This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English – and now Welsh – legal sources. Angela Muir is Lecturer in Social and Cultural History and Director of the Centre for Regional and Local History at the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on gender, sex, crime, deviance and the body in Wales and England in the long eighteenth century. You can find her on X @DrAngelaMuir and Bluesky @drangelamuir.bsky.social.

Angela Muir

When we think about religious diversity in Georgian Wales, what typically comes to mind is the growth of Protestant Nonconformity. What we don’t typically think about is Judaism. However, Wales was home to a small but important Jewish community from the middle of the eighteenth-century, which was based primarily in the South Wales port of Swansea.

We know much about the Jewish community in Wales in the nineteenth century due to a richer and more varied range of records available, and to the work of historians like Harold Pollins, Ursula R. Q. Henriques and Cai Parry-Jones.[1] Little research has focused on the lives and experiences of the individuals who made up the earlier community. However, through my research using the records of the Court of Great Sessions in Wales, I have serendipitously come across additional evidence which helps add more depth and detail to our understanding of the lives and experiences of some Jews in Georgian Wales.

The Great Sessions were the highest court in Wales between the 1540s and 1830 when they were abolished and replaced with the Assize system. Overseeing both civil and serious criminal cases, the Great Sessions administered English law in Wales. Surviving records from the Great Sessions, which are held at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, provide uniquely detailed evidence not only about crime and deviance, but also about Welsh society and culture that historians can uncover by reading these records ‘against the grain’. It is in these records that we find evidence about Wales’s early Jewish community.

Tradition has it that Jews began to settle in Swansea in the early eighteenth century. The earliest individuals who we definitively know about include David Michael, who became a leader of the local Jewish community. Michael is believed to have arrived in Swansea along with a handful of other Jewish men in 1740s, likely as refugees from Germany

This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Charmian Mansell is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She works on early modern gender and work, and mobility and migration, and has articles in Continuity and Change, Gender & History and The Historical Journal. She is the author of Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2024). You can follow her on Twitter/X at @charmianmansell.

Charmian Mansell

In 1609, Norfolk-born Thomas Hanwood was questioned by officials over his trade as a petty chapman. His work took him across the country and most recently, had brought him into Somerset. Perhaps on the highway as he peddled his wares, he passed the servants of Joanna King. Five times a week they rode six miles to Bristol, returning to the Somerset village of Compton Dando upon horses laden with wheat to be ground at their mistress’s mill.[1]

Tracking everyday movements of much of today’s society has become pervasive. Google Maps tells me the places I’ve visited over the years and reminds me how often I walk to my favourite café. Uber collects data on all the times it’s been too late (or I’ve been too lazy) to walk home from the train station. Alongside digital tracking, transport-use surveys and interviews of migrant people provide yet more data for the systematic and detailed study of contemporary mobility.[2]

But it’s rare to unearth detailed records of the daily movements of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century person or community. Letters, journals, travelogues, and diaries document the travels of literate people, allowing us to trace the journeys and geographically expansive networks made by elites and middling sorts. Tracing the dynamic footsteps of urban dwellers as they criss-crossed cityscapes has become possible through records of civic government. We know, then, that dispersed personal networks created economies and communities. But what about the mobile lives of non-elites and rural dwellers? After all, they made up the majority of people in pre-modern societies.[3] To shadow their movements, we have to look elsewhere.

Over the last decade and more, legal records have become the bread-and-butter of my academic work. Searching for experiences of service in court depositions for my PhD (and later, book) was needle-in-a-haystack work: weeks (or maybe months?) of combing through church court witness statements uncovered around 30,000 witnesses, only around 500 of whom were female servants (less than 2 per cent). But this time round as I bury myself in the same documents for a new project ‘Everyday Mobility in Early Modern England’, I find people on the move everywhere.

This post is part of our ‘The People and the Law‘ Online Symposium, a series exploring early modern English legal sources. Lucy Kaufman is Assistant Professor of Early Modern British History at the University of Alabama. You can follow Lucy on X/Twitter @drlucykaufman.

Lucy Kaufman

Thomas Kendall was despondent. “I am richer in years and in diseases than in any other riches,” he wrote to Thomas Windebank in 1574, in a thinly-veiled plea for patronage and employment. “I have in boarding and teaching gentlemen’s children and others been mine own decay, and now at midsummer I give it all over…I remain yet in the house of one John Paston whom I think you know, but no longer than midsummer next. I paid my rent truly for the year £5, but what moved him to warn me out, I know not. Our City is sore peopled with strangers but we almost know not where to place us.”[1]

It was a last-minute scribble at the bottom of the letter: strategic, a little self-pitying, and tinged with a nativist anxiety that sounds not terribly dissimilar to that you hear in political debates today. But it also reflected a particular view of a new reality: the soaring number of immigrants from the Low Countries—known as ‘Strangers’—in Norwich in the 1560s and 70s. In 1565, the city welcomed in 300 immigrants. By 1571, there were over 4,000 such immigrants in Norwich, men, women, and over 1600 children.[2] To put this in perspective, in 1565, Strangers accounted for no more than one percent of the population of Norwich, England’s second-largest city, next only to London in both size and wealth. Less than a decade later, one in three inhabitants was an immigrant.

They were driven to England by religious war. After the violent wave of Calvinist iconoclasm known as the Beeldenstorm destroyed images in the Low Countries, Spain set up a tribunal to prosecute heresy—one that would see nearly 10,000 put on trial. In response, Protestants began to flee from the Low Countries; some historians estimate more than 60,000 emigrating between 1567 and 1568 alone. Many of those, particularly from the areas of Zeeland and Flanders, followed the old woolen trade routes to England.[3] There, they settled in London, Canterbury, Sandwich, Colchester—and in Norwich.

My work on this is part of a project I’m just beginning, examining what I think is the first wave of what we, in modern words, might call ideological immigration into England. It was a movement sparked by geopolitical conflicts that sprung from the fractures of the Reformation, where populations were being imprisoned, attacked, and executed for their religious beliefs. What resulted in England, however, was something far different than expectations: new experiments in managing populations, new definitions of belonging, new capacities of state power.