Into the Nineteenth Century
The development of Troy Town (and Star Hill and New Road) at the end of the eighteenth century would have led to an increase in the population of Rochester.
However, it is not easy to demonstrate this. There was no counting of the population, at local or national level, at this time. Historians wanting to know the population need to use sources created for other purposes. Lists of taxpayers or ratepayers give the names of householders or the owners or occupiers of land, not of individuals.
Parish registers list baptisms, marriages and burials. (Nearly) everyone who died in England was buried. Not every one was married, and not every child was brought to church to be baptised. The most complete and easily accessible parish registers in England are those of the Church of England, but by the end of the eighteenth century increasing numbers of people were not members of the Church of England but of one of the dissenting churches, such as the Methodists, or were not members of any church at all. If they were never baptised, never married, and were never a taxpayer or ratepayer, there might be no official record of their existence,
Troy Town was within the parish of St Margaret's, Rochester. The baptisms at St Margaret's from 1784 to 1803 were counted, using the digitised parish register, available on Find My Past.
The period 1784-1803 was chosen because it happens to coincide with one complete volume of baptism registers. It also includes the beginning of Troy Town (from 1786) and the French Revolutionary War from 1793 to the Peace of Amiens in 1802.
The sudden increase in baptisms in 1803 may be because there was a new vicar in that year; he may have been more successful or proactive than his predecessor in persuading parents to bring their children to be baptised.
Even excluding 1803, the figures show a definite upward trend from 1784.
There were not enough marriages each year for any definite trends to be identified. Burial registers are available, but the difficulty with a town such as Rochester (and even more so Chatham) that is likely to have a transient population so that burials include people who were not normally resident there and therefore do not reflect the size of the actual population.
There were 206 burials at St Margaret's in the two years 1793-94. Of those, eleven were 'from Rochester' - possibly from St Nicholas' parish, which covered the High Street. Six were from Chatham, two from Sheerness and one each from Gillingham and London. Three burials were of strangers, names unknown.
55 were from 'Hosp', including four French prisoners.
These burials pre-date the establishment of the military hospital at Fort Pitt, but the fact that the burials were all men, and the presence of the French prisoners, suggests that this hospital was a military establishment.
The 1790s were a difficult decade. As well as war, there was a succession of bad harvests. Food imports were limited, due to the war. Food prices increased, and continued to increase, leading to pressure on the system of poor relief.
At the same time, the population was growing. People were aware that it was growing, but did not know by how much. There was concern that there would be insufficient food supplies to feed the rapidly growing urban populations. As a consequence, the government decided to hold a census of the population, to establish how many people there were, where they lived, and how many worked in agriculture or manufacturing.
The first census was held in 1801, and every ten years thereafter, except in1941. Not only were the census returns useful to the governments of the time, the census reports, and later the individual household returns, are invaluable resources for historians.
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