The Myth of Immobility: Tracking Movement in Early Modern England 

In the decades before the COVID-19 pandemic, lunch spots, bars and restaurants multiplied in city centres, fed and watered by the daily footfall of commuters pattering from trains and cars. These were businesses geared to serve an office-based workforce. Everyday movements can have a transformative effect on societies and economies.

But in March 2020, government-mandated restrictions on mobility paved the way for home working and many have never looked back. Though businesses urge employees back to the office, commuters resist. Cafés and grab-and-go lunch spots sit vacant. Not only have lunchtime spending habits changed, working from home has also reoriented – possibly reduced – social practices. A substitute for the post-work drink is hard to find on your doorstep. As many swap the office for home, are workers retreating, stepping back into a more local past?

We tend to think of ordinary people in the past – rural labourers, farmers, artisans, craftspeople and urban sellers – as static, rooted in place, inward-looking. Admittedly, mechanised transport means that commuting is easier, faster, and more comfortable today than it was five hundred years ago. But it is misguided to assume that before the age of rail and road travel, people in the past rarely left their hometowns and villages.

In the first place, society was more migratory than most people realise. Between around 1530 and 1650, around two-thirds of people had moved at least once in their lifetimes and about half of them had moved further than 9 miles. [1] But it is not just the migrant we should pay attention to. Like pre-pandemic commuters, the quotidian footsteps of people in the past created relationships, communities and economies, too.

If you know where to look, mobile people are everywhere in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England. Court witness statements are thick with incidental descriptions of people’s movements. If we read closely, we track them climbing hills, crossing streams and rivers as they journeyed to market towns and other villages. There they are, buying and selling goods, visiting friends and family in distant places. Even the lives of the supposedly sedentary – those who never migrated from home – played out beyond the parish boundaries.

Nobody would talk about ‘commuters’ until the nineteenth century. [2] But early modern people did travel for work. Trade and craftspeople regularly worked away from their own homes. One Sunday night in May 1622, John Smyth left the home of Wiliam Hapgood in Newton Tony in Wiltshire where he had been weaving all week. He arrived home in Woodborough, fourteen miles away, just before sunrise on Monday morning. [3] In 1631, Thomas Younge, a 40-year-old carpenter of Priddy in Somerset was busy ‘att worke’ in Edmund Shepton’s joinery shop in Wrington; his journey to work was just over seven miles. [4]

In this overwhelmingly rural society on the precipice of accelerated urbanisation, the city was not always the destination for work, then. But harvests reaped from rural soils of course found buyers in urban centres. Amy Clement travelled around six miles from home to sell at markets in and around Bristol between 1622 and 1624. We catch her travelling ‘with horses laden with peas and turnips the summer and winter’, crops she sold for her father. [5]

Likewise, fifty-year-old Alice Lawrence and her husband Benedict travelled a similar distance selling milled grain at a Bristol market in 1612. The route must have been ground into the wheels of Alice’s cart: buying corn, milling it and selling it was work she was ‘chieflie ymployed [in] between our Ladye daye [25 March] & Xmas’. [6] Women like Amy and Alice connected countryside supply with city demand, their movements impressed in the landscape along the way. 

Walking for pleasure was an eighteenth-century invention, it is argued, promenading arm-in-arm onto the scene with Romanticism and increased leisure time for the affluent. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century walking has different associations. Rather than broadening spatial horizons, walking was associated with literally ringfencing communities within the parish through practices like parish perambulation and beating of the bounds. Only the shapeless, shiftless vagrant walked abroad. 

But early modern walking was not just for the wandering poor. The sick recognised walking’s health benefits. In 1667, the spectacularly named Sampson Grubb ‘findinge himself not well in health walked abroade from his howse in the parish of Aymestry to Wigmore in Herefordshire’. The two-mile walk called for refreshment, and so Sampson stopped at an inn. The innkeeper sat with the Sampson as he explained ‘that he found himself not well and was com abroade to procure his health’. [7]

Nor was walking simply utilitarian. One Thursday in May 1620, a Bristol grocer named Thomas Davies and his wife Mary spent the afternoon walking in the fields with their daughter, Alice and her husband, Edward, another city grocer. This was an afternoon of leisure; they stopped at an alehouse in Bedminster with the intention of eating some cream, but the house having none, they called instead for a pot of ale. [8] These city-dwellers took to the fields, escaping busy urban life and seeking pastoral pleasures. If the post-COVID commuter is retreating from society, they are not retreating into the past. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was a society on the move.

Dr Charmian Mansell is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Sheffield. Her research explores the histories of work, gender, and society, with a particular focus on recovering the everyday experiences and identities of ordinary people from legal records. Charmian's first book, Female Servants in Early Modern England, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. She is currently working on a new project titled Everyday Travel and Communities in Early Modern England. 

References

[1] C. Mansell, Female Servants in Early Modern England, (Oxford University Press: 2024), p.126,132.

[2] “Commuter, N.”  Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1112470286  

[3] Wiltshire and Swindon Heritage Centre, A1-110-1622T, 1622.

[4] Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/cd/71, Elizabeth Shepton v John Allett (1631).

[5] SHC, DD/cd/59, William Bralad, Richard Cox and Thomas Fifitt v Eleanor Clement (1624).

[6] SHC, DD/cd/43, Richard Harris v Joanna King (1612).

[7] Herefordshire Archive and Records Centre, HD4/2/12-13, Grubb v Grubb (1670).

[8] SHC, QSR-34, Examination of Thomas Davies (1620).

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