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Exploding England: The dialecticsof mobility and settlement in earlymodern EnglandDavid Rollison aa University of Western Sydney , MacarthurPublished online: 30 May 2008.

To cite this article: David Rollison (1999) Exploding England: The dialectics ofmobility and settlement in early modern England, Social History, 24:1, 1-16, DOI:10.1080/03071029908568049

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David Rollison

Exploding England: the dialectics ofmobility and settlement in early

modern England

The elementary particles are certainly not eternal and indestructible units of matter, theycan actually be transformed into each other.

(Werner Heisenberg)

Many people apart from sociologists and historians treat towns as social realities —just asthey treat magic as a real force and the national interest as a real interest. But the task ofsocial analysis is to say something about why and how such seeming realities areconstructed socially, -which is not likely to happen if they are accepted at their face value.

(Philip Abrams)

Whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they arenot there, but are seemings and apparitions only. The things that really are in the worldwithout us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And this is the greatdeception of sense, which also is by sense to be corrected. For as sense telleth me, whenI see directly, that the colour seemeth to be in the object; so also sense telleth me, whenI see by reflection, that colour is not in the object.

(Thomas Hobbes)

This article explores the relationship between two concepts which form a basic dyad of thehuman sciences in general, and early modern historiography in particular.1 Movement andmobility are seen as 'real-life activities', and settlement is conceived as a long-term 'discursiveformation'. The historical landscape is regarded as a text that is constantly renewed and rewrit-ten by the movement and mobility of people. Regions and communities are usually seen assettlements or networks of settlements within relatively unchanging landscapes. In the sensethat it tends to reproduce the organization of the archives, the study of regions and communi-ties of early modern England is a study of texts that reify prescribed forms of organization.

1 This article was prepared for the Symposiumon 'Conflict and Continuity in English Communi-ties and Regions', held at Liverpool University inMarch 1995; a later draft was delivered at the Econ-omic and Social History Seminar, University of

Liverpool, in December 1997. I would like to thankPat Hudson, Andy Wood, David Cullum, AdrianRandall, Garthine Walker and all the participants inthose seminars, and Keith Wrightson, for theircomments.

Social History Vol. 24 No. 1 January 19990307-1022 © Routledge 1999

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Histories of regions and communities in early modern England too readily incorporate house-holds, families, neighbourhoods, parishes, manors, hundreds, counties, kingdoms, common-wealths, nations and empires — relatively unchanging institutions — at the expense of moremobile and dynamic communities of the people.2

While states found these to be effective categories for administrative and fiscal purposes, the'regions of the people' were more fluid and variable than the apparent solidity of the archivalrecord suggests.3 It is at least arguable that intensifying mobility, particularly that of the labour-ing population, was the most dynamic forcer of change in the early modern period; if this isso, the historian's business being to understand and explain change, we need to rethink ourunderstanding of what kind of society early modern England was.4

'Any activity developed over historical time produces a space,' writes Henri Lefebvre; it 'canonly attain practical "reality" or concrete existence within that space'. 'The social relations ofproduction have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence: they projectthemselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing that space.'5

Application of this perspective to historical research involves the principle of specific location,which begins the study of evidence with the assumption that everything that happens, happenssomewhere. Movements in time can be reduced to movements in space. Research organizedaccording to this principle focuses on the locations mentioned in or implied by sources, anddeduces the movements linking the references. A great many basic sources of early modernhistoriography, including court depositions, state papers, wills, vagrancy and settlement papers,can be used to reconstitute fragments of actual, physical networks: roads actually taken, as it

2 E. P. Thompson wrote about the political faceof these communities: compare especially 'Themoral economy of the English crowd in the eight-eenth century', chap. 4 of Customs in Common(London, 1991), and all Thompson's writings aboutthe movement of the English commonalty, which,he thought, 'cannot be described as "political" inany advanced sense (but which) cannot bedescribed as unpolitical either, since it supposeddefinite, and passionately held, notions of thecommon weal', ibid., 188.

3 John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the EnglishEconomy 1348-1530 (Macmillan Studies in Econ-omic and Social History, London, 1977), notes that:'We know that peasants were surprisingly mobile. . . migration . . . was nothing exceptional.' C. Lisand H. Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-industrialEurope (Brighton, 1982), 79; for the crisis years ofthe late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,cf. especially A. L. Beier, Masterless Men:The VagrancyProblem in England 1560-1640 (London, 1985). AlanMacfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism(Oxford, 1978) represented a significant 'decon-struction' of old conceptions of'peasant' society inlate medieval England. There is an extensive

specialist literature on the history of migration inearly modern England, summed up in the Intro-duction to David Souden and Peter Clark (eds),Migration and Society in Early Modern England(London, 1987). My position is that movement isthe agency without which settlement could notexist.

4 This article is a development of a theme ofD. Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society(London, 1992), summed up in the idea of'intensi-fication', 2-3, 45-63; and chap. 5, where it issuggested that the rise of the middle rank in six-teenth- and seventeenth-century England is bestunderstood as an 'expansion of networks in socialand territorial space: a form of colonization'.

5 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans.Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1994), 115, 129;also relevant are E. W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies(London, 1989); Robert A. Dodgson, The EuropeanPast; Social Evolution and Spatial Order (London,1987); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity:An Enquiry into the Origins of Social Change (Oxford,1992). It is a key tenet of post-modern geographiesthat time (the historian's medium) can be reducedto movements in space (the geographer's).

