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migration « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Posts Tagged ‘migration’

The north-south divide

Thursday, November 7th, 2024

Kevin Schürer

“When you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a long time past... The Northerner has ‘grit’, he is grim, ‘dour’, plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy – that at any rate is the theory.” 

Thus wrote the Eton-educated George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) in The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937.  

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The first urban society

Thursday, October 31st, 2024

Romola Davenport

In 2007 the United Nations announced an historic milestone: the world had become decisively urban, with half the global population living in towns and cities. This represented a dramatic reversal of historic norms, when 80-90 percent of people worked and lived in the countryside. And this unprecedented shift from rural to urban areas shows no sign of abating – indeed, the UN predicts that all future population growth will be urban 

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You’re not from these parts, are you?

Thursday, September 26th, 2024

Kevin Schürer

John Leech, ‘Bits from the mining districts‘ (1868).

The John Leech cartoon above, published in 1868 and entitled Bits from the mining districts, bears the following caption: 

First polite native – ‘Who’s ‘im, Bill?’ 

Second polite native – ‘A stranger!’ 

First polite native – ‘ ‘Eave ‘arfa brick at ‘im’.

Whilst obviously sarcastic, the underlying context is clear. Outsiders – those not from these parts – are treated with caution, if not distrust and open hostility. Yet mining communities, often being mono-cultural in terms of employment, were known for being tight-knit, closed, maybe inward looking, and the stranger of this cartoon was not only ‘not from these parts’, but also clearly socially distant judging from the way he is dressedYet, how wide-ranging were such notions of xenophobia – literally fear of strangers – in the past?  

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Sorry, you’ll have to walk!

Thursday, September 12th, 2024

Alan Rosevear

Imagine! No bike, no car, no bus, no train; a walk to work and a wet trudge to the shops. Our social support miles away; how to keep in touch? Can granny look after the sick kids? How far do we dare move from home? 

The personal diaries of men and women from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s show how people in England and Wales resolved these dilemmas. What emerges from the analysis of 300,000 miles of journeys is a story of evolutionary change in travel, facilitated by technological improvement.  

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Stuck in the mud!

Thursday, August 22nd, 2024

Kevin Schürer 

Of all situations for a constant residence, that which appears to me most delightful is a little village far in the country…” Thus starts Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village, published in 1824, a bestseller in its day. It continues to describe this idyllic village as a place “with inhabitants whose faces are as familiar to us as the flowers in our garden; a little world of our own, close-packed and insulated like ants in an ant-hill, or bees in a hive where we know every one, [and] are known to every one”. 

The message is loud and clear. Prior to the coming of the railways and mass transportation, rural villages were slow-moving, tight-knit communities – places where people rarely came or went, and where the likelihood was that the majority of the population would live and die in the parish where they had been born and baptised. To all intents and purposes, they were stuck in the mud. 

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