The geography of religious pluralism research project based in the
Department of English Local History at Leicester University and in the
Department of Economic and Social History at Queen's University Belfast has
recently received additional funding from the Economic and Social Research
Council to bring the research to a conclusion.
The project has several aims:
i) To analyse quantitatively and cartographically the 1851 Census of Religious
Worship data on denominational provision, free and appropriated sittings,
attendances and related information for all parishes in sixteen selected
counties in England and Wales.
ii) To develop further computerised datasets for the same counties of other
religious sources, notably the 1676 Compton Census, the 1715 Evans List, the
1772 Thompson List, visitation returns of various dates and the 1829 religious
returns.
iii) To collect and computerise a wide range of parochial socio-economic
statistics for the sixteen counties, to analyse the data from the 1851
Religious Census and the 1829 religious returns in conjunction with these, and
thus develop understanding in the historiographical and
sociological-anthropological theory bearing on the relationships between
religious/cultural phemomena and socio-economic contexts.
iv) To outline and intepret changes in the geography of English and Welsh
religion over time and to develop cartographic and quantitative methods and
approaches that will facilitate this.
To date all relevant quantitative and cartographic data for the project
have been gathered and entered into the computer cartographic package GIMMS
and the statistical package SPSS respectively. The first section of a major
publication has been largely completed analysing religious data for the whole of
England and Wales based on the 1851 Religious Census at Poor Law Union Level. A
research associate based at Leicester University is now assisting the
quantitative analysis of the parish level data which forms the basis of the
second half of the book.
The project has already resulted in the creation of a number of large
and complex datasets including all the published Religious Census data for
England and Wales at Poor Law Union Level, 200 socio-economic variables
gathered from various population censuses and other sources for parishes in
sixteen selected counties and 1600 religious variables gathered mainly from the
unpublished 1851 Religious Census returns for the sixteen counties. Digitised
boundary files for mapping also exist for all Poor Law Unions in England and
Wales and for parish boundaries in 1851 for fourteen counties.
Paul Ell
-- ********************************* Paul S. Ell Research Fellow The Queen's University of Belfast ell@le.ac.uk *********************************