Patterns of migration and movement of labour to three pre-industrial East Anglian towns

Abstract

The very population growth of most pre-industrial English towns of any size depended on considerable immigration: certainly their economic well-being was equally dependent on continuous influxes of labour to fill urban manufacturing, trading and service occupations. Rates of immigration will always be impossible to quantify exactly, but without doubt no town of any standing—from London downwards—could for long have grown in size, or prospered economically, without such influxes of newcomers. Three East Anglian towns, the great provincial capital of Norwich, and the seaports of Great Yarmouth and Ipswich, are discussed in order to examine migration patterns to towns of different sizes and economic roles within a regional framework. Registers of apprentices enrolled in them are the sources which are used. These sources are the only surviving for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for any town in East Anglia which give a relatively coherent picture of geographical patterns of migration. Apprentices were but one group amongst all those moving to towns in search of work it is true, but they were a substantial one; then, as today, younger people formed a majority in the migrant sector of society. Migration appeared generally to have been densest from the immediate surroundings of these towns; from other, smaller towns in the region; and from areas with which they had a special link, such as similar manufacturing interests. It could also be marked from areas of high population and low agricultural or manufacturing opportunities. The migratory “pull” and attraction of the bigger Norwich, throughout the two centuries examined, was more marked than that of Great Yarmouth or Ipswich—both within East Anglia, and indeed all England. For northern and western upland England indeed supplied a good number of immigrants to the economically buoyant and attractive Norwich, while long range coastal migration was an important component of the total movement of apprentices to the two ports.