This volume brings together the proceedings of two seminars that took place at Dartington Hall in the early 1970s. The first half concerns population, and the second considers marketing.

Individual papers in Part I cover: the population of Cornwall before the first census; the association between mortality and poverty in Exeter from the seventeenth century to the present day; interaction between population growth and economic circumstances in the eighteenth century; Wembworthy: a Devon parish in the eighteenth century; reconstitution and census: Colytonians in parish register and enumerator’s book.

Part II includes offerings on: sources for the history of food supplies and marketing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in local record offices; food production and distribution in pre-industrial Cornwall; the home market and the sea fisheries of Devon and Cornwall in the nineteenth century.