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. 

Migration from rural areas to urban areas

It is well known that England and Wales urbanised relatively rapidly over the course of the 19th century, partly as a result of developments in both industrialisation and transportation. Those living in towns and cities increased from around a third of the population in 1801, to just over half in 1851, and reaching just over three-quarters of the population by the end of the century.  

This switch from a predominantly rural society to a predominantly urban one could not have happened without migration from country to town. The second half of the 19th century, in particular, witnessed widespread rural depopulation, as people moved into towns in search of work and a better life.  

Take the small rural parish of Elmdon in the remote north-west corner of Essex. At the 2021 census it recorded a population of 612, of which just over half were aged 50 or over. Like many small rural parishes, its heyday was the mid-19th century: it recorded a population of 743 in 1851.  

However, if we dig a little deeper into the population dynamics of this Essex village, we can see that the overlying trend of rural depopulation masks a more complex pattern of rural migration.  

Migration into rural villages 

The total population of Elmdon remained fairly constant between 1851 and 1861, but Jean Robin, a former Campop researcher, demonstrated that only half (52%) of the individuals living in Elmdon in 1851 were still present a decade later, in 1861. Some 12 percent had died between the two census years, and about 36 percent had moved away. 

So rural migration was not a one–way flow away from rural villages, since in 1861 a fifth of the Elmdon population had moved into the village from elsewhere over the course of the previous decade. Maybe the inhabitants of mid-19th century rural Elmdon were not so stuck in the mud after all!        

Pre-industrial migration 

But what of earlier periods? What was the situation in pre-industrial rural societies? The pioneering research of one of Campop’s founding fathers – Peter Laslett – has been mentioned in an earlier blog on household structure and the nuclear family.

Peter’s work on the 17th-century household listings for the villages of Clayworth (Nottinghamshire) and Cogenhoe (Northamptonshire) included an analysis of migration and population turnover. For the first of these villages, the total number of residents was little changed between 1676 and 1688 – 401 in the first of these years and 412 in the second. Yet over the 12-year period between the taking of the two listings, some 38 percent of the initial population had moved away, while 40 percent had moved in. 

Remarkably similar rates of migration into and out of the village are recorded for the smaller parish of Cogenhoe between 1618 and 1628, with 38 percent of the initial population of 185 moving out, and 36 percent of the later population of 180 moving in since 1618. Movement in and out of rural parishes in the pre-industrial period was therefore not only common, but it was potentially higher than that experienced in the mid-19th century.  

Indeed, work by Larry Poos, a former Campop research student, using an early 14th century set of tithing listings for four Essex parishes, has demonstrated that in the case of the male population aged 12 and over, similar turnover rates to those of the 17th century were experienced. Thus, as far back as it is possible to determine, English rural society has exhibited evidence of being highly mobile.   

Reasons for migration

A large proportion of this mobile rural population would have been young people searching for work.   

In her pioneering study of servants in husbandry – essentially live-in farm servants – Ann Kussmaul has shown that in the early modern period, servants were usually hired on an annual basis, invariably serving no more than a year at a time on any one farm, and moving from farm to farm within the local area known to them. These servants, both males and females, would have been young and unmarried. One example is Joseph Mayett of Quainton, Buckinghamshire, who worked as a servant on 12 separate farms between the ages of 12 and 19, before joining the local militia in 1802.  

Movement within a parish

Population movement was not only widespread between rural parishes, usually within a relatively constrained local area, but also within villages and parishes.  

Using a fairly unique set of documents for the Berkshire parish of Binfield between 1790 and 1801, Maggie Escott, a former researcher at Campop, calculated that just under half of the households resident in 1790 remained in the same property in 1801. Of the rest, some 18 percent of households were dissolved due to death, 15 percent moved away from Binfield, whilst 16 percent of the households moved within the parish of Binfield, several moving more than once, and one household moving five times.  

Such internal migration was a common feature of urban areas as well, if not more so. A rare survey of the London parish of St George-in-the-East undertaken in 1847 showed that only a fifth of single men had remained in the same dwelling for three years or more, compared to a third of single women and 40 percent of families. A quarter of all families in the parish in 1847 had resided in the same dwelling for only a year or less.   

The autobiography of the social reformer Francis Place indicates that between 1785, when he was apprenticed to Joseph France, a maker of leather-breeches in Temple Bar, London, and 1800, when he established his own tailoring business in Charing Cross, he moved ten times – including at least one move in the dead of night to avoid rent collectors.  

Coming unstuck?

So rather than being stuck in the mud, residential mobility and migration was the norm for large sections of the population in the past. Rather than migration resulting from the processes of urbanisation and industrialisation, England was already a mobile society in the pre-industrial period. 

Indeed, one might argue that a mobile labour force was one of the factors that helped industrialisation.  

However, before concluding this investigation into migration, let us return to the Essex village of Elmdon. Whilst movement into and out of the parish was a common feature, it is worth remembering that around half those living there in 1851 could still be found resident in 1861.  

Indeed, in her detailed study of the village and its inhabitants, Jean Robin found that a small group of core ‘insider’ families, the Hoys and the Hayes, had been present in the village between the mid-17th and mid-20th centuries, while the Gamgees and the Greenhills had roots in the parish from the 18th century to the 1920s. A clear minority of the whole, but these families are perhaps the best examples of Mary Russell Mitford’s “bees in a hive … known to every one” – the true ‘sticks in the mud’.  

Further reading

Escott, M. M., ‘Residential mobility in a late eighteenth-century parish: Binfield, Berkshire 1779-1801’, Local Population Studies 40 (1988), 20-36.  

Kussmaul, A., Servants in husbandry in early modern England (Cambridge, University Press, 1981). 

Laslett, P. and Harrison, J., ‘Clayworth and Cogenhoe’, in Bell, H.E. and Ollard, R.L. (eds), Historical Essays, 1600-1750 Presented to David Ogg (London, 1963) 157-84.

Poos, L.R., ‘Population Turnover in Medieval Essex: The Evidence of some Early-Fourteenth-Century Tithing Lists’, in Bonfield, L., Smith, R. M. and Wrightson, K. (eds.), The World We Have Gained: histories of population and social structure (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986) 1-22. 

Robin, J., Elmdon: continuity and change in a north-west Essex village, 1961-1864 (Cambridge, University Press, 1980). 

Thale, M., (ed) The autobiography of Francis Place, 1771-1854 (Cambridge, University Press, 1972). 

Whitelaw, J., ‘A statistical return of the district of Christchurch in the parish of St George-in-the-East’, Royal Statistical Society (1847).