Marital Fertility in Seventeenth-Century Colyton: A Note
THE fertility history of seventeenth-century Colyton presents many surprises, some of which cause problems of interpretation. In his reappraisal of the data contained in my article of i 966, Morrow seeks to show that one at least of the apparent problems can be laid to rest. There is, he argues, no evidence for family limitation in the later seventeenth century which survives examination by the technique recently developed by Coale and Trussell which makes it possible to test for departure from a natural fertility schedule. Although marital fertility was low, the fall was a general one experienced at all ages in the same proportion, not the age-specific type found where deliberate family limitation is practised. He argues that the decline in marital fertility can be explained as an after-effect of the outbreak of plague in I 645-6 which not only caused heavy immediate mortality but also severely reduced the fecundity of women who survived the epidemic. Morrow describes the plague outbreak as a "Malthusian visitation" which acted both by killing many of those living "at the physical margin of subsistence", and by pushing down the fecundity of married women to a level which militated against any resumption of population growth. Morrow's article falls into two main sections, the first devoted to the specific issue of the evidence for family limitation, the second to the plague of i645-6 and its effects. My comments will follow the same pattern.