#census of the poor

[tenth-sentence]

The Norwich Census of the Poor of 1570 categorised women as single, married, widowed, deserted, and as 'grass wenches' – sexually active unmarried women, sometimes with bastard children.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

[vigilantdesert]

~

[feyres-divorce-lawyer]

oh!

[dougielombax]

No you can’t write your profession in the census as “The Squirterrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”.

No not even in jest!

[shiegra]

LMAOOOOOOOO the 'same sex attracted is a better way to put it' person had no other response than to go 'IT IS BETTER, IF U DISAGREE UR LYING' after being confronted with the fact that they also have never previously personally used the term on their blog

this site, also, is free

[isthatafuckinggayangel]

Remembered this post again, so this is your periodic reminder that treating all southerners as a bigoted monolith is in itself white supremacist bullshit.

Who in the fuck.

“People from the south” is not something to put a trigger warning for, you dumb fucks. If you mean racism/homophobia, fucking say that.

The south is not a monolith of cishet christian white men with every type of bigotry in the book.

Minorities live in the south as well.

If you use tags like this, go fuck yourself.

(Edit to include image ID in Alt text)

[womenaremypriority]

This is so horrific.

———————

I have been following Siro’s story for 30 years, ever since I went to interview her and four other rural midwives in India’s Bihar state in 1996.

They had been identified by a non-governmental organisation as being behind the murder of baby girls in the district of Katihar where, under pressure from the newborns’ parents, they were killing them by feeding them chemicals or simply wringing their necks.

Hakiya Devi, the eldest of the midwives I interviewed, told me at the time she had killed 12 or 13 babies. Another midwife, Dharmi Devi, admitted to killing more - at least 15-20.

It is impossible to ascertain the exact number of babies they may have killed, given the way the data was gathered.

But they featured in a report published in 1995 by an NGO, based on interviews with them and 30 other midwives. If the report’s estimates are accurate, more than 1,000 baby girls were being murdered every year in one district, by just 35 midwives. According to the report, Bihar at the time had more than half a million midwives. And infanticide was not limited to Bihar.

Refusing orders, Hakiya said, was almost never an option for a midwife.

“The family would lock the room and stand behind us with sticks,” says Hakiya Devi. “They’d say: ‘We already have four-five daughters. This will wipe out our wealth. Once we give dowry for our girls, we will starve to death. Now, another girl has been born. Kill her.’

“Who could we complain to? We were scared. If we went to the police, we’d get into trouble. If we spoke up, people would threaten us."

The role of a midwife in rural India is rooted in tradition, and burdened by the harsh realities of poverty and caste. The midwives I interviewed belonged to the lower castes in India’s caste hierarchy. Midwifery was a profession passed on to them by mothers and grandmothers. They lived in a world where refusing orders of powerful, upper-caste families was unthinkable.

The midwife could be promised a sari, a sack of grain or a small amount of money for killing a baby. Sometimes even that was not paid. The birth of a boy earned them about 1,000 rupees. The birth of a girl earned them half.

The reason for this imbalance was steeped in India’s custom of giving a dowry, they explained. Though the custom was outlawed in 1961, it still held strong in the 90s - and indeed continues into the present day.

A dowry can be anything - cash, jewellery, utensils. But for many families, rich or poor, it is the condition of a wedding. And this is what, for many, still makes the birth of a son a celebration and the birth of a daughter a financial burden.

Siro Devi, the only midwife of those I interviewed who is still alive, used a vivid physical image to explain this disparity in status.

“A boy is above the ground - higher. A daughter is below - lower. Whether a son feeds or takes care of his parents or not, they all want a boy.”

The preference for sons can be seen in India’s national-level data. Its most recent census, in 2011, recorded a ratio of 943 women to every 1,000 men. This is nevertheless an improvement on the 1990s - in the 1991 census, the ratio was 927/1,000.

By the time I finished filming the midwives’ testimonies in 1996, a small, silent change had begun. The midwives who once carried out these orders had started to resist. 

