Study 4025 - Small Debt Statistics, 1847 -1913

In general, the Poor Law Board and its successor the Local Government Board provided detailed bi-annual statistics of numbers of paupers in each county in its Annual Report and similar statistics for the individual unions in a separate Return to Parliament. The sheer volume of this material poses considerable problems, and building up systematic coverage has proved difficult: our transcriptions are selective by level of reporting unit, area, period and variables transcribed.

Tables described in this section:

's_debt': data for c. 500 courts, grouped by circuit from Returns of Proceedings in the County Courts of England and Wales, annual series in BPP, 1848-1914. Continuous annual series from 1868 to 1913 plus other dates.

'sd_1938': data for 439 courts in England and Wales covering 1938 from statistical returns of county courts held in manuscript form in the Public Record Office.

(c) Humphrey Southall, David Gilbert and Ian Gregory, 1996.