Early Modern England: A Mobile Society?

Volume 2 | Issue 6 - Travel

Article by James Mawdesley. Edited by Danielle Coomer. Additional Research by Ellie Veryard.

The early modern ideal of society was of a stable entity, based around the family, and the patriarchal networks which ensued from the family unit. Even the Poor Law system, enshrined most famously in two Acts of Parliament passed in 1598 and 1601, was based around a central idea that people were ‘settled’, and that if poverty struck, they would be maintained by the rates collected from the place of their birth. The 1598 Act ordered that those found to be vagabonds were to be ‘arrested, whipped until bloody, and returned by the most direct route to their place of origin’.

However, the inhabitants of early modern England were never really convinced that their world lived up to its ideals. Those living in sixteenth and seventeenth century England were well aware that vagrancy existed; as the historian R.H. Tawney famously put it in 1912, ‘the sixteenth century lives [sic] in terror of the tramp’. Vagrancy stood as a threat to conventional social order. In a study by A.L. Beier of 1209 Elizabethan vagrancy arrests, it was found that over half of those arrested were single men, with less than a fifth of those arrested having a spouse. Young single men lived outside of the conventional social order, and by their very existence seemed to pose a threat to the social order as extorted by writers and clergymen.

Yet, like many phenomena in history, vagrancy is not a straightforward issue for the historian. Included within Beier’s study were the statistics of the 102 suspected vagrants arrested in Warwick between 1580 and 1587 who gave a reason for their journey. 49 were found to be travelling for reasons attached to their occupation, and a further 18 were ‘seeking work’. Only 23 were deemed to have been travelling for illegal reasons, such as theft.

Trade and employment would seem to be logical reasons for travelling. In April 1688, a Lancaster twenty-something named William Stout, having recently been discharged from his apprenticeship on account of his desire to enter trade, and fortified by the sum of £120 which consisted mostly by the legacy which his father had left him, travelled to London with a group of his neighbours. Whilst there, he purchased the initial stick required for his business, paying half then, and promising to pay the remaining half after he had sold the goods.

By the time of Stout’s journey in 1688, England was a much more stable society than it had been in the 1580s, the focus of Beier’s research on vagrancy in Warwick. The late sixteenth century was a time of population growth and increasing food prices, with wages in real terms being in decline. When Stout made his journey to London a century later, he was travelling with a group of established Lancaster merchants, and with a large sum of cash. Although a traveller, he was by no means a vagrant.

It goes without saying that not every young man in early modern England was as fortunate as Stout. Agricultural workers were subject to periodic slumps in their market, as were cloth workers: both of these groups particularly suffered during the late sixteenth century. There was also another problem: that of the younger son. Both of these problems caused groups of young men to go on the move in search of employment.

In one of the most striking historical works of the second half of the twentieth century, Alan Macfarlane sought to challenge the Marxist notion that sixteenth century England saw a transition from a feudal to a capitalist society. Rather, England had never been, at least as far as written records existed, a ‘Classic peasant’ society, typified by family owned farms, on which the younger children often lived their lives alongside their eldest brother. This model was found in central Europe, Russia, and in Ireland, but not in England. For as long as written records existed, Macfarlane argued, most areas of England used primogeniture (the principle of sole inheritance by the eldest son) as the basic means of land transfer on the death of the head of the family.

Macfarlane included a detailed study of the parish of Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmorland, situated in modern-day Cumbria on the border with Lancashire. He found that during the seventeenth century, it was rare for married children to live with their parents. He also found that mobility amongst young people was relatively common. In one of the manors of Kirkby Lonsdale, Lupton, he found that of the twenty men from that manor baptised between 1660 and 1669 who it is not known that they had hitherto died, only six were still living in the manor in 1695. Macfarlane suggested that rather than working on their parents’ farm, children moved as hired labour to other farms, both within and outside of the parish.

Yet, as Macfarlane noted, by the end of the seventeenth century, most people did not have a farm to call their own. Whilst the eldest son of the eldest son would accumulate land, the younger children would lose out, and would either have to live as hired labour, or to make their own way in life, possibly buying land outside of the parish (if they could afford it). In 1695, one-third of the inhabitants of another of Kirkby Lonsdale’s manors, Killington, were receiving poor relief. To Macfarlane, the early modern period saw the creation ‘of a permanent and large category of landless and largely propertyless labouring families’.

So, what are the implications of this situation for travel? Some of these landless people were lucky enough to have a choice, in that they could either remain in their home villages to work on a farm, or they may have had enough capital to establish their own farm possibly in another village. But, there were those who did not have such ready capital. If the labouring opportunities were not available in their home village, they may have had to try their chances elsewhere, or live on the poor rate to the (likely) disapproval of their neighbours. Agriculture was not a straightforward industry in which to gain occupation: in arable areas, employment was often seasonal and temporary, whereas on pasture farms, although employment could be secured on a yearly basis, farmers would often prefer to employ young single men who would live on the farm. Travel was not something to be embarked upon lightly in early modern England, but for many people, there was no other choice if they wanted employment.

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Mobility and vagrancy was a long, continual issue and problem throughout the history of early modern England, extending into the later early modern period where similar influences, circumstances and situations can be seen.

Mobility, especially among younger people, continued into the eighteenth century. Large numbers of young migrants, both male and female, flocked to London every year in search of work. The employment they found was often insecure and casual. Many were left unemployed, either temporarily or permanently. This influx of youth and the unstable job market led contemporaries to fear these migrants as trouble makers and criminals; unemployment led to idleness, idleness to led immorality and immorality led to crime. This perception is reflected in levels of crime prosecuted at the Old Bailey; young men and women between the ages of c. 17 and 28 were most likely to be arrested in eighteenth-century London, often for theft. Many pleaded poverty as an excuse.

Vagrancy was punishable in the eighteenth-century under a statute which allowed the arrest of all whom constables, night-watchmen and justice’s of the peace regarded as ‘loose, idle and disorderly persons.’ This widely ambiguous category often facilitated the arrest of immoral and troublesome members of communities as well as vagrants. Men and women were often arrested as vagrants for having no visible way of living, and the rolls of people brought to JPs under this act often cite the justification of arrest as the prisoner being ‘unable to give a good account’ of themselves.

Once arrested vagrants could be sent to a House of Correction for corporal punishment designed to instil good working practice in them, or they would be ‘passed’ back to their original parish of residence.

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