This change was instigated by Anila Kumari, a social worker who supported women in the villages around Katihar, and was dedicated to addressing the root causes of these killings.

Anila’s approach was simple. She asked the midwives, “Would you do this to your own daughter?”

Her question apparently pierced years of rationalisation and denial. The midwives got some financial help via community groups and gradually the cycle of violence was interrupted.

Siro, speaking to me in 2007, explained the change.

“Now, whoever asks me to kill, I tell them: ‘Look, give me the child, and I’ll take her to Anila Madam.’”

The midwives rescued at least five newborn girls from families who wanted them killed or had already abandoned them.

One child died, but Anila arranged for the other four to be sent to Bihar’s capital, Patna, to an NGO which organised their adoption.

The story could have ended there. But I wanted to know what had become of those girls who were adopted, and where life had taken them.

Anila’s records were meticulous but they had few details about post-adoption.

Working with a BBC World Service team, I got in touch with a woman called Medha Shekar who, back in the 90s, was researching infanticide in Bihar when the babies rescued by Anila and the midwives began arriving at her NGO. Remarkably, Medha was still in touch with a young woman who, she believed, was one of these rescued babies.

Anila told me that she had given all the girls saved by the midwives the prefix “Kosi” before their name, a homage to the Kosi river in Bihar. Medha remembered that Monica had been named with this “Kosi” prefix before her adoption.

The adoption agency would not let us look at Monica’s records, so we can never be sure. But her origins in Patna, her approximate date of birth and the prefix “Kosi” all point to the same conclusion: Monica is, in all probability, one of the five babies rescued by Anila and the midwives.

When I went to meet her at her parents’ home some 2,000km (1,242 miles) away in Pune, she said she felt lucky to have been adopted by a loving family.

“This is my definition of a normal happy life and I am living it,” she said.

Monica knew that she had been adopted from Bihar. But we were able to give her more details about the circumstances of her adoption.

Earlier this year, Monica travelled to Bihar to meet Anila and Siro. 

Monica saw herself as the culmination of years of hard work by Anila and the midwives.

“Someone prepares a lot to do well in an exam. I feel like that. They did the hard work and now they’re so curious to meet the result… So definitely, I would like to meet them.”

Anila wept tears of joy when she met Monica. But Siro’s response felt different.

She sobbed hard, holding Monica close and combing through her hair.

“I took you [to the orphanage] to save your life… My soul is at peace now,” she told her.

But when, a couple of days later, I attempted to press Siro about her reaction, she resisted further scrutiny.

“What happened in the past is in the past,” she said.

But what is not in the past is the prejudice some still hold against baby girls.

Reports of infanticide are now relatively rare, but sex-selective abortion remains common, despite being illegal since 1994.

If one listens to the traditional folk songs sung during childbirth, known as Sohar, in parts of north India, joy is reserved for the birth of a male child. Even in 2024, it is an effort to get local singers to change the lyrics so that the song celebrates the birth of a girl.

While we were filming our documentary, two baby girls were discovered abandoned in Katihar - one in bushes, another at the roadside, just a few hours old. One later died. The other was put up for adoption.

Before Monica left Bihar, she visited this baby in the Special Adoption Centre in Katihar.

She says she was haunted by the realisation that though female infanticide may have been reduced, abandoning baby girls continues.

“This is a cycle… I can see myself there a few years ago, and now again there’s some girl similar to me.”

But there were to be happier similarities too.

The baby has now been adopted by a couple in the north-eastern state of Assam. They have named her Edha, which means happiness.

“We saw her photo, and we were clear - a baby once abandoned cannot be abandoned twice,” says her adoptive father Gaurav, an officer in the Indian air force.

Every few weeks Gaurav sends me a video of Edha's latest antics. I sometimes share them with Monica.

Looking back, the 30 years spent on this story were never just about the past. It was about confronting uncomfortable truths. The past cannot be undone, but it can be transformed.

And in that transformation, there is hope.

[boreal-sea]

Firstly: get dunk'd, transphobe.

Secondly, nice source, dipshit:

I have to do everything, don't I?

