The historian Sir Tony Wrigley, who has died aged 90, transformed our understanding of the industrial revolution. He did this by mining in British history for a rich ore that nobody had previously thought usable: England’s parish registers of christenings, marriages and burials, created by Thomas Cromwell in 1538.
Before Wrigley, our knowledge of population change throughout the period before the first decennial census of 1801 was patchy. Population was growing strongly from 1801 onwards but it was not known with any certainty when this had begun to occur, nor how exactly population change might have related to the early phases of growth in towns and in the iron, coal and cotton industries, or the controversial processes of enclosure.
