Oh all recipes should be shared and readily. I have saved in my notes app my strong recommends and will send the out after people come over for dinner. Macaroni is my only red line

Mac and cheese recipes, if done well, should be kept to yourself. I sometimes worry my wife only married me for my macaroni cheese (she brought it up twice in her wedding speech as did her best woman) and so I daren’t tell anyone my hidden truths.

Zebulon Swingewood (imprisoned debtor in 1769) has been living rent free in my head for almost the last decade

Surely we can at least go from the act of union as formation of Britain? A healthy diet of boiled potatoes (none of that modern frying) and gin is all I need

I remember discovering in shock as an undergraduate that Eric Hobsbawm was still alive only for him to die the next day

Measuring worth (again now a little out of date) but slightly more detailed / recent than TNA

www.measuringworth.com

Followed by 'Jewish Credit, Debt, and Economic Integration in Eighteenth-Century London', by @awakelam.bsky.social: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.....

If you want to play around with the visualisation of the data and see fertility decline (particularly marital fertility) can’t recommend the Populations Past website enough

www.populationspast.org

This is 19th century UK focussed by the way. There is no single global pattern of fertility decline and we don’t yet understand what really caused it in any setting but we are good at working out what didn’t cause it.

Oh they were absolutely still having sex. Pre-contraception, couples were much better at coitus interuptus than you’d expect. Ultimately it comes down to whether women are able to negotiate it - wage earning women have fewer children.

Unfortunately that’s not the answer. It would be delightful
If it was that simple. The major fertility transition in Britain had already occurred by 1911, average children per family falling from 6 to 2 1851-1911 without contraception.