King, Gregory
King, Gregory
Gregory King (1648–1712), the son of a mathematician who was also a landscape gardener, was born at Lichfield. He got his early education at home, at the Free School, and as clerk to the antiquary Sir William Dugdale, whose service he entered at the age of 14 and with whom he spent several years traveling in the English counties on heraldic surveys. He was a well-informed topographer and surveyor; he assisted in the production of Itinerarium Angliae: Or, a Book of the Roads, 1675; and for a while he supported himself by mapmaking, engraving, and surveying. He was a skilled and well-known genealogist and became successively Rouge Dragon, registrar of the College of Arms, and Lancaster herald. He was a successful practicing accountant; he taught bookkeeping as a young man and in later life became secretary to the comptroller of army accounts and to the commissioners of public accounts. Finally, he was a distinguished political arithmetician. His autobiography (which, however, ends in 1694) was reproduced by James Dalloway as an appendix to Inquiries Into the Origin and Progress of the Science of Heraldry in England (1793).
It is as a statistician that King makes his claim to fame as a social scientist although, so far as we know, he did not become interested in political arithmetic until 1695. In that year he published a broadsheet summarizing the rates of duties payable under the Act of 1694, which levied taxes on marriages, births, burials, bachelors, and childless widowers. Possibly King had been involved in designing the statistical inquiries that were essential to the assessment of these taxes: he was certainly interested in the results, which were immensely significant sources of demographic information in an age when the size and trend of the population was a matter of great political interest and much speculation. There is no record of his having published any other work relating to political arithmetic during his lifetime, although his work was well known among his contemporaries and his estimates were freely used and quoted by Charles Davenant.
Unlike most of his contemporary political arithmeticians, King was a scholar rather than a politician. Perhaps this was why he never published his estimates, being content to make them freely available as a basis for economic policy-making or analysis rather than using them to support his own special pleadings. He was primarily interested in finding the exact truth about the dimensions of the national economy, so far as the available data would let him. It is evident from the notes and communications which have survived that he was completely honest about the limitations of his material and amazingly methodical in his use of it, and the more modern scholars have probed his methods and uncovered new sources of his notes, the more they have tended to admire his results. His famous “Scheme of the Income and Expences of the Several Families of England,” given in his Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions Upon the State and Condition of England (1696), and his international comparisons of national income and expenditure for England, France, and Holland in his Of the Naval Trade of England A°; 1688 and the National Profit Then Arising Thereby (1697) were based essentially on guesswork, but as explicit statements of the views of a particularly well informed observer they are profoundly revealing. They inspired comparable calculations by Patrick Colquhoun in the early nineteenth century and became bench mark data of immense value to students of long-term growth.
All King’s estimates were made with an accountant’s meticulous concern for internal consistency, and in this respect his national income estimates were in advance of any calculations made in this field until the mid-twentieth century. It is possible to extract from the national income and balance of payments estimates given in his two tracts, supplemented with additional estimates quoted by Davenant, a complete, articulated set of double-entry social accounts as well as an abundance of detail on the content of national income, output, and expenditure in 1688 and 1695. He also made estimates of the national capital, its content, and its rate of increase through the seventeenth century. His population estimates were based on careful analyses of actual enumerations for particular places, corrected for technical errors and adjusted to a national basis, on assumptions that modern demographers (basing their judgments on the results of nineteenth-century census enumerations) have found to be both consistent and plausible. His schedule of the relation between changes in the price of wheat and deviations from the normal wheat harvest, which was originally published by Davenant and became known as “Gregory King’s Law,” represents a piece of demand analysis of a kind that we find in no other source until the early twentieth century.
Phyllis Deane
WORKS BY KING
There are manuscripts and calculations by King in the British Museum, the Public Record Office (London), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), and the Library of the London County Council.
1695 A Scheme of the Rates and Duties Granted to His Majesty Upon Marriages, Births, and Burials, and Upon Batchelors and Widowers, for the Term of Five Years from May 1, 1695. London: A broadsheet.
(1696) 1936 Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions Upon the State and Condition of England. Pages 12–56 in Two Tracts by Gregory King. Edited by George E. Barnett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. → The manuscript of 1696 was first published in 1802 in George Chalmers’ An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great-Britain.
(1697) 1936 Of the Naval Trade of England A° 1688 and the National Profit Then Arising Thereby. Pages 60–76 in Two Tracts by Gregory King. Edited by George E. Barnett. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. → The manuscript of 1697 was first published in 1936.
1793 Some Miscellaneous Notes of the Birth, Education, and Advancement of Gregory King. Appendix 2 in James Dalloway, Inquiries Into the Origin and Progress of the Science of Heraldry in England. Gloucester (England): Raikes. → The autobiography covers the years 1648 to 1694.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Deane, Phyllis 1955 The Implications of Early National Income Estimates for the Measurement of Long-term Growth in the United Kingdom. Economic Development and Cultural Change 4:3–38.
Glass, D. V. 1946 Gregory King and the Population of England and Wales at the End of the Seventeenth Century. Eugenics Review New Series 38:170–183.
Glass, D. V. 1950 Gregory King’s Estimate of the Population of England and Wales, 1695. Population Studies 3:338–374.
Rees, J. F. 1932 Gregory King. Volume 8, page 565 in Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.
Yule, G. Udny 1915 Crop Production and Price: A Note on Gregory King’s Law.Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 78:296–298.