Let's talk about this source before we even read this article, because it shows how poor your rhetorical analysis skills are - or how unwilling you are to practice those skills, or perhaps just how willing you are to ally yourself with racist, nationalist, far-right reactionaries if they also happen to be transphobic.

Wings Over Scotland is a far-right, nationalist, reactionary blog run by Scottish "video game journalist" Stuart Campbell. It is not an unbiased news website - it's some dude's personal blog, and he created it because he hated that mainstream news in Scotland wasn't spreading the far-right rhetoric he wished it would.

And this is what you used as a "source". Fucking laughable.

Now let's get into the actual blog post. I refuse to call it a "news article", because it's not. This one was written by a nobody named "Mar Vickers". At the bottom of the article, Stuart claims Mar has "extensive experience in equality law". I can't seem to find any indication Mar is some sort of lawyer or scholar; all I can find is a link to his twitter - sorry, I mean his "X":

https://twitter.com/mar2vickers

You can tell this is the same Mar based on the content of his tweets. He's also transphobic garbage, surprise surprise. He has a backup account on "gettr", because it seems like his twitter gets suspended frequently - which says a lot. Gettr is a clone of twitter that caters to right wingers who get suspended and banned on Twitter for constantly violating its hate speech policies. So. You know. Though these days, X is the safe-haven for far-right reactionaries, so honestly that's a red flag period.

As a summary: Mar doesn't understand surveys or their limits, he doesn't define what a "sex crime" is, he doesn't know what the Rorschach test is, and he's bad at math. He plays with numbers like he's some sort of population statistician, which he's not. He draws conclusions that are completely nonsense, because he's not asking the relevant questions.

Basically, he states that over the past few years, the ratio of trans women in jail for sex crimes to compared to the general population of trans woman is now higher than the ratio of cis men in jail for sex crimes compared to the general population of cis men. Ok, but why did these numbers change? He doesn't ask why. He just assumes these trends are natural and reflect the behavior of cis men and trans women, rather than the increased transphobia in England and Wales that he and his buddy Stuart have been fueling.

I absolutely don't doubt that trans women are incarcerated for "sex crimes" (which he never defines of course) at a higher rate per population than cis men. It's the same reason people of color are incarcerated more per population: bigotry. "Wow, this population of people who society hates sure gets sent to jail a lot. That's probably a reflection of their true nature, and not a reflection on society at large!"

[probablyasocialecologist]

America isn’t suffering from a housing shortage. Housing production has lagged behind household growth since 2010, but this doesn’t account for the massive overhang of housing produced in the previous decade. Fueled by the housing bubble of 2000-07, 160 homes were added to the stock for every 100 households formed during the aughts, our analysis of Census Bureau data shows. This level of production created a huge surplus of housing, which has yet to be fully absorbed. Put differently, from 2000-21, the nation grew by 18.5 million households. To maintain an adequate inventory of vacant housing, which historically would be 9.3% of the total, the housing stock needed to expand by 20.2 million units. Instead, it grew by 23.7 million housing units, producing a surplus of 3.5 million units.

[...]

It’s conceivable that a huge increase in supply would eventually lead to lower prices. But that would require a major intervention in the market, and the case for it is weak. U.S. housing policy should focus less on adding to the already ample stock of housing and more on raising the incomes of low-income households and giving them access to good-quality housing in safe neighborhoods. We know how to do this. Raising minimum wages to the living-wage level will help the working poor afford housing. Zoning reform can encourage the production of multifamily housing, accessory apartments, and other less-expensive housing formats. Subsidized construction should be targeted for supportive housing and for affordable rental housing in places with actual housing shortages. The most effective housing assistance for low-income households is not found in building more units but in helping low-income households afford the units that already exist through housing vouchers for renter households and down-payment assistance for home buyers. The U.S. cannot build itself out of its housing crisis.

