People in Place: families, households and housing in early modern London

Primary tabs

Grant Holder: Dr Vanessa Harding; Matthew Davies; richard smith; Mark Merry
Project start date: 2003-10 Project end date: 2006-11
This project examines the crucial role of family and household in the social and economic transformations that took place in London in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Population growth, immigration, urbanisation, and commercialisation produced new patterns of sociability, gender relations, employment, and domestic lifestyle. The family was central to all these developments, but has been little studied in detail. The project will reconstruct and analyse the dense matrix of families, households, properties, and buildings in sample areas of the capital, and trace their evolution over time, gaining new insights into social structures and the agents and circumstances of change. The project's main practical objective is to create a database or set of linked database tables relating to properties, reconstituted families, households and householders for two sample areas (Cheapside and St Botolph Aldgate), for specific moments in the period c.1540-1710, and to undertake a complementary study of the parish of Clerkenwell developed around a complete family reconstitution of the parish for the same period.
Project Website
Subject domains: 
History
Era(s): 
Modern
Country/region(s): 
England
Methods usedCategory
2d Scanning and photographyData capture
Coding and standardisationData structuring and enhancement
Content analysisData analysis
Data miningData analysis
Data modellingData structuring and enhancement
Image enhancementData structuring and enhancement
Record linkagesData analysis
Searching and queryingData analysis
Topic Detection and TrackingData analysis
Statistical analysisData analysis
Use of existing digital dataData capture
Manual input and transcriptionData capture
Funding sources: 
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Content types created: 
Dataset/structured data, Still Image/Graphics, Text
Software tools used: 
Microsoft Access, Ultraedit, Adobe Photoshop
Source material used:  
1. Parish Registers (Guildhall Library, London; London Metropolitan Archive) 2. Nominative sources (taxation assessments etc.) (The National Archive; GL; Corporation of London Records Office; LMA) 3. Wills and personal papers (GL; TNA) 4. Property histories for Cheapside and Aldgate (Centre for Metropolitan History - see British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk ) 5. Records of property holding (GL; other repositories) Information from these sources has been variously transcribed, abstracted or encoded within the database for use both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Digital resource created:  
A relational database containing data on individuals and properties in the sample areas/periods, including information on vital events, property development, use and transfer, the composition of domestic groups, and individual wealth.
Access to digital resource:  
Open Access
Data Formats created: 
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), Microsoft Access Database (MDB), Tagged Image File Format (TIFF), Text file (TXT)
Metadata standards employed: 
Dublin Core, simple (DC)

Institutions affiliated with this project: 

UK HE institutions involved:
Birkbeck College
University of Cambridge
School of Advanced Study

Project staff and expertise: 

Principal staff member:Dr Vanessa Harding; Dr Matthew Davies; Professor Richard Smith
Other staff:Postdoctoral researcher(s) / Research assistant(s)
External expertise:


Metadata on this arts-humanities.net record
Author(s) of recordVanessa Harding
TitlePeople in Place: families, households and housing in early modern London
Record created2005-11-07
Record updated2011-01-14 16:22
URL of recordhttp://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2078
Citation of recordVanessa Harding: People in Place: families, households and housing in early modern London.
<http://www.arts-humanities.net/node/2078>
created: 2005-11-07, last updated 2011-01-14 16:22