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.

Going ‘abroad’ – meaning to leave the place you called home – was commonplace in early modern England. Some people were migratory, making more permanent moves to pastures new. Court records capture the migrant in droves: almost two thirds of church court witnesses in the south and west of England had moved at least once in their lives, mirroring patterns found elsewhere by Peter Laslett[4]. Others were semi-migratory or even itinerant, like Thomas Hanwood (more on him later). But many more still were mobile like Joanna King’s servants, travelling back and forth (to market, to work, to visit family) between their homes and sometimes quite distant places. It’s these quotidian movements that took people outside their parish of residence that have caught my attention.

The paper trail left by all sorts of litigation and offences – adultery cases, litigation over wills, defamation disputes, and indictments for theft – documents these ordinary journeys. The journey made by Joanna King’s servants appears because Joanna’s household economy was placed under scrutiny in a tithe dispute that year. But some movement turns up more incidentally: journeys to work are detailed as an explanation for why a witness was in a particular place at a particular time, for example. In using legal records, we have to be sensitive to the possibility that witnesses might distort the historical record. But handled with care, evidence of this kind allows us to write a history of mobile lives that encompasses men, women, and children across the age spectrum and from the poorest to richest strata of society.

Why does all this everyday mobility matter? Interest in historic mobility tends to centre on its most visible forms: long-distance or permanent/semi-permanent migration, and sometimes urban movement. But everyday journeys made by rural society represented a more typical experience of mobility than migration.[5] Implicit within the focus on migration is the idea that only ‘movers’ drive change. ‘Stayers’, on the other hand, are seen as sedentary, creating only local identities and community. Their movements are delimited by the parochial boundaries of early modern local government and administration (and later, processes of archiving). The idea of the pre-industrial self-contained village – in which movement in and out was limited – looms large.

Following the footsteps of ordinary people outside their place of residence challenges this dominant narrative. In their daily lives, people routinely crossed and re-crossed parish borders. But we really know far too little about the connectedness of places and people. As geographer Doreen Massey has argued, ‘place’ and ‘community’ are rarely coterminous.^[6] Analysing journeys (destination and arrival points, travel purpose, distance travelled, travel duration, time and season of travel and mode of transport) sheds new light on the connections to both people and places that ordinary society forged outside their home parish. We can look at journey-makers, too: how does age, gender, social/marital status, and place of residence affect experiences of early modern people? To what extent did places – of birth, residence, leisure, work, and worship – shape their identities?

Thinking about different forms of mobility (from migration to semi-migration to everyday mobility) helps us to rethink the limits to journey-making, too. Returning to Thomas Hanwood, our petty chapman apprehended in Somerset in 1609, we might pose another question: what types of journeys were not only possible but also permissible for different types of people? What were the spatial horizons of different kinds of early modern people?

On the one hand, we have a story of a state increasingly fond of demarcating boundaries, limiting mobility of the poor, and shutting out and locking in marginalised groups and individuals. On the other, what has struck me over the years of reading thousands of court depositions and examinations is that early modern people were routinely making journeys: people were on the move all the time. Court records showcase roads and waterways bustling with life, travellers piled into beds in inns and taverns on stop-overs, and well-trodden routes established by both custom and tracks in the landscape.

The quotidian movements of early modern people worked in tandem with the potentially ‘illicit’ mobility of the marginal, like Thomas Hanwood. Reconstructing the whole gamut of mobility reminds us that while limiting movement was a state project, mobility was the norm and too routine to easily police.

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[1] Somerset Heritage Centre, Q/SR-5 (1609); SHC, DDCd43 and DDCd45 (1612).

[2] John Urry, Mobilities, (Cambridge: 2007), esp. chapter 2.

[3] Jan de Vries, European Urbanization 1500-1800 (Cambridge: 1984), p.39.

[4] Charmian Mansell, Female Servants in Early Modern England (Oxford: 2024), p.126; Peter Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: 1977), pp.65-7.

[5] See Urry, Mobilities; M. Sheller and J. Urry, ‘The New Mobilities Paradigm’, Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 38 (2006), 207-226.

[6] D. Massey, ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today, (June 1991), 24.