[marzipanandminutiae]

you know, the Horrible Histories "Victorian names were WEIRD!!!!" skit leaves out some important info on some of the names (assisted by Ancestry.com searches):

Lettice Berger: "Lettice" was an anglicization of the Roman name "Leticia." Berger is just a normal German surname. Yes, they had the word "lettuce," and I'm sure the similarities occurred to them. But nobody named their child "lettuce" like the vegetable.

O.K. Johnson: Probably just the kid's initials. "O.K." as a slang term was invented in 1830s Boston, but without any evidence of when little O.K. lived (they don't cite any sourced for these names, how convenient), it's impossible to tell whether it would have crossed the pond by the time he was born.

Never [they pronounce the surname Rookrook]: I found a LOT of Nevers in the UK with Indian surnames. So uh. There's that. And a lot of census records online seem to have notes written by the census-taker mislabeled as names- "never opens door" was one I noticed. Just saying. I also found multiple "NEVA Rook" census entries- which probably would have been pronounced "NEE-vah" but sounds like "Never" with a British accent if you tilt your head and squint.

Toilet: Surprisingly common modern misreading of "Violet" on 19th-century censuses with bad handwriting.

Baboon: Found one census where it's a misreading of "Barbara;" others were non-Anglo names like Baban, Babyon, Babboni, etc.

Susan Semolina-Thrower: That's just two unfortuate surnames, I'm guessing? I can't find their sources, again, but I do find a lot of records of "Semolina" as a surname in the UK during the 19th century. The poor parents had no control over that, did they?

Happy: ...yeah, it's a virtue name. And? How is that weirder than Faith, Hope, Grace, Patience, Prudence, etc?

Evil: Another census misreading- usually "Evie."

Minty Badger: "Minty" is short for Araminta/Aminta/Arminta. Still sounds like a Discworld character, but nothing would sound normal with "Badger" as a surname. Araminta Badger at least makes more sense to modern ears, though.

Freezer Breezer: Breezer was a real surname, and parents can be cruel. I don't doubt that- my dad went to school with an "Emily Memily." that being said...I did find a "Fred R. Breezer" born in 1873 in England; see above re: census misreadings. Just throwing that out there. I found it as a corruption/misspelling of "Fraser/Frasier" too.

Scary Looker: I actually found this one. It was a misreading of "Jeany" on a census- the girl's name was Jane Looker, born 1841 in Lancashire to John and Elizabeth Looker. Nice research there, team.

Farting Clack: Fasting Clack or Clark, born 1863 in London. Another lovely misreading from the census. True "Fasting Clark" is not NOT a weird name, but it's a lot less horrible than "Farting Clack" and it makes sense under the Hyper-Christian Parents category.

Princess Cheese was real, not a nickname, and not a misreading or misspelling. Princess May Cheese was born in 1896 in West Bromwich. She married one John T. Brookes in 1914- possibly eager to no longer be a Cheese?

Multiple people really have been christened Bovril, most notably one Bovril Simpson, married in West Ham in 1911.

Incredibly, Raspberry/Rasberry/Roseberry is a real given name, and Lemon a real surname. Most people named Raspberry seem to have been men.

So that's only three of their Wacky Victorian Names that are actually 100% real. Nice job, there, team. I love Ghosts, but get your collective act together!

(They did once have a skit insisting that Victorians called trousers "the southern necessity" when that's actually a phrase from the writings of famously terrible 19th-century author Amanda McKittrick Ros, whose work her contemporaries loved poking fun at. So I shouldn't be surprised)

[dougielombax]

Yes I do think we should include alleyway gremlins and sewer goblins in the population statistics for the next census!

What of it?!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Poor people pay higher time tax

Doubtless you’ve heard that “we all get the same 24 hours in the day.” Of course it’s not true: rich people and poor people experience very different demands on their time. The richer you are, the more your time is your own — not only are many systems arranged with your convenience in mind, but you also command the social power to do something about systems that abuse your time.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/10/my-time/#like-water-down-the-drain

For example: if you live in most American cities, public transit is slow, infrequent and overcrowded. Without a car, you lose hours every day to a commute spent standing on a lurching bus. And while a private car can substantially shorted that commute, people who can afford taxis or Ubers get even more time every day.

