Albion's People by John Rule

Author:John Rule [Rule, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General, Medieval
ISBN: 9781317895947
Google: jnXJAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-11T01:23:13+00:00

MIGRATION

Contemporaries differed in their view of the overall effect of the Settlement Laws on the mobility of the labouring poor. They saw things from different perspectives. For Adam Smith in 1776, laying down the philosophical system which was to become the ideological underpinning of the market economy, they were the greatest obstruction placed on the movement of labour for they affected even common labour, while the regulations of guilds and corporations restricted the movement only of artisans. Henry Fielding in 1751 saw the matter from the perspective of a London magistrate, linking vagrancy to crime. For him the laws of settlement hardly prevented the ‘idle poor’ from wandering and a stricter enforcement of vagrancy laws would ‘compel the poor to starve or beg at home; for there it will be impossible for them to steal or rob without being presently hanged or transported out of the way’.59 Whatever personal suffering the laws caused – and there is no doubt they caused a great deal – there is little to suggest that the development of the eighteenth-century economy was frustrated by an unusual level of institutionally produced labour immobility. There is also much evidence from a variety of sources that the labouring poor moved a great deal in search of employment, if usually not over very great distances.

Most people did not spend their whole lives in one place. A study of some West Riding parish registers has found that in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, farming was the only occupation where more than half of sons remained in their fathers’ places of residence. Another analysis of a sample of sixteen English parishes has shown that in only one case did the number of males married between 1721 and 1750 who could also be found in both the baptism and burial records exceed 50 per cent (in that case it was 51 per cent). The proportions for women were even lower.60 It was the argicultural parishes which produced the smallest percentages. Villages where rural manufacturing enhanced employment possibilities, like the framework-knitting villages of Shepshed and Gedling, had 36 and 51 per cent of their male sample with a ‘complete’ registration. For the same reason the coal-mining parish of Earsdon also had a more stable population. Such measures of absences from parish registers are the crudest of indicators, but other evidence points in the same direction. On the evidence of church court depositions, Professor Clark has suggested that in the early eighteenth century six out of ten males moved at least once in their lives. Country rates were higher than those of the towns; in the former case the ratio was seven out of ten. Women were even more mobile, reflecting perhaps the large proportion who at some time of their life entered service and married extra-parochial partners. Three out of four country women moved at least once.61

Mobility was closely linked to the life-cycle: men and women moved while they were young. Farm service and apprenticeship, two especially common reasons for relocation, were obviously related to young persons.

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