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were, can then be studied as clues to regions of the people, as against the prescribed adminis-trative units which usually frame historical research.6

Prescribed administrative settlements cannot be regarded as unproblematical units ofhistorical discourse. Landscapes, like traditions, are invented, constructed and reconstructed. Theconstructed spaces that structure societies (and that societies structure), in Lefebvre's theory, areprofoundly political in that they aim to contain and shape the lives of those born into them.Space is not neutral in its shaping effects on the way the populations inhabiting it grow up, andbehave in adulthood; nor is the way we are taught to think about space neutral. It has becomevirtually a common sense axiom, notwithstanding the efforts of historians like Febvre, Hoskinsand others, that landscapes are the neutral contexts within which the lives of individuals andcommunities take place, the passive backdrop to the active drama.7 It would be more realisticto say that not taking space for granted is a defining attribute of successful conquerors and im-perialists.8

The claim that social relations of production are quite literally reified in 'concrete' (or someother building material) receives unexpected support from the authors of the Oxford EnglishDictionary. 'Region' derives from a Latin adverb meaning 'direction, line, boundary, quarter,district'. In Old French regere meant 'to direct', whence it is connected to 'a realm, or kingdom'.'Regions' were the way the Romans organized their imperium, and in the original sense shouldperhaps be conceived as lines or networks through which Roman power travelled. When theempire fractured into smaller units like 'kingdoms', 'region' continued to refer quite unam-biguously to a relationship of subordination, of being possessed by a superior regnum or'lordship'. 'The earliest English uses', the OED tells us,'show association with regere in the senseof "to rule".'

Imperial and colonial regimes have always involved the planting of settlements, which arethe monumental outposts and markers of the regnum. Settlements are a universal character-istic of all imperial regimes from Sumer to Alexander the Great, and from the Hindus, theChinese, the Romans and the Incas, to the British.9 In this sense it is perfectly reasonable to

6 Historians have done this, of course: specialreference should be made to David Souden's work,and to Peter Clark, 'Migration in England duringthe late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries',Past and Present, LXXXIII (1979). Important thoughthey are, migration studies tend to see the subject asa footnote to the great epic of settled society, instead(as I argue) of the force which created and uncre-ated settled societies.

7 Lucien Febvre, 'Frontiere: the word and theconcept'in Peter Burke (ed.), A New Kind of Historyfrom the Writings of Lucien Febvre (London, 1973);W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape(London, 1988); Oliver Rackham, The History of theCountryside (London, 1987).

8 Clive Gamble's Timewalkers: The Prehistory ofGlobal Colonization (Harmondsworth, 1993) ishighly relevant to my theme. Concerned with thehitherto unasked question, 'Why were humanseverywhere?', his book is 'guided by the propositionthat the evolution of humans and the acquisition of

humanity came through the process of globalcolonization', and argues that 'the prehistory ofglobal colonization is the prehistory of humanity'.He stresses 'exaptive radiation', which incorporates'the difficult area of intention and motivationimplicit in . . . colonization, migration (and) disper-sal' and 'places more emphasis on behaviour as theframework for change among species. This behav-iour provides purpose', 6-9. J. Caesar, The Conquestof Gaul (Harmondsworth, 1987), is the master-textof a tradition in which the decisive quality in heroicphases of imperial expansion is being good at geog-raphy. I am grateful to Lynda Parry for allowing meto read her unpublished paper 'Convict roads inearly colonial Sydney'. Ms Parry suggests that thesewere the real masterpieces of early Australian archi-tecture, and describes the spatial consciousness (andmethodology) that was behind them.

9 Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great(Harmondsworth, 1986); Leonard M. Dudley, TheWord and the Sword (Oxford, 1991).

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say that building workers, not agriculturalists or clothworkers, are the oldest trade of civiliz-ation, and building workers have always been the most mobile of trades, whether they wereslaves (in ancient civilization) or proletarians (as in modern civilization since c. 1500). Buildingworkers have always worked on (and crossed) the frontiers of civilization. As the etymologyof the term implies,'civilization' has always been about creating an impression of settled space.To the extent that historians perpetuate this illusion by reifying the prescribed spatial organiz-ations of the regnum (nation states, counties, parishes, manors, towns, villages, hamlets) theyare obscuring one of the most dynamic forces of change in the early modern and modernworlds.

The impulse to reduce the intense and unpredictable movement of the English common-wealth to serene immobility is a powerful theme of early modern cartography.10 ChristopherSaxton's beautiful county maps are emblems of a settled landscape, ruled through the insti-tutions Saxton used to represent the settlements: churches, cathedrals, gentry estates and nobles'castles, and private parks. There are no roads. What mattered to Saxton's patrons were the insti-tutions by which the people of his profoundly and serenely settled regions were ruled. Thesame perspective is evident in Kip's 'Augustan' engravings of manor houses, villages and townsin the early eighteenth century. In his series of Gloucestershire manor houses produced in thefirst decade of the eighteenth century, Kip's point of vision is that of Gulliver, except that areal Gulliver would have noted hundreds of horses, dairy and beef-cattle, some belonging tolocals, some available for hire, others fattening for the next market, the ubiquitous sheep, geese,pigs and dogs, wains, carts, coaches, packhorses, riders or travellers by shanks's pony on the roadsor in the streets, stalls, traders, musicians or entertainers in the marketplaces. The serene, deeplysettled impression is produced precisely by an absence of people to disrupt the proper order ofthings.11

A new version of pastoral emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century, in whichlandscapes were defined more 'scientifically', and the common people were seen as 'indigines'who were shaped, not directly by the ruling class or caste, but by the landscape itself. JohnAubrey set out this myth (later incorporated in the discipline of anthropology) in the 1660s,when he described the 'indigines' of his native north Wiltshire as 'aborigines', and cataloguedthem along with the native flora and fauna.12 By the nineteenth century the OED could declarethat the old meaning of 'region' as regnum had been superseded by the kind of definitionAubrey pioneered: 'a large tract of land; a country; a more or less defined portion of the earth'ssurface, now especially as distinguished by certain natural features, climatic conditions, a specialflora and fauna, or the like'.13 The definition has in common with the tougher version thatpreceded it, that it subsumes the people. To control physical territory, in the eyes of the rulingcastes and classes of agrarian civilization, was to control its people. The OED's etymology takesus through two thousand years during which the politics of landscape gradually disappear fromconsciousness, as 'region' moves from being a term denoting a realm or regnum of power, to onedenoting a realm of nature.

