CENSUS

CENSUS. The word census is a Latin term, and efforts during the early modern period to conduct population surveys were historically descended from the Roman census process, which was based on sworn declarations of the age, number of family members, and property of individual households. Early modern political writers were impressed by the Roman state's ability to enumerate and assess its subject population. Because the equation of a commonwealth's population with its strength had by the later sixteenth century become a commonplace, enthusiastic recommendations of the census were made by a host of thinkers, including Jean Bodin (1576), Giovanni Botero (1588), Justus Lipsius (1589), and other political thinkers. Yet, if the historical memory of the Roman census had survived the collapse of the Roman Empire, the administrative ability to actually conduct one did not. As a result, full territorial enumerations were only sporadically carried out in most of Europe until the end of the eighteenth century.

The most significant exception to this generalization was Italy itself, where true censuses (as opposed to household listings and tax surveys) were already being carried out by the end of the Middle Ages. The Italian city-states were especially (and unsurprisingly) advanced in this regard, and censuses had already been carried out in Florence (1380), Treviso (1384), Padua (1411), Verona (1473), Reggio (1473), Palermo (1479), Brescia (1493), Parma (1508), Venice (1509), and Rome (1526). Enumerations were also conducted in Italian territorial principalities, including the duchies of Ferrara (1431) and Mantua (1451), and in Sicily (1501). The mature administration of these censuses reflects the much greater sophistication of public administration in Italy than elsewhere in Europe, and early modern Italian censuses were much more than simple head counts. The Sicilian censuses, of which there were fourteen between 1501 and 1747, listed every individual by name and relationship to the head of the household, and separated out those males of arms-bearing age. By the sixteenth century, Italian censuses often recorded detailed information on the age structure of the population, and the exact age of every inhabitant was recorded at Pozzuoli (1489), Sorrento (1561), and Carpi (1591). By comparison, the English and American censuses did not list every individual by name until 1841 and 1850, respectively. It is also worth noting that the registration of births began in Siena in 1381, in Florence in 1450, and in Bologna in 1459, whereas parish registers do not survive before the mid- to late-sixteenth century in Protestant Europe, and before the seventeenth century in most of Catholic northern Europe.

Italian precocity did not mean, however, that the rest of Europe had ceased to carry out population surveys altogether, and the early modern period generated a mass of such material. Thus, population surveys begin to appear on monastic estates in France and Germany as early as the ninth century, and by the later Middle Ages full population counts were taken in several German cities, for example in Nuremberg (1449), Nördlingen (1459), and Strasbourg (1473), although these were not followed up on a regular basis.

Especially at the level of the local territory or community, a huge variety of other surveys were conducted with ever greater frequency during the early modern period. Muster rolls listing all men eligible for military service were drawn up on an irregular basis in various European communities. There was also a variety of specialized censuses, such as the Norwich Census of the Poor (1570) and the Castilian educational census of 1764, which was designed to determine the number of students who were attending various education institutions. In the Holy Roman Empire a number of territorial authorities (for example, the Bishop of Speyer in 1530, and the monastery of Ottobeuren in 1548, 1556, 1564, and 1586) compiled Leibeigenbücher, 'serf registers', which recorded the free (or servile) status of every man, woman, and child in the territory. During the sixteenth century both Catholic and Protestant episcopal authorities began conducting parish-by-parish counts of the number of communicants (all persons over twelve to fourteen years of age), and these surveys became ever more detailed and systematic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Still more detailed was the liber status animarum, or listing of each parish resident, which the papacy, in 1614, ordered every parish priest to maintain. These listings were less commonly compiled than the more familiar baptismal, marriage, and burial registers, but many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parish listings have survived from Catholic Europe, and in a few areas (Malta after 1687, for example) complete listings have survived for every single parish. Similar records were maintained in many Protestant areas. In England, listings have survived from scattered locations from the later sixteenth century, although it is a rare parish where more than one such survey has survived. More systematic efforts were undertaken on the Continent, especially in Sweden, where parish registration had begun in 1686. In 1749, the Lutheran parish clergy in Sweden and Finland (then a Swedish possession) were further required to maintain a continuously updated list of parish residents and submit quinquennial tabulations to the Tabellverket (Tabulation Office) of population numbers broken down by sex, age, marital status, occupation, and social status, in addition to annual statistics of births, marriages, deaths, and (in the nineteenth century) migration.

By far the most common type of early modern enumeration, however, was a survey of hearths or heads of households, made almost always for fiscal reasons. As with the census itself, the earliest such territorial hearth tax surveys were carried out in Italy, as at Pavia (1250), Pistoia (1255), Perugia (1278), Padua (c. 1281), Reggio Emilia (1315), Florence (1351), Sicily (1374), and Venice (1379). The Florentine catasto (tax survey) of 1427 went so far as to record not only the name, age, marital status, and profession of the household head, but also the number of other individuals in the family, the type of residence (owned or rented), the number and value of livestock, the value of private and public investments, and the capitalized value of real property.

Beyond Italy, England stands out as a kingdom of very early tax surveys. Because of its unusually centralized monarchy, national tax surveys began in England as early as 1086 (William I's famous Domesday Book), and were repeated with varying degrees of completeness in 1279–1280 (the Hundred Rolls), 1377 (Edward III's Poll Tax), 1524–1525 (Henry VIII's Lay Subsidy), and 1662–1674 (Charles II's Hearth Taxes). Elsewhere in Europe full territorial tax surveys were conducted in France (1328), the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire (1495), Portugal (1527), Bohemia (1653–1655), Moravia (1655–1657), Ireland (1659), and Austria (1749–1750). Before the eighteenth century these large-scale surveys were only infrequently attempted; thus in Portugal there was only a single national survey between 1527 and 1736, and this one (in 1636) was seriously inaccurate. Outside of Italy, perhaps the most regular set of national household surveys were conducted in Castile between 1528 and 1536, 1541, 1552, 1561, 1571, 1587, 1591, and 1596, and were supplemented by the so-called relaciones topográficas of 1575–1578, a set of questions about local customs, economic conditions, and institutional characteristics administered in each locality in the kingdom. Even then, the frequency of survey fell off in the following century.

Local hearth and household tax surveys were much more common than their national counterparts and grew in frequency over the course of the early modern period. Nevertheless, there were significant regional differences in detail. Thus, in northern France, local taille (direct property tax) rolls recorded little more than the payment made by each household (and even they are rare before 1650). By contrast, German tax surveys often itemized and valuated each item of a household's property, and the level of its debts, as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century.

The close connection between census taking and taxation was, of course, recognized both by administrators and those they surveyed, and fears of excessive taxation would move the British Parliament to reject a census bill as late as 1753. Nevertheless, by the end of the eighteenth century the census was recognized as an essential tool of government, and regular population surveys were initiated (or at least attempted) in Norway (1769), France (1774, 1790), Denmark (1787), Belgium (1797), England (1801), Bavaria (1818), Saxony (1834), and Austria (1850).

CENSUS

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