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KING, GREGORY

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(1648–1712)

Gregory King was one of the earliest and most accomplished exponents of political arithmetic. He is described by Richard Stone (1997, p. xxii) as "the first great economic statistician" and the "ablest follower" of John Graunt (1620–1674). Born in Lichfield, England, at age fifteen King became clerk to a leading official of the College of Arms, the body concerned with the assignment of coats of arms and with investitures and similar ceremonies. In other employment he acquired skills as a mapmaker and surveyor, a better source of income. Over subsequent years he advanced to a senior level in the profession of heraldry, eventually being appointed to the positions known as Rouge Dragon and Lancaster Herald. An often-published engraving shows him in the extravagant costume of Rouge Dragon Pursuivant.

King is known mostly for statistical investigations of the population and economy of England in his day, the innovative accounting schemes he devised for those studies, and his early specification of a demand curve. Little of this work was published in his lifetime, and all of it was in the nature of an engrossing hobby, an unpaid sideline to his many other activities.

His major work, dating from 1696 but first printed only in 1802, was Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England. The Observations along with King's notebooks contain an astonishing array of statistical information, sought out and systematically presented–in historian Peter Laslett's words, "the first conscious and deliberate attack on social opacity which was ever made" (1985, p. 353). The statistics on population structure include classifications of population by occupation, sex, marital status, age group, and other characteristics. A facsimile of the 1696 manuscript and together with one of the notebooks was published in 1973 in the Pioneers of Demography series edited by Laslett. Another, apparently earlier, version of the manuscript exists with the variant title Observations and Conclusions, Natural and Political, Upon the State and Condition of England.

King's estimate of the population of England and Wales in 1695–5.5 million–compares with the Wrigley—Schofield figure of 4.95 million. His estimate of the average age of the population was 27.5 years. He also produced estimates of continental and world population at the end of the seventeenth century, based on assumed densities by latitude; these accord moderately well with modern historical estimates, although that may reflect the similarity of informed guesses in the absence of much new information.

See also: Demography, History of; Graunt, John; Petty, William; Population Thought, History of.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED WORKS BY GREGORY KING.

King, Gregory. [c. 1695] 1973. Notebook. Unpublished manuscript. Facsimile in The Earliest Classics: John Graunt and Gregory King, ed. Peter Laslett. Farnborough, Eng.: Gregg International.

——. [1696] 1973. Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England. Unpublished manuscript. Facsimile in The Earliest Classics: John Graunt and Gregory King, ed. Peter Laslett. Farnborough, Eng.: Gregg International. First printed as an appendix in George Chalmers, An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain (London, 1802).

SELECTED WORKS ABOUT GREGORY KING.

Glass, David V. 1965. "Two Papers on Gregory King." In Population in History, ed. David V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley. London: Arnold.

Holmes, Geoffrey. 1977. "Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-industrial England." Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 27: 41–68.

Laslett, Peter. 1985. "Gregory King, Robert Malthus and the Origins of English Social Realism." Population Studies 39: 351–362.

——. 1992. "Natural and Political Observations on the Population of the Late Seventeenth Century England: Reflections on the Work of Gregory King and John Graunt." In Surveying the People: The Interpretation and Use of Document Sources for the Study of Population in the Later Seventeenth Century, ed. Kevin Schurer and Tom Arkell. Oxford, Eng.: Leopard's Head.

Stone, Richard. 1997. Some British Empiricists in the Social Sciences, 1650–1900. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.

GEOFFREY MCNICOLL