> Dear All,
>
> I am involved in a project on the impact of the railways on rural
> society in the period before the First World War. As part of these we
> want to use the Agricultural Returns which annually published
> parish-level details of the amounts of crops and livestock in every
> parish in England & Wales. The parish returns are available in the
> National Archives as MAF68 but if we were to digitise them we would
> have to be very selective because of the volume of data. The stats are
> also available at county-level in various published sources but these
> are too aggregate to be useful.
> In a review of L. Napolitan's "A century of agricultural statistics"
> published by TW Fletcher in the Economic History Review in 1969 there
> is a reference to the Agricultural Returns also being available at
> Poor Law Union level. He states "The historian's continuing need for
> the specific and the concrete is to a degree catered for in the
> pre-1914 volumes. But in the last resort he will have to explore the
> original Parish Returns, which, incidentally, were usefully aggregated
> into Poor Law Unions down to 1929, but of the existence of these the
> centenary volume gives no indication." Working with data at Union
> level would be manageable but we have not been able to track these
> down or to get in to get in touch with TW Fletcher.
>
> I am wondering if anybody knows whether these data are really
> available and, if so, where we can access them.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Ian Gregory
>
>
>
> Digital Humanities
> c/o Department of History
> Lancaster University
> Lancaster
> LA1 4YG
>
> T: +44 (0)1524 594967
> F: +44 (0)1524 846102
> E: [log in to unmask]
>
|