Welsh Journals

FLINTSHIRE SINCE 18011 By J. G Edwards. I ought to begin by explaining why I chose so precise a date a 1801 for my starting-point this afternoon. I did not do so because I have a tidy mind and because it would be tidy to begin with the first year of the nineteenth century. Nor did I choose 1801 because that year has any special interest in the history of Flint- shire itself. I chose it for quite another reason. What is a shire? Usually, we think of a shire as being first and foremost a geographical thing-an area of country, a district, a place; a place, for its own folk, of familiar sights and sounds. A shire is all that, of course, but the geographical aspect is really secondary: the primary and essential thing about a shire is that it is a community of people-it is an area of country only because a community of people must live somewhere upon the earth: but the community that lives is more essential to the idea of a shire than the mere earth that is lived upon. Such has for centuries been the British idea of the shire it is primar- ily a human thing, and only secondarily a geographical thing: a shire is first and foremost a community of people. It is that com- munity, the community of Flintshire, that is my subject this after- noon. If we are to think to any purpose about the community of the shire, there are at least two fundamental questions about it to which we must have some sort of answer, a precise answer if possible, but at any rate some sort of answer. Firstly.-How numerous is the community? Or what is the size of it ? Secondly.-How is the community distributed over the area which it occupies ? Or what is the distribution of it ? Those then are the two fundamental points Size, Distribution. And that is why the particular year 1801 has come into my story. It was in 1801 that the first census was taken in this country, and since 1801 a census has been taken every ten years (with the one exception of 1941, when a census was impracticable because of the war). From 1801 to 1951 a census has been taken fifteen times. The census returns are our main source of information when we want to know about the size and distribution of the community since 18012. Perhaps I ought to say in passing that for the period before 1801 we have in this country nothing more than estimates of the number of the population. Some of these estimates cover the country as a 1. Based upon a lecture given to the Society at Prestatyn on 3 October, 1953. 2. For bibliographical lists of the census returns for 1801-1931) see H.M. Stationery Office's Guides to Official Sources, No. 2: Census Reports of Great Britain I80I—I93I; for the 1951 census see Census 1951, England and Wales, Preliminary Report.