10 R. V. Tooley, Maps and Mapmakers (New York,1987), 65-6.

11 I am thinking of the series produced for SirRobert Atkyns, The Ancient and Present State ofGloucestershire (Gloucester, 1712).

12 Oliver Lawson Dick, Aubrey's Brief Lives(Harmondsworth, 1978), 46—7; Rollison, op. cit . ,chap. 10.

13 OED (Oxford, 1971): 'region'.

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The 'Natural History' conception of regions, pioneered by Aubrey and fellow members ofthe Royal Society in the second half of the seventeenth century, was grounded in precise,'scien-tific' (and therefore unquestionable) classifications and differentiations of land forms, geology,soil types, flora and fauna. It was elaborated in a late nineteenth-century English country classic,Richard JefFeries s Hodge and His Masters.™ The book is a canonical study of settlement, evokinga stereotype that is of abiding significance in English culture — not least, its political culture.JefFeries describes the habitat of Hodge as 'a distinct land'. At its heart is 'Fleeceborough . . . alittle market town, the total of whose population in the census records sounds absurdly small;yet it is a complete world in itself; a capital city, with its kingdom and ruler'. 'Soil and substrataare characteristic'The 'flora is distinct'. Distinctive flora and fauna blend gently with local agri-culture, and the habitat generally, to produce a subtle and unique local culture. The wood andstone from which the people build has a grain, texture and colour all its own. A stolid but proudnative imagination meshes with centuries of stone-cutting from local pits, and a specializedmasonry, to produce an impressive vernacular architecture. It all fits together smoothly as a resultof centuries of organic interaction with the land.

Continuity of settlement is axiomatic. JefFeries takes for granted that settlement is not just aplace, but a natural condition of the natives. 'When men have first settled', he writes,'they andtheir descendants remain, generation after generation.' 'These people have been stationary fora length of time, and the moss of the proverb has grown around them.' It is a portrait of settle-ment, in which a 'stationary' or 'settled' condition is what all true English regions have incommon. What keeps people settled is that every region, and therefore every native people, isdifFerent from every other. The geology, topography, farming habits, building materials, flora,fauna and folklore of the Fleeceborough district are different from everywhere else. Landscapeand timeless generations blend organically to form culture.

The town is the centre of a satellite-system of villages, hamlets and outlying estates and farms,circling within 'thirty miles or so' of the town. This thirty-mile radius recurs in modern studiesof migration and mobility. Objective (flora and fauna, etc.) and subjective, or affective elementsblend imperceptibly. Every adult male is 'a citizen of Fleeceborough . . . it is his centre; thitherhe looks for everything'. Its inhabitants view neighbouring districts as 'separate countr(ies) . . .almost . . . foreign'. The population is ranked and classed into five categories. It has a lord or'prince', a scattering of gentry, farmers, shopkeepers and tradesmen, and simple, unskilledlabourers. It is a little microcosm of Hodges and Masters. Patriarchy is an absolute principle,and women are not mentioned.

The 'prince' is the centre of this universe. His park (adjoining the town) is surrounded by a'vast wall' which exudes 'an air of power and authority'. JefFeries describes this radiant symbolof authority as 'a prince and ruler . . . the very highest and most powerful of (the) masters inthat part of the country'. He represents a caste of higher beings, the aristos. The people, on theother hand, are rooted in the local soil. They do not need 'an Act of Parliament' to protect theirinterests, for the presence of the prince does not rule out politics. The farmers have specialcouncils. It is their'religious duty' to attend 'hostelries . . . on market days'. The meetings havean aura of formality. 'No one finally settles himself at the table till the chairman arrives.' Thechairman is 'a stout, substantial farmer, who has dined there every market day for the past thirty

14 Richard Jefferies, Hodge and His Masters (London, 1979), chap, xi, 'Fleeceborough: a Despot'.

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or forty years'. Each farmer has 'his own particular hostelry', to which entry is granted by inheri-tance. 'He is expected to dine in the same room . . . (as) his father and grandfather', and that iswhat he will teach his son to do. Traditions are passed imperceptibly from generation to gener-ation, entirely unchanged since time out of mind.

The farmers attend their councils on market days, when the shopkeepers and tradesmen areat their busiest. The townsmen stroll down to their neighbourhood meetings at their localhostelries in the evenings, after the farmers have gone home. No constitutional law is neces-sary to make them attend the daily meetings at the pub, where the opinions of the town aretransmuted into sense for the deliberation of higher decision-makers. Everyone, Jefferies insists,'the rich and the moderately well-to-do, the struggling and the poor' — every adult male hasentry to 'the common hall — the informal place of meeting'. Pubs are political institutions, oneof the points of departure of constitutional life. 'The drinking is extremely moderate,' he adds,because it is 'here that the real government of the town is planned'. Jefferies is ecstatic over'their ale! No one knows what English ale is till he has tasted this.' Every region has its ownbrew, the final and perfect synthesis of the soil, water, grain, culture and people who produceit. Like the ploughman's lunch, it is simple, uniquely flavoursome and healthy - taken, it goeswithout saying, in moderation.

