Vital statistics : a memorial volume of selections from the reports and writings of William Farr / edited for the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain by Noel A. Humphreys.
- William Farr
- Date:
- 1885
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Vital statistics : a memorial volume of selections from the reports and writings of William Farr / edited for the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain by Noel A. Humphreys. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.
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![elected and ex-officio board of guardians wielding great administrative and rating power. The union counties tlius constituted diffei'ed little in many instances from the old counties, and in the aggregate only transferred 1,053,423 out of a population of 22,712,266 from county to county. For the sake of maintaining the union counties properly constituted intact, the requisite changes would involve no great sacrifice • but should it be held to be desirable, the disparity might in many instances be greatly and advantageously reduced by well-considered alterations of the existing unions. The subject was discussed in the Census Report of 1851 ; and it will be evident from the folIoAving extract that the new divisions of the country are better suited to administrative purposes than the old divisions descending to us from a time when the population was uncivilized, and in number inconsiderable. The cause of the discrepancy between the ' registration counties' and the other counties arises from the circumstance that, in many cases, the boundaries of the old counties were rivers; on which, subsequently, at fords and bridges, important towns arose, the markets and centres of meeting for the people of all the surrounding parishes. These towns have been made the centres of the new districts, as at them it is most convenient for the guardians to meet, and the officers to reside. Thus Wallinrford in Berkshire is the natural centre of the district, which is nearly equally divided by the Thames; and the Thames is here, as it is in a lower part of its course, the county boundary separating Oxford- shire from Berkshire. The people of the parishes of Bensington, Ewelme, Crowmarsh, North Stoke, Berrick-Prior, Wai-borough, and Dorchester, on the north side of the river, in Oxfordshire, meet at Wallingford market, and are in many ways intimately associated with the people on the south side of the river in Berkshire; hence it was quite justifiable to unite the parishes so related on both sides of the Thames in the Wallingford Union—the Wallingford district. The whole district is placed in the ' registration county' of Berks; though part of it is in the old shire of Oxford. [And this is reasonable, for if these people are properly associated in one union, they should on many grounds be united in one county. The same remark applies to the city of Oxford, which is now partially in Berks; the whole of it should be transferred to Oxfordshire.] In the same way the greater part of the other discrepancies is accounted for. The old shire boundaries often run near towns; and the districts, Avhich have not been arbitrarily framed, consist of 624 of the towns, with the surrounding parishes, sub-divided into sub-districts; while the registration counties are aggregates of the districts which have their central towns within the limits of the old shires. In the counties which, like Norfolk, Suifolk, and Essex, were originally well divided, little change has been made; in others, the defect of the old subdivisions into counties has been partially modified, without any further subslantial innovation than the substitution of districts for the obsolete hundreds. (Census Report, 1871, Vol. 4, p. xxxvii.) 3.—Houses. Definition of a house.—What is a house ? appears to be a question admitting of an explicit answer. And the enumerators of the United Kingdom were instructed to class under that category every habitation ; each separate house comprising by definition all the space within the external and party walls of the building. Thus it became impossible to count either each room or each storey as a separate house, although](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21364333_0041.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
