The emergence of historical demography in the decades since the Second World War has rendered English historians only too familiar with the demographic facts of mortality in the Tudor and Stuart period. The jagged peaks in burial statistics derived from the aggregative analysis of Anglican parish registers are in themselves sufficient to lacerate the complacency of a western culture in which death, though inevitable, has become postponed, confined, effaced from public view and muted in public consciousness. The patient piecing together of marriages, baptisms, and burials in family reconstruction studies demonstrates less dramatically, but in more compelling detail, the stark realities of an age in which high infant and child mortality and the premature deaths of spouses were perennial threats to the survival of the individual family. Graphs, tables and histograms, simulations and back-projections, the proliferating weaponry of the demographic arms race, combine to bring home to the modern student what every contemporary knew: that life was tenuous; that few could hope to live out the biblical span and die already retired from the immediacy of family responsibilities; that for most death came both unexpected and untimely, cutting them off quite literally in the midst of life.

The facts of a demographic regime in which high mortality was a central characteristic are clear enough.