While 'the real government of the town is planned' in the 'hostelries', a corporate body ofelders meets 'in an ancient wainscoted hall, with painted panels and coats of arms, carved oakenseats black with age, and narrow windows from which men once looked down into the streetswearing trunk hose and rapier'. Generations of 'respectable men' have met here to refinepopular opinion and petition the prince. Formally the nominated or elected representatives ofthe people, mentally they are courtiers. 'He', the deity at the centre of the universe, never attendsmeetings and does not need to. Consensus is achieved by telepathy, plans are submitted, the'prince' loves the people and always puts their interests ahead of his own. Factional conflictsare inconceivable because the 'despot's' policy is 'perfect freedom'. Formal institutions like thetown council, or the prince's status as a member of the national peerage, are insignificantcompared with arrangements which take place in the interstices of formal structures. Even thestructures are organic, having grown out of the land. The 'respectable men' are not required byany formal law to consult with their lesser brethren in the hostelries. They do it as a matter ofcourse. What they share is more important than what divides them. If his tenants are havingdifficulties, the prince simply forgoes his rent.

No one cares to rely on formal institutions and laws. Jefferies describes the fixed places menmeet — the pubs and the council chamber, and, of course, the town itself. The whole is aharmonious organic osmosis. The men 'walk down to their inns' every evening voluntarily,restrain their drinking voluntarily, consult with each other voluntarily, and worship the princebecause they love him. The farmers at the hostelries wait voluntarily for the 'chairman' toarrive.

Jefferies fills out the nineteenth-century OED definition of region by adding a populationthat is as immobile, insular and self-contained as the landscape in which it is situated. When'region' meant 'to rule', in the epoch of the peasantry (whenever that was), the assumption wasthat the labouring population went with the land, and only moved if the lord wished it so. Inthe more populist constitutional milieu that emerged between the late seventeenth and nine-teenth centuries, it became desirable to propagate the myth that the people stayed with the landbecause they were organically connected to it. Once upon a time, they were settled because

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the ruling class willed it. Now they were settled because they belonged to the biosphere. Bothversions of the constitution of regions, from the politically absolute regnum to the biologicallyand culturally absolute regions of Aubrey and Jefferies, were efforts to represent an inherentlymobile social field of force as a static, predictable settlement.

Recognizing that the organization (and imagination) of space is deeply implicated in themaintenance of existing power structures makes it possible to consider alternatives. In Jefferies'svision the settled, organic community is the sine qua non of life. From the point of view herepresents critics are literally mad in the sense that they are unable to recognize that the land-scape is an inescapable element of constitutional life in the deepest sense of the term: howpeople are 'constituted' in the sense of 'bred', 'made up', 'constructed'. In a sense, the line of'constitutional' discourse that includes Aubrey and JefFeries was writing the natural history ofthe constitution. Can the historical record yield alternative conceptions of space, different waysof grounding a constitutional history that is not prescriptive, but descriptive in that it literallygives us new ways of seeing the English explosion?

Theorists have suggested that popular and official cultures conceive of space in differentways. One study looks at the way contemporary New Yorkers describe their apartments, anddiscloses two distinct types of response,'the map' and 'the tour'. In the map response, livingspace is seen through the eyes, as in the response 'the girls' room is next to the kitchen'.15 Inthe other, the 'tour' type description is in terms of movement, activity, as in: 'You turn rightand come into the living room.' In the New York survey only 3 per cent of the descriptionswere of the 'map' type; 97 per cent of respondents conceptualized their domestic space interms of 'spatializing actions', whereas only 3 per cent did so in terms of a static logic ('aknowledge of an order of places'). In the minority, space is conceived as abstract, static andfixed, experienced only by the eye; in the majority, space is a place for movement, involvingthe whole person, and therefore, potentially, all the senses. De Certeau points out that we havehere 'two symbolic and anthropological languages of space', and notes that 'scientific' or'official' thought is invariably of the static, 'map' variety, whereas that of popular culture is ofthe moving 'tour'.

De Certeau shows popular culture subverting the archimedian points in space from whichplanners and governmentalists tend to view and represent the world.16 In his study of walkingin New York,17 he noticed the way people seemed to refuse to walk in straight lines, howthey weaved from one side of an arcade or street to another, turned back on themselves,changed direction constantly in response to unknown impulses and stimuli. For de Certeauthis was hardly ever a consciously subversive radicalism of behaviour, more the way peopleare when they have no sense that a powerful other is watching them. He provides us with anillustration of the ways in which constructed landscapes, rather than acting as manipulators

15 Charlotte Linde and William Labov, 'Spatialnetworks as a site for the study of language andthought', Language, LI (1975), 924—39; quotationsand analysis in Michel de Certeau, The Practice ofEveryday Life (Berkeley, 1984), 119, n. 8, 221.

16 Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and PeterMiller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality(London, 1991), especially chap. 1, 'Governmental

rationality: an introduction' by Colin Gordon,where it is explained that the 'Foucault effect' is 'themaking visible, through a particular perspective inthe history of the present, of the different ways inwhich an activity or art called government has beenmade thinkable and practicable' (ix).

17 'Walking in the city', chap, vii of The Practiceof Everyday Life, op. cit.

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of the directions of ordinary lives, can also be contexts for a kind of instinctive anarchism. Ifthat is too strong, then at least we must say that people do not always obey the implicit rulesof government planners, but follow entirely other logics, operating as they are in quite differ-ent operational contexts, determined by circumstances which the planners may never evenhave dreamed about.

