The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social StructureKevin 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.