English Marriage Patterns Revisited

**Roger Schofield is Director of the ESRC Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, 27 Trumpington Street, Cambridge, England, CB2 1QA, and currently working with E. A. Wrigley on family reconstitution data. In the academic year 1984-1985 he is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar in Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (CA 91125). David Weir’s ingenious and path-breaking article on the course of nuptiality in England before and during industrialisation, published in the previous issue of this journal, addresses a central issue in English demographic and economic history (Weir, 1984). In his paper Weir tested and refined both the reconstruction and the interpretation of the empirical historical record that was presented in The Population History of England (Wrigley and Schofield, 1981). In this book we argued that changes in population growth rates were largely determined by changes in fertility and that the latter, in turn, were almost entirely determined by changes in nuptiality. Since nuptiality appeared to have responded to changes in the standard of living, it emerged as the critical variable in a Malthusian &dquo;preventive check&dquo; cycle, whereby English population growth rates in the past adjusted to