ERBYSHIRE JARCH OLOGICAL 
AND 
NATURAL History BOCIETY. 
A Statutory List of the Inhabitants of Niel- 
bourne, Derbyshire, tw 16953 printed from 
the oviginal MS. Assessment, with a Come 
mentary and Explanatory Motes. 
By R. E. Cuester Waters, B.A. 
Sves|ORD MACAULAY, in a well-known chapter* of his 
History of England, deplores the absence of materials 
from which the state of the population of England, at 
the Bisse of the seventeenth century, can be determined with 
accuracy. Complaints of this kind are readily accepted by the 
general reader, who is flattered by the suggestion that he is more 
enlightened than his forefathers ; but the historian ought to have 
learned from the statute book that a thorough and complete 
enumeration of the inhabitants of every parish in England, with 
a full and precise statement of their several names, occupations, 
and qualities, was made in 1695, under the provisions of that 
singular Taxation Act,{ which imposed duties on births, marriages, 
* Chap. iii. + 6 and 7 William and Mary, c. 6. 
VOL. 7. 4 
