Simon Smith - British Census, The (Shire Library)

T he word census comes from the Latin censere : to estimate, assess. For many, the earliest mention of a census dates back to a chilly December afternoon attending a carol service in a church or school hall. The reading recounting the birth of Jesus begins, A decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. These opening words of the second chapter of St Lukes Gospel are made clearer in later translations: the world was the Roman world, which extended to Palestine in the first century AD, and taxed meant registered or counted.

Such a public declaration of personal circumstances would have aroused suspicion then, as it did through successive generations, as citizens have feared underhand motives for such a head count. Exactly who was being assessed and for what purpose in that gospel story where Joseph and the heavily pregnant Mary travelled to Bethlehem is not entirely clear. The actual population of the Roman Empire probably numbered between 5 and 12 million, depending on whether only the men were counted, or women and children too.

This is not the first reference to counting people in the Bible. At the start of the aptly named Book of Numbers, God tells Moses to count those Israelites in the desert who are capable of bearing arms and are fit for military duty (there were 603,500 of them). He was instructed to take the sum of all the congregation of the children of Israel and judge which males of 20 years old and more were able to go forth to war in Israel. Thus, Moses became the first known census enumerator. This process of assessing men fit to fight in order to raise an army finds its parallel some 2,500 years later when the need to find troops to fight Napoleons forces was one of the main justifications for the first British census in 1801.

The Census at Bethlehem , as portrayed by Pieter Bruegel in 1566.

As one might expect, the Romans did carry out a population survey during their occupation of Britain from the first to the fifth century, but no detailed records have survived. In fact, none do survive until the eleventh century. When William the Conqueror landed in Sussex in 1066, one of his first tasks was to determine how many people lived here, what tax they had paid to his predecessor Edward the Confessor, and how much land he himself owned. In 1085, the order was given to make the assessment. That famous historical resource the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the king was staying at Gloucester with his witan (counsellors) and discussing ownership of land and property. He accordingly sent men out into every shire with the task of ascertaining how much land and cattle the king owned in each hundred (see ) and how much revenue each ought to provide. His men were also charged to write down how much land his archbishops, bishops and earls owned.

An extract of some of the entries from the Domesday Book . William Is wide-ranging survey of his lands was a massive undertaking.

This great land survey, not known as the Domesday Book until some hundred years later (because its irrefutable contents were believed to last until the Day of Judgement), was a massive undertaking, as over 3,400 towns and villages were recorded. Remarkably, the whole work seems to have been copied in the same hand (by just one scribe), over the course of a single year. For assessment purposes the country was divided into seven regions or circuits and in each hundred within the circuit the sheriff, priest, reeve and six villeins swore an oath to disclose who held what. By 1087 the work was finished. However, considerable swathes of England were missing, including Winchester, London and the whole of Northumbria. It is important to remember that this was not a head count; it was land and ownership that the king was interested in. Little Domesday , a sort of companion volume, contained details of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, even taking account of how many cows, pigs and sheep were to be found in each hundred.

HIDES AND HUNDREDS

In the early medieval period, although no centralised mechanism existed for counting the population of the whole of England, the areas where the people lived were clearly delineated. Counties (or shires, with a shire reeve, or sheriff as an official), which we still recognise today, were divided into smaller subdivisions for various administrative and judicial purposes. The largest of these was a hundred, a word of obscure origin, but popularly supposed to refer to a hundred hides. A hide was an ancient unit of land considered sufficient to support one peasant family. This unit is referred to in the tenth-century epic poem Beowulf , wherein the eponymous hero is given by Hygelac, King of the Geats, 7,000 hides, hall and throne as a reward for his courageous deeds, most notably the killing of the monster Grendel.

The parish, first used in the thirteenth century, was a purely ecclesiastical term to denote an area of land with a church at its heart, where the rector or vicar (acting on behalf of the landowner) would collect tithes from those who worked the land within it. Until the Local Government Act of 1894, the hundred was the only unit between a parish and a county, except in Sussex, where groups of hundreds are called rapes, and in Kent, where the term lathe was used.

A seventeenth-century map of the rapes of Sussex.
Another term to add to this vocabulary of county subdivisions is the wapentake. Originally a Norse term, meaning the taking of weapons and implying a conspicuously warlike culture, it was the equivalent of hundred in English counties within the Danelaw (those north of a line stretching roughly from London to Liverpool) where the laws of the invading Danes prevailed.

Williams motive in compiling this record was not for historical purposes; it was primarily to raise money. He wanted to know who held land in King Edward the Confessors time ( tempore regis Edwardi ), how much they paid him and, importantly, who could pay more. Furthermore, the money that had previously been raised to pay the Danegeld, the protection money to Nordic invaders, was now to come to him. King Harold, whom he had overcome at the Battle of Hastings, was airbrushed out of the picture altogether in the narrative, despite having been on the throne for 9 months; there is merely the occasional mention of eorl Harald.

The parish chest at St Andrews, Hoo, Suffolk. Precious parish records would be stored in chests such as this.

At the end of it all, it was revealed that about one fifth of England was owned by the king, one quarter by the Church, and about a half by Williams French or Flemish followers who had crossed with him in 1066. The startling conclusion was that the majority of the land was owned by eleven men, out of an estimated population of around 1.7 million.

For all its incompleteness, inaccuracies and failure to state how many people actually lived in post-Conquest England, the Domesday Book was an extraordinary achievement unmatched in its scope until the first official census in 1801.