The rotation of more than 700 pulsars has been monitored using the 76-m Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank .
Here we report on a new search for glitches in the observations , revealing 128 new glitches in the rotation of 63 pulsars .
Combining these new data with those already published we present a database containing 315 glitches in 102 pulsars .
The database was used to study the glitch activity among the pulsar population , finding that it peaks for pulsars with a characteristic age \tau _ { c } \sim 10 kyr and decreases for longer values of \tau _ { c } , disappearing for objects with \tau _ { c } > 20 Myr .
The glitch activity is also smaller in the very young pulsars ( \tau _ { c } \lesssim 1 kyr ) .
The cumulative effect of glitches , a collection of instantaneous spin up events , acts to reduce the regular long term spindown rate | \dot { \nu } | of the star .
The percentage of | \dot { \nu } | reversed by glitch activity was found to vary between 0.5 % and 1.6 % for pulsars with spindown rates | \dot { \nu } | between 10 ^ { -14 } and 3.2 \times 10 ^ { -11 } Hz s ^ { -1 } , decreasing to less than 0.01 % at both higher and lower spindown rates .
These ratios are interpreted in terms of the amount of superfluid involved in the generation of glitches .
In this context the activity of the youngest pulsar studied , the Crab pulsar may be explained by quake-like activity within the crust .
Pulsars with low spindown rates seem to exhibit mostly small glitches , matching well the decrease of their crustal superfluid .

Through the analysis of glitch sizes it was found that the particular glitching behaviour of PSR J0537 - 6910 and the Vela pulsar may be shared by most Vela-like pulsars .
These objects present most of their glitches with characteristic frequency and frequency derivative jumps , occurring at regular intervals of time .
Their behaviour is different from other glitching pulsars of similar characteristic age .