There’s a thick anthropological literature on the ways that cash-poverty translates into #TimePoverty. In David Graeber’s must-read essay “The Utopia of Rules,” he nails the way that capitalist societies generate Soviet-style bureaucracies, especially for poor people. Means-testing for benefits means that poor people spend endless hours filling in forms, waiting on hold, and lining up to see caseworkers to prove that they are among the “deserving poor” — not “mooches” who are defrauding the system:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/02/02/david-graebers-the-utopia-of-rules-on-technology-stupidity-and-the-secret-joys-of-bureaucracy/

The social privilege gradient is also a time gradient: if you can afford a plane ticket, you can travel quickly across the country rather than losing days to the Greyhound or a road-trip. But if you’re even richer, you can pay for TSA Precheck and cut your airport security time from an hour to minutes. Go further up the privilege gradient and you’ll acquire airline status, shaving another hour off the check-in process.

This qualitative account of time poverty is well-developed, but it’s lacked a good, detailed quantitative counterpart, and our society often discounts qualitative work as mere anecdote and insists on having every story converted to numbers before it is taken seriously.

In “Examining inequality in the time cost of waiting,” published this month in Nature Human Behavior, public affairs researchers Steve Holt (SUNY) and Katie Vinopal (Ohio State) analyze data from the American Time Use Survey (AUTS) to produce a detailed, vibrant quantitative backstop to the qualitative narrative about time poverty:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01524-w

(The paper is paywalled, but the authors made a mostly final preprint available)

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/jbk3x/download

The AUTS “collects retrospective time diary data from a nationally representative subsample drawn from respondents to the Census Bureau’s Community Population Survey (CPS) each year.” These time-diary entries are sliced up in 15-minute chunks.

Here’s what they found: first, there are categories of basic services where high-income people avoid waiting altogether, and where low-income people experience substantial waits. A person from a low-income household “an hour more waiting for the same set of services than people from high-income household.” That’s 73 hours/year.

Some of that gap (5%) is attributable to proximity. Richer people don’t have to go as far to access the same services as poorer people. Travel itself accounts for 2% more — poorer people wait longer for buses and have otherwise worse travel options.

A larger determinant of the gap (25%) is working flexibility. Poor people work jobs where they have less freedom to take time off to receive services, so they are forced to take appointments during peak hours.

Specific categories show more stark difference. If a poor person and a wealthy person go to the doctor’s on the same day, the poor person waits 46.28m to receive care, while the wealthy person waits 28.75m. The underlying dynamic here isn’t hard to understand. Medical practices that serve rich people have more staff.

The same dynamic plays out in grocery stores: poor people wait an average of 24m waiting every time they go shopping. For rich people, it’s 15m. Poor people don’t just wait in longer lines — they also have to wait for understaffed stores to unlock the cases that basic necessities are locked behind (poor people also travel longer to get to the grocery store — and they travel by slower means).

A member of a poor household with a chronic condition that requires two clinic visits per month loses an additional five hours/year to waiting rooms when compared to a wealthy person. As the authors point out, this also translates to delayed care, missed appointments, and exacerbated health conditions. Time poverty leads to health poverty.

All of this is worse for people of color: “Low-income White and Black Americans are both more likely to wait when seeking services than their wealthier same-race peer” but “wealthier White people face an average wait time of 28 minutes while wealthier Black people face a 54 minute average wait time…wealthier Black people do not receive the same time-saving attention from service providers that wealthier non-Black people receive” (there’s a smaller gap for Latino people, and no observed gap for Asian Americans.)

The gender gap is more complicated: “Low-income women are 3 percentage points more likely than low-income men and high-income women are 6 percentage points more likely than high-income men to use common services” — it gets even worse for low-income mothers, who take on the time-burdens associated with their kids’ need to access services.

Surprisingly, men actually end up waiting longer than women to access services: “low-income men spend about 6 more minutes than low-income women waiting for service…high-income men spend about 12 more minutes waiting for services than high-income women.”

