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.
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