Migrants on the margin? Mobility, integration and occupations in the West Riding, 1650–1820

Abstract

The idea that families and individuals in England between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries were highly mobile has now been explored in some detail. It is clear that most people could expect to move at least once during their lifetime, that much of this movement was short distance and that the risks of migration were much heavier at certain points of the life cycle than others. The consequences of such mobility for studies which focus on individual spatial communities as a vehicle for studying social structure, institutions or demography are potentially very severe. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in the fact that most English family reconstitutions can detect baptism dates for less than 40 per cent of all people marrying in a place. Against this backdrop, the idea that studying a «local country» defined by walking distance, the physical extent of occupational or religious networks or the width of the labour market, has particular attractions. This article argues that in practice we do not know enough in the English context about the character of migration, the motivations for migration or the reception of migrants, to be able to test the usefulness of theoretical notions of «local country». Using a case study of a large West Yorkshire parish between the mid-seventeenth and the early nineteenth centuries, this article shows that motivations for migration were often very complex and that migrants who came into townships in the parish, even where they came from other townships in the parish itself, did not integrate easily and without stress into the networks which shaped the character of everyday life for those longer resident. Indeed, the excellent sources for the parish would seem to show that migrants were marginalized economically and spatially, such that eventual acceptance was accorded to the children of migrants, not migrants themselves. Even if migrants theoretically shared the same local country, and even if they had previous connections with the township or individual families within it, there were no guarantees of easy integration. In this part of West Yorkshire then, the idea of a «local country» as a framework for studying demography or social structure has only limited validity.