Given the important role that scheduling flexibility plays in the time gap, the authors propose that interventions like subsidized day-care and afterschool programming could help parents access services at off-peak hours. They also echo Graeber’s call for reduced paperwork burdens for receiving benefits and accessing public services.

They recommend changes to labor law to protect the right of low-waged workers to receive services during off-peak hours, in the manner of their high-earning peers (they reference research that shows that this also improves worker productivity and is thus a benefit to employers as well as workers).

Finally, they come to the obvious point: making people less cash-poor will alleviate their time-poverty. Higher minimum wages, larger earned income tax credits, investments in low-income neighborhoods and better public transit will all give poor people more time and more money with which to command better services.

This week (Feb 13–17), I’ll be in Australia, touring my book Chokepoint Capitalism with my co-author, Rebecca Giblin. We’re doing a remote event for NZ on Feb 13. Next are Melbourne (Feb 14), Sydney (Feb 15) and Canberra (Feb 16/17). More tickets just released for Sydney!

[Image ID: A waiting room, draped with cobwebs. A skeleton sits in one of the chairs. A digital display board reads 'Now serving 53332.' An ogrish, top-hatted figure standing at a podium, yanking a dollar-sign shaped lever looms into the frame from the right. He holds a clock aloft disdainfully, pinched between the thumb and fingers of one white-gloved hand.]

[bluesfreakingart]

what would actually happen if one were to go into jervis' cell and hug him? would he like... snap your neck? im confused as to why we are being dissuaded from hugging the cuddle boy

WELL, Jerv wouldn't just snap someones neck for no reason! that's a waste of resources and people he could use or make connections with, if he did manage to make one with staff or something.

Killing is messy and causes a lot of conflict with other parties if it happens to be he somehow snuffed out a semi important person. For the most part he only does that when as stated he has no choice/it's a bigger hassle to let someone live....ooooor you pressed a big huge red button that said "I'm going to hurt someone he is fixated on/loves."

like say for example some poor sods trying to attack the trio of rogues and manage to hurt either Ed or Jon, even worse, both? that's when he'd be like a semi truck sprinting in your direction at full force to straight up take you off the census,regardless of his own status physical or otherwise.

Tipping the emotional teapot over will get an anger that could rival the red queen.

he's just a gamble, less so than the other two but still...

[anonymous-dentist]

Absolutely obsessed with Spiderbit's record books because:

Cellbit's official residence isn't his castle. It's Quesadilla Island's Federation Headquarters, aka the offices you get to via the train station

They actually have his blood type on record!

Also, does this mean that his employee number could be 435? Which is interesting because his coworkers and all the other Federation employees refer to him as "Mr. Cellbit", which is kinda like the Census Bureau because Cellbit more or less works under Cucurucho directly. And, as we know now, Cucurucho isn't actually a Federation employee, so maybe Cellbit isn't officially an employee, either.

Roier's home, again, is not listed as Cellbit's castle, which is where he's been living basically since his marriage. Everybody knows that he doesn't live in Bobby's Castle or Bobby's City because that's all just an extension of Bobby's Tomb, and Roier hasn't been in his house more than ten times since Bobby's death six months ago.

And then there are the kills:

(Cellbit, left. Roier, right.)

I've been sitting here for a WHILE trying to think of who they've killed-killed, and I think I've figured it out?

Cellbit, I believe the day before his wedding, murdered Maximus because Maxo was talking about politics, and that was Not Allowed. Outside of that time, he has made a point of not killing any players because of his Trauma- the only players he's ever properly attacked outside of that kill have been Forever (day of the wedding, Roier asked him to) and then Maxo again during the Gordinho Gostosinho interview (Maxo triggered him by bringing up his past, and he got revived by Richarlyson iirc.)

Outside of players, Cellbit has killed Abueloier once. He tried to kill him for good, but it somehow didn't stick. Abueloier doesn't count as a player because he isn't part of the experiment (aka he's played by cc!Roier as an NPC.)

