linked to the empty household of ‘Mr Scofield’ given in the census. This might therefore move the earliest date of the document to July 1740. Since the house was shown as unoccupied, his death might have occurred recently.

As far as the latest date is concerned, the family of Thomas Lambert is shown headed by him in the census, but he was buried in December 1741. So the document was probably compiled between the summer of 1740 and the end of 1741, and perhaps nearer the start of that period than its end.

Why was it drawn up? A strong clue lies in the separation of counts of children under the age of sixteen from adult men and women. Sixteen was the usual age of communion in the Church of England at the time. The number of potential and actual communicants was a question commonly asked of parish clerics by their ecclesiastical hierarchy every three years. One such visitation covered the entire Archbishopric of York in 1743, including Hexham, so it is possible that the previous visitation took place in 1740. It therefore seems likely that the census was taken for church purposes, but this does not explain why it should have ended up in the Allgood archives rather than those of the parish.

However, different branches of the Allgood family had often occupied civic offices in Hexham from the seventeenth century, and Thomas Allgood was bailiff of Hexham manor between 1736 and 1741. This was a role closely linked in practice to that of the parish vestry, the ‘Four and Twenty’, which set and collected the town rates and was therefore familiar with drawing up lists of local households. The census might have been taken primarily for church purposes but it may also have been of wider use in support of later rate assessments.

What of its coverage? Until 1764 Hexham parish included rural Hexhamshire to the south of the town, so if the listing was drawn up to support a visitation return the whole parish might have been included. Fortunately we can compare the total number of households (621) with those declared by the parish curate, William Graham, in his reply to Archbishop Herring’s visitation queries of 1743 (775). We know that the latter figure includes rural Hexhamshire. The difference of 154 households is a feasible total for ‘the Shire’ in comparison to the total of 150 given for it in the 1673/4 Hearth Tax assessment and the 164 enumerated in the 1821 census. So the 1740 listing covers Hexham town only.

The census is incomplete, for some of the right hand side of the manuscript has been nibbled by rodents or otherwise lost. [Before it came into the archives! Ed.] This means that while the counts of males and females over the age of sixteen are all still present, the number of children is missing for 44 of the 621 households (7%). The best that can be done here is to estimate the number of missing children based on the ratio of children to adults in the other households. This adds 50-60 children to the total. Hexham’s population was about 2,550 in 1740. 784 adult men were counted, and 1,007 women. While this might seem quite imbalanced, it was actually reasonably common in many early modern English towns.

The largest household was Sir Edward Blackett’s at Hexham Abbey, with 29 in total. Seventeen were family members, Sir Edward and his wife Mary (previously Roberts), her son Nicholas, his wife, and their children, all of whom are listed in a Roberts family tree given in Hinds’ Volume 3 of the History of Northumberland (1896, p.297). The remaining twelve were presumably servants. Other prominent local residents’ households included the seventeen in Lancelot Allgood’s substantial house overlooking the Market Place, ten at the Reverend Andrewes in Hexham House and nine at John Aynsley’s home in Fore Street. At the other end of the scale were 32 houses with only a single occupant, (of the households for which records are complete), 25 of them women. The town’s workhouse apparently contained just five male occupants. On average there were 4.1 people per household, confirming Hexham as a town made up mostly of small nuclear families.

A date of 1740-1 for this census places it just about half way between two other two dates for which Hexham’s population can be estimated – 1673/4, from a Hearth Tax assessment, and the first national census of 1801. A longer article on what this tells us about the town’s growth will appear in the 2021 issue of the Hexham Historian journal due to be published by Hexham Local History Society in the autumn.