Home> Tour of the village - 1871

Tour of the village - 1871.

The tour takes you around the village house by house. Start the tour

• Other special topics for Victorian Kelvedon Hatch:
• Farming
• Law and Order
• Leisure
• Health and Wealth
• Education
• Parish Officials
• Extracts from the Parish Magazine 1897
• Moved 1881 Where did they go?
• Post Office Directories Listed inhabitants

Kelvedon Hatch in the 1870s was a community involved with work on the land. All sections of the community: the landowners, the farmers, the tradesmen, and the agricultural labourers, had their lives affected by the success or failure of agriculture.

In this tour you will also visit the part of Doddinghurst parish known as Fox Hatch which is now part of the present village, the boundaries having been changed in the 1970s.

The full details of the occupants of all the premises are from the census returns for Kelvedon Hatch, 1871. Published by permission of the Public Record Office - RG10/1643.

Returns for the rest of England can be found on the Ancestry.co.uk web site.
1871 England Census

Kelvedon Hatch had a population of 401: 223 men and 178 women. A disproportion which was found in most agricultural areas.The growth and decline of the population of Kelvedon Hatch from 1801 until 1891 followed the trend of other villages in Victorian England. While the villages lost their populations, nearby towns and cities grew in size. Their population increase was due to immigration of young people and high fertility rates because of early marriages amongst those young people.

The 19th century growth of the population of Kelvedon Hatch to its zenith in 1851 can be attributed to the enclosure of the common land which encouraged farming of that land, the building of new houses upon it, and improved transport links to the London markets via the railway: first at Brentwood and then at Ongar.

These new transport links, the decline of agriculture, poor wages and conditions, were to create an increasingly mobile population, especially the young and single of both sexes. Young people left home at an early age and kinship ties were important, especially in the city areas, in giving assistance to other family members. However, there were still those individuals who had lived all their lives in the village and had probably never gone beyond neighbouring parishes.

Classification of households by household head - 1871
There were 82 households.

Landowners/Independent 4

Clergy 2

Middle class professions 1

Tenant / independent farmers 5

Trades and skills 17

Services and servants 6

Agricultural workers 47