Roier, meanwhile, has made a point out of not attacking literally anybody first because he doesn't like resorting to violence. He just doesn't Do That, hence why Etoiles was so happy when Roier started going apeshit and murdering people during Purgatory. He never even attacked his mortal enemies, Quackity and Spreen, after their betrayal (but tbh what he was gonna do to Spreen is worse than death.)

So who did Roier kill?

Well, a while ago he was running around playing with explosives, and he foreshadowed the hell out of the Purgatory ending when he blew up Maximus on a tiny little island, killing him and erasing little baby Trump(et)'s last sign.

Poor Maxo?

Anyway idk what any of this means, I just think it's super interesting

[thethirdromana]

I thought it might be useful, given the chapter we're up to, to do a quick primer on religion in the UK in the 1850s. (Useful for me, anyway). These are the articles I read.

Religion here means almost exclusively Christianity. Judaism was the next largest faith with less than 60,000 adherents. In 1851, of a population of 17.9m in England and Wales, 5.3m attended Church of England services, 4.5m attended other Protestant churches (about half of those Methodists), and 383,630 attended Catholic services.

There was a significant class divide in who attended what services. The Church of England was very much part of the establishment - between 1830 and 1879 more clergy voted Tory than any other profession - and struggled to get a foothold in new industrial cities. In some cases they simply didn't build enough churches to accommodate the growing population. Seats in pews were also often rented, i.e. wealthier families paid for a better seat, and the 'unrented' portion of the church set aside for the poor was often insufficient.

The census that revealed nearly half of the churchgoing population was nonconformist (i.e. Protestant but not Church of England) was a significant shock, and there was a push both to build more churches and to recruit more clergy. They succeeded in both of those things but not in increasing the number of regular churchgoers; it's later than North and South, but the publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 also contributed to a rising wave of religious doubt.

Everyone in this chapter is reasonably typical of their class and background. Margaret is middle class, Anglican and a regular churchgoer. Bessy is working class and Methodist (or at least that's what Nicholas' reference to her "methodee fancies" suggests). Nicholas is working class and sceptical of faith at all.

[gracefulfallen]

ok, but the idea that veth may not actually know luc's age is so genuinely funny to me from a sociological standpoint? because like... yes it was sam trolling. yes sam was being funny/probably forgot/wanted luc to be a teenager despite the fact that he should canonically be 11 or 12. but, also - imagine what this means from a societal perspective!

if you are a ruler in a large empire, you need to know your population demographics. are your birth rates in decline? is your workforce going to keep up with demands of your economy? is there something killing specific age groups at a higher rate than normal? do you have enough young people to fill out your military? enough farmers to feed you?

so you get a census bureau to keep track of all that. but this shit! it is chaotic! this is difficult! it is not as simple as births vs deaths!

first, you have different races with different lifespans and ages of maturity. so, do you set a single age of majority across your realm? what does that mean for orcs, who are adults at 14 and die at 70? how does that same age work for elves, who within elven culture are children until they are 100? do you have different ages of majority for different races?? when can someone legally drink? or enlist? or buy property? or get married??

if that's not complicated enough, there's different realms where time flows differently. so if a kid goes to the feywild (as veth says she took luc), they can come back a whole year (or two, or three, or ten) older than they should be. now they have a useless birth certificate, and the census has to be updated! legally, they're 11. physically, mentally, emotionally they're 19. they've lived 19 years. so... do we adjust the birth certificate? issue an addendum? he should be a legal adult now, and he wants to get married to this wood nymph he met & brought back with him, but everything on paper shows him as 11 and not old enough to get married.

our poor census official is pulling out their hair now.

then! THEN! you have magic! so your census taker is sitting there, and suddenly they get a messenger. "not sure how to handle this - there was a resurrection!" should be simple enough - there's a reason we don't formalize death certificates until the 11th day. "no. see, he was dead 95 years."

well! shit! do you count this as a birth? there's probably a special census category specifically for this, right? but all of his property was inherited by his descendants - some of who have died themselves. his home was sold after his death, and the new tenants are legal owners of it.

i just think the life of a bureaucrat in dnd must be equally fascinating and miserable.