John Stows famous survey of London is represented as a perambulation, or 'tour'. 'I willbegin at the east,' he wrote, 'and so proceed through the high and most principle street of thecity to the west.'18 The archives of the town Jefferies used as the model for his fiction,'Fleece-borough', like any town of its type, also yield alternative conceptions of space. In 1209 'certainyoung men of Cirencester, by their birth villeins of our lord the king, also certain others fromwithout, but sojournant there' complained to the Sheriff of Gloucester that 'Richard, Abbotof Cirencester . . . the king's fee-farmer' was flouting the immemorial customs of the town,and oppressing the people. 'Nineteen lawful elders' were called before the Halimote Court togive their version of the customs of the town.

They stated that every adult was obliged to serve three works a year for the lord of the manor,as Henry I had laid down almost a century earlier in the charter establishing the Abbey. Inreturn for the works, which varied from a few days' harvest work for an average artisan orlabourer to quite elaborate and onerous duties for the holders of larger estates, and the payment'once and for all at Michaelmas to the king, or his fee-fermor, twopence-halfpenny as chepin-gavel (market toll)',19 they testified that custom entitled any member of the community'to buyand sell freely without toll of any sort of merchandise to be found in the town-market all theyear round, saving horses'. The market was the heart of the town, the reason for its existence.The witnesses represented the market: the merchants, the craftworkers, the agricultural workersof the town's hinterlands, the petty traders and shopkeepers, the journeymen, apprentices,servants, musicians, innkeepers and tapsters, beerbrewers, and not least the weavers and shoe-makers who made the town what it had to be to service the needs of its region, and connectits region with wider worlds. The witnesses called this open community 'the fellowship of thetown'.

The presence of sojourners among the elders indicates that, at this time, immigrants andpassers-through were central to their constitution.20 'As to strangers, resident or sojournant',they testified 'that if a stranger coming hither slept in Cyrencester on midsomer night, and after-wards stayed there till the king or his fee-farmer had his corn reaped'

18 John Stow, The Survey of London, ed. H. B.Wheatley, (London, 1987), 107. Other notableexamples of this perspective are John Leland's Itin-erary of England, ed. Lucy Toulmin Smith (London,1906-9); Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the WholeIsland of Great Britain (Harmondsworth, 1971); andWilliam Cobbett, Rural Rides (Harmondsworth,1967).

19 Cirencester Abbey Register A, f.88a, trans,and repr. in W. St C. Baddeley, A History of Cirences-ter (Cirencester, 1924), 138-41.

20 M. I. Finley,'The ancestral constitution'in TheUse and Abuse of History (Harmondsworth, 1975) isa classic study of the use of arguments fromantiquity in political life; Finley views such argu-ments as invariably fanciful; my point is not that theelders of Cirencester were right in their argumentfrom antiquity, or custom; but that their argumentfrom antiquity accurately represented the necessarycondition for Cirencester's continuing existence(immigration).

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then, whosoever he might be, whether freeman or bondman, male or female, he (sic) mustneeds do three bederipes to the king, or to his fee-farmer, for the fellowship that is of thetown, which the said man had used and had enjoyed up till that day.

Anyone who could be accepted by this informal 'fellowship' could attain membership of it, andsuch membership overrode feudal obligations. This was politically naive in the early twelfthcentury, but even then the view of the commonalty was more 'realistic' in a deeper sense, inthat it embodied something fundamental about the fundamental dependence of such places onimmigrants.21

What the descriptions of twentieth-century New Yorkers and twelfth-century Cirencastri-ans have in common is that, in both cases, popular culture saw living space in terms of move-ments, and official culture saw it as permanent institutions, a regnutn. The elders of the earlytwelfth century took 'the mobility factor' for granted as a fact of life. Settlements were placesthrough which a majority of the population moped. The Abbot's regnum was mapped out in asuccession of charters drawn up by the canons and legitimated by the king's courts. The prioritybehind the charters (for which the Abbey always paid a small fortune) was to define Cirences-ter as a kind of multiple tollgate, a cluster of prescriptions entitling the abbots to direct andextract fees from inhabitants and visitors. From the perspective of the elders, the inhabitantsbelonged to a continuing flow of traffic. From their point of view, the Abbot was a kind oftyrannical traffic-cop.

Thus we have alternative representations of space. From a post-structuralist point of view,we cannot say that one representation is more accurate or valid than another, only that they aredifferent. But it is in fact possible to describe the realities that lay behind the different represen-tations. The reality of the abbot's claims lay in two directions. First, the abbots' success in havingtheir version accepted by the central legitimating agency (the crown), was due to 'the lengthof their purse'.22 And second, the historical record shows clearly that on occasions when thetownspeople revolted against the Abbot's regnum, local barons and knights invaded the town inforce and suppressed them.23 Thus the status quo was only 'proven' by movements of moneyand movements of feudal lords who were fearful that movements of the people would, ifallowed to stand, inevitably spread to their own lordships. Even in the late Middle Ages, govern-ment was an attempt to contain and localize a subject population by regulation, and if that failed,by force.

The elders' conception of the town as a kind of conjuncture, through which traffic constantlyflowed, represented a structural condition; it implied a condition without which the town couldnot have continued to exist.24 In this sense it was more 'realistic'. The constitution of the eldersof Cirencester did not just concede ground to travellers, sojourners and migrant workers. It

21 This is the subject of a forthcoming study, TheClass-struggles at Cirencester, 1117—1643 ( p u b details???).

22 H . P. R . Finburg, ' T h e genesis of the Glouces-tershire towns ' in Finburg (ed.), GloucestershireStudies (Leicester, 1957), 74-9 .

23 Conflict o f this type occurred at Cirencesterin 1225: C. D. Ross, The Cartulary of CirencesterAbbey, vol. I (London, 1964), 152; 1242: ibid., 151;

1300: VCH Gloucestershire, 11, 81; 1302: E. A. Fuller,'Cirencester: the manor and the town', Transactionsof the Bristol and Gloucestershire Archaeological Society,ix (1884-5), 313-15; 1343: VCH Glos., 11, 82 andBaddeley, op. cit., 177-8; 1351, 1370, 1378 and 1381:VCH Glos., II, 81-2.

