Mortality of rural landless men before the black death: the Glastonbury head-tax lists.

Demographic studies of medieval English villages are often considered impracticable, since nearly all surviving documents were intended to help manorial lords control their property and supervise their local managers, not to record every birth or death. Only rarely did the king demand a lay subsidy from his subjects, enabling us to enumerate the better off, though not the whole population. Not until Thomas Cromwell began to create a local government system based on ecclesiastical parishes did the state concern itself with the registration of births, marriages and deaths, thereby providing us with the raw material for many local population studies. Demographic work relating to the period before 1538 depends on the survival of unusual documentation, or ingenious interpretation of indirect evidence, with a clear recognition of the assumptions behind any analysis; the validity of the results will always be limited, to social classes, age groups, regions or time periods.