The stillbirth rate in early modern England.

Over the last 40 years or so English parish registers have been extensively analysed to create a range of demographic measures relating to mortality, fertility and nuptiality. This process has enabled the major population changes to be revealed from 1538, the date when parish registers were first ordered to be kept, until 1837, when a national system of civil registration was introduced.1 In addition to providing simple lists of baptisms, burials and marriages occurring within the church, some parish registers, for certain periods, contain a wealth of additional details relating to age, occupation, place of residence and cause of death. A few registers even recorded stillbirths, babies who died before, during or at birth. Stillbirths are a neglected, but important, demographic phenomenon since stillbirth rates (SBRs) are linked with infant, and especially neonatal, mortality (deaths within the first 28 days), birthing processes, the mother’s health and patterns of fertility. Indeed, when Wrigley sought to account for increases in fertility during the eighteenth century he argued that, ‘there was a large fall in the stillbirth rate in England in the course of the “long” eighteenth century, and that this in turn caused the mean interval between births to shorten and thus marital fertility to rise’.2 Wrigley could not confirm this association empirically, but nationally SBRs would need to have been in the region of 100– 125 per 1,000 birth events during the late seventeenth century in order for the resulting increase in fertility to have occurred.3 Curiously, given the importance of this topic, there has been no systematic attempt to calculate a representative SBR directly from parish registers. This note seeks to begin this process: it aims to draw attention to the importance of stillbirths and it presents rates derived from a range of parish registers.