24 'Structural' meaning 'logically and historicallynecessary'.

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encouraged them. Immigrants wishing to settle were required to support themselves indepen-dently according to the customs, and in order to enjoy the liberties, of the 'fellowship of thetown'. This ancestral constitution bent over backwards to make the place attractive. In the mindsof the commonalty, bond men and women could be made free by attaining fellowship of thetown. Everything was done to make it attractive to visitors and immigrants. It was a 'boomphase', in which immigrant labour was welcome. In slump phases the elders of the town werenot so welcoming.

The importance of immigrants in the explosive population growth of London is wellknown.25 Few towns in early modern England could maintain their size, let alone increase it,without the tide of immigrants that flowed across the landscape in search of livelihoods,working, as a favourite phrase of overseers of the poor and magistrates had it, for 'divers mastersin sundry places', a phrase that could easily serve as the title for this article, capturing as it doesthe basic, 'structural' condition of the early modern working class.26 This tide of migrants hadbeen necessary to maintain specialized towns since the first documentary evidence that isrelevant to it begins to appear in the twelfth century. Thus movement was literally the neces-sary condition of the abiding, settled, 'structure'. As manufacturing expanded and intensifiedits influence in more and more districts of England, the tide grew.27 Entailing as they did densecongregations of workers, manufacturing districts, especially the small manufacturing towns,were relatively unhealthy. Because of their need to stay open to visitors, they were suscept-ible to every endemic and epidemic disease. They needed immigrants, if only to replace thedead.

It is difficult to explain how Cirencester maintained what appears to have been its optimumpopulation size, which it may well have reached in the early fourteenth century, and which iswhere it hovered until the mid-eighteenth century. Why was it (and other towns like it) a townof 2—3000 inhabitants? Why did it occupy that category? The simple answer is that it was a'regional (or provincial) capital', as distinct from the thousands of 'market towns' dotted acrossthe English landscape. As Jefferies noticed, Cirencester was the receiver and transmitter of goodsand information, the place of formal and informal meetings for the people of a region whichencompassed as many as thirty market towns, and about a hundred villages, situated in at leastthree counties. But the key variable determining its functions was not size, it was, once again,movement. Connecting it with national and international trafike, it was also an outpost ofLondon. It was a meeting place of clothiers, who connected the producing regions of Glouces-tershire and Wiltshire with London's national and international merchant companies. The pointis that its size and status were functions of its traffic, which made it part of larger networks. Itis of constitutional significance that, by 1600, these networks were more or less independent ofthe state structure. The settled absolutist state was redundant, but did not yet know it.

25 E . A . Wrigley, 'A simple m o d e l o f London 'simportance in changing English society andeconomy', Past and Present, xxxvii, (1967); PeterClark and Paul Slack, English Towns in Transition1500-1700 (London, 1976).

26 T h e phrase occurs frequently in the seven-teenth- and eighteenth-century settlement papersof Hawkesbury, a straggling industrial parish on theCotswold Edge (GRO); cf. also the rich collections

of Newnham, Painswick, Blockley at the GRO, andthat of Dursley at the Gloucester City Library.

27 J. R. Wordie, 'Deflationary factors in the Tudorprice rise', Past and Present, CLIV (1997) estimatesthat: 'Over the country as a whole, it might be fairto suggest that perhaps two-thirds or more of thepopulation belonged to families whose main oronly financial asset was the labour that their handscould produce.'

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The increased documentation of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries makes itpossible to study the dynamics of towns like these (and many of the smaller manufacturingtowns) in some detail. The period from c. 1570 to c. 1625 was one in which great fortunes weremade organizing the 'projects' which employed the bulk of the labour in Cirencester's region.Yeoman farmers flourished, producing food and raw materials for local industries. But for thebulk of the working population these were deeply unpredictable and troublesome times. The1570s were a decade of mounting crisis in the industrial districts of Gloucestershire. Work wasscarce, and mortality crises moved year by year through the Stroudwater and Vale of Berkeleyclothworking communities;28 in 1577 Cirencester, the central place and gateway of its region,was struck by two years of devastating mortality in which a third of its inhabitants wereburied.29 Between 1570 and 1603 burials exceeded baptisms by 1079; without immigrants, thetown would have shrunk by at least a third. Yet baptisms rose from 70 to 90 per annum, suggest-ing fairly rapid population growth, and other sources show that in these thirty years of devas-tating mortality, Cirencester's population actually increased by 28 per cent. Over half (54 percent) of the inhabitants at the end of these awful decades must have been immigrants.

A relatively comprehensive 'census' of Cirencester's male working population was conductedfor the musters of 1608, yielding 355 able-bodied men, most of whom were classified by occu-pation.30 The occupational structure is itself of interest, but my concern here is with the mobilityfactor. Is it possible to say exactly how many of the men listed in 1608 were recent immigrants?How many were born at Cirencester, the children of parents who survived the waves of crisismortality that surged through the region in the later decades of the sixteenth century? The immi-grant majority (54 per cent) suggested by the aggregative analysis can be checked by cross-referencing the names on the muster-list with the parish registers, which begin in 1560.31 This

28 Popula t ion movemen t s calculated from C a m -bridge Group aggregates for Minchinhampton,Stroud, Painswick, Wotton Under Edge, etc.; myaggregates of the parish registers of Dursley andCirencester (Gloucestershire Records Office).

29 Cirencester Parish Regis ters , GloucestershireRecord Office P86, IN 1:1, 1:2.

30 T h e original manuscr ip t list survives in them u n i m e n t s of Berkeley Castle: I a m grateful toDavid Smith, the Gloucestershire CountyArchivist, for making it possible for me to consultand copy it; Men and Armour for Gloucestershire in 1608(Gloucester, 1980), 239-40.

31 Each man named in the muster-list was allo-cated a card, and all entries in the parish registersrelating to a person of that surname were enteredon the card, to ascertain, first of all, whether a familyof that name was active in the town in the period1560—1640. The age group of the men listed in themuster is indicated as 'about 20','about 40' and'over50', which makes it possible to estimate within10-15 years when that man was born and shouldhave been baptized. In cases like Charles Bragge,Servant to William Seacole, aged'about 20', the firstevent recorded is his marriage to Ann Horshall on

23 October 1606, suggesting strongly that he was arecent arrival. There are no entries at all for WalterPeeters, a 40-year-old weaver, and no family of thatname, so, again, he is likely to have been a recentimmigrant. Thomas Hews, Servant, 'about 20' wasbaptized in 1579 and married in 1605, so he ismarked as a definite native. In every case it is a ques-tion of marking down all the family entries, ornoting that there are none, and then making ajudgement. My statistics, then, are qualified by thefact that they represent 355 judgements as to theprobabilities in individual cases. In 59 cases I wasunable to judge with any confidence whether theperson was or was not a likely immigrant. It shouldalso be noted that there is a problem in that theentries for the years 1581-5 are missing, but someallowance can be made by checking to see whetherpossible siblings were baptized before 1581 or after1585: if so, the card was marked as a 'possible'; 59cases were marked as 'impossible to decide':Cirencester Parish Register indexes at the Glouces-tershire Record Office were cross-referenced withmy copy of the Cirencester listing at BerkeleyCastle.

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exercise results in the conclusion that of the 355 men listed in 1608, only 74 (19.2 per cent) weredefinitely born there, and a minimum of 222 (57.5 per cent) were immigrants. The labour andvagrancy laws of the mid-sixteenth century sought to monitor and control a flow that becamea way of life wherever whole regions were affected by any contraction of markets for the goodsthey manufactured. By the later decades of the sixteenth century journeymen easily outnumberedrelatively settled masters in the Gloucestershire cloth industry.

Some occupations were more mobile than others: the most populous trades - labourers,tailors, shoemakers and weavers - were particularly likely to be journeying men in search of aliving. Of the 42 weavers listed at Cirencester in 1608, at least 27 had arrived since 1586, andmost of them came after 1600. These were the most common and poorest trades; the poorerthe trade, in general, the more mobile its members. Individual cases provide evidence of thestructural (i.e. inbuilt) circumstances that made it so. The mortality crisis of 1577-9 affected thehouseholds of the poorer trades in two ways which made them different from more substan-tial households. Crises visited their homes first, and visitations tended to devastate their familiesmore comprehensively. Thus Thomas Master, a weaver, lost his daughter Agnes in January 1578.Another daughter, Elinor, was buried on 7 April. His wife Joane died on 5 May, followed byhis sister Julyan (buried 14 May), son William (25 May), and daughter Alice (28 May). ThomasMaster survived, only to die in a lesser mortality crisis in 1586, the last of his family. The house-hold of his neighbour and fellow weaver, Thomas Chapman, was hit in June. Chapman's eldestdaughter Margaret (14), and her sister Lydia, were buried on 12 July. Four-year-old Sarah wasburied on 22 July, the day before her brother Thomas, and two days before their mother,Dorothy, were lowered into their graves. Finally, Thomas himself was buried, the last of hisfamily, on 7 August.32

Every 'sort' of person was affected, but not to the same degree. Thomas Mann, a substantialbutcher, died in July 1577, but he was the only member of a solid middle-rank family to die.The Manns represented continuity of settlement, and were members of a small core of long-resident families. Gentry households also suffered. Among the dead were William PartridgeGent., Nicholas Stone Gent., a daughter of Christopher George Gent., Joane the wife of JohnCoxwell Gent., and Thomas Farringdon, the clerk responsible for keeping the town records.They were the only ones in their families to die in the years of crisis; immigration was notnecessary to maintain their class — although we must also remind ourselves that the networksof the gentry were also networks in space.

They were the people who kept the records, and it was from them that we have inheritedthe 'common sense' assumption that community involves settlement and long association witha particular locality.33 Peter Laslett's suggestion that they provided the structures through whichthe bulk of the population flowed is a useful one.34 The pace and density of the flow variedacross time, as did popular attitudes towards immigrants. The movement of the early thirteenth

32 Cirencester Parish Regis ters , op. cit.33 R a y m o n d Williams, The Country and the City

(London, 1973).34 Peter Laslett w i th J o h n Harrison, 'Clayworth

and C o g e n h o e ' in H . E. Bell and R . L. Ollard, His-torical Essays presented to David Ogg (Cambridge,1963); Charles Phythian-Adams, Re-thinking English

Local History (Leicester University Press, 1987), 36,writes that 'It may be argued that rural communi-ties can only be understood as parts of a spatial and"processual" continuum. In the long term, com-munities are, as it were, no more than staging posts,through which some families pass briefly and othersmove more slowly.'

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century included 'sojourners', and expressed 'customs' which welcomed them into the 'fellow-ship' of the town. The records of the best-organized craft, the weavers, suggest that the crisisdecades of the late sixteenth century were also welcoming. If so, there are signs of a tightening-up after the worst years were clearly over, and the resident population was large enough to meetits local, district and national functions comfortably once again. The records of the Cirences-ter Weavers Company and the Cirencester Journeyman Weavers Company date from the 1550s,and their regulations focus on controlling conduct rather than numbers. But in 1614 'yt wasagreed uppon by the full concourse of the wardens and companie . . . that noe forraigne weaversshall sett upp any loombe or loombes within the towne but shall pay to the use of the companietenn poundes'.35 What is constant is the assumption that immigrants are available — that thereis a 'flow' to draw on. Towns had to be sensitive to the tide of immigrants and foreigners, whento open their arms to it, and when to close the doors.

A minor gentleman's affective world was a region centred on a 'seat', a substantial householdand immediate family; his affections rippled out in concentric circles to embrace friends, neigh-bours, village, district, region, kingdom. As he moved from the centre his affections waned, andgradually became active dislike or even contempt. The firmly centred, settled life was the ideal.36

They were a hardy caste, the English country gentry, but they were not the centres of theuniverse they dreamed of being; their vision had little to do with the experiences of the unset-tled, necessarily mobile workers of early capitalist England.37

The working population moved through the regions of the ruling classes, sometimessubmissive, always ducking and weaving, and sometimes expressing itself in violent demon-strations, even rebellion against official structures and conceptions.38 The activity of lookingfor work involved the development of new ideals and ways of life.39 Workers have always beengreat travellers, not necessarily because they chose a migrant way of life, but because it was amatter of survival — and not necessarily mere physical survival. All sorts of motives, somechosen ('betterment'), some imposed by the system ('subsistence'), others based on the fact

35 G R O D4590 2(1): 'Register B o o k for thewhole company of weavers inhabiting the towne ofCicester . . . for the year 1580'; D4590 1(2): ' T h eCharter of King Philip and Q u e e n Mary, 18 MayAnno Regni 4 ' and ' T h e Charter of Q u e e n Elizabeth8 February Anno Regni 18 (1576)' o n which 'began1558' is wri t ten in an Elizabethan hand;D4590 1(3):'Customs and constitutions of the JourneymanWeavers . . . by voluntary agreement ' .

36 Roll ison, ' T h e bourgeois soul of John Smythof Nibley' , Social History, xi i , 3 (October 1987).

37 Wordie, op. c i t . ; Keith Wr igh t son and DavidLevine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village, Terling1525-1700 (London, 1979), 80-2, show that in thisvillage (and perhaps in many parts of England), newadministrative institutions checked (but did nothalt) the mobility of the poor after 1620. Theirstudy of an industrial village, The Making of anIndustrial Society, Whickham 1560-1765 (Oxford,

1991), 179, revealed that 'Whickham needed a con-stant flow of immigrants. . . . To this extent (itsdemographic experience) is less reminiscent of therural parishes of early modern England, be theyagricultural or "proto-industrial", than of thegrowing cities of the period, those "devourers ofmankind".'

38 Rollison,'Community at the borders', chap. 8of Local Origins, op. cit., especially 202.

3 9 F. Leeson, Travelling Brothers (London , 1979);

the famous front cover o f The Making of the English

Working Class ( H a r m o n d s w o r t h , 1968) depicts a

j o u r n e y m a n o n his travels; R u d o l f Braun , Industri-

alization and Everyday Life (Cambr idge , 1990),

especially 176-7, provides a particularly goodgeneral description of the lives and minds of whathe calls 'mendicant outworkers', the new class ofthe proto-industrial districts.

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that capitalism rarely stays in one place for long, led to the life of a migrant worker.40 Sincethe sixteenth century the kinds of work available have multiplied, and the distances travelledhave increased.41 It is possible to view the age of European ascendency, surely the great epicof modern history, through the eyes of migrant workers.

The mobility factor, conceived within reconstructions of historical space, affects more thanworking-class history. Power, to be operative, must be transmitted. Constitutions are not onlywritten documents and formal institutions, but actual organizations of people spread acrossspaces. It should be one of the historian's tasks to compare formal constitutions with actualconstitutions of people, organizations and networks which formal constitutions have not yetunderstood, not yet incorporated into readily defined institutions. In England, 'commerce' and'market economy' were originally subversive networks, 'trails of progress' etched into, across andpenetrating formally constituted spaces.42 Today, market culture dominates public life andpolitics everywhere. Our thinking about economic life has become clouded by the abstractions,ideologies and slogans of everyday politics. The study of new regions of life, new operationalcontexts constructed by the 'commonalty' of early modern England, may give us new ways ofunderstanding where we are today.

Images of social structure from the ranking systems of Tudor and Stuart England to modernclass analysis invoke vertical hierarchies and pyramids, constructed on the basis of relativities ofwealth and prescribed status. In practice, class is more accurately measured by movements inspace — movement in the 'horizontal' plane. The rise of the 'middle rank' of early modernEngland, for example, is best understood as a process of colonization - as extension in and, ineffect, the conquest of, space.43 Conceptions of the alleged weakness of kinship in early modernEngland might be modified if kinship networks were reconstructed as networks in space thatmost commonly 'transgressed' formal units of settlement.44 Horizontal - spatial - movementeroded the vertical hierarchies of the old regime.

The aim of the history of space is to recover the movement of humanity first, its intellec-tual reconstructions of what those movements mean, maybe, later. What people do is alwaysmore important than what they say (although saying can be a form of doing). How can werecover what people did in the past when we only have accounts of what they say they did?One way of reading 'through' documents is to record all the places they mention, and recon-stitute the journeys they imply. Their ostensive meanings can be recorded separately, but for

40 '16th century capitalism was . . . essentiallycommercial capitalism, extremely mobile due tominimal investment in durable means of p roduc-tion. Merchant entrepreneurs could wi thdraw theircapital from one business or region and transfer itto another, quickly and wi th little financial loss. T h edevelopment of western European industry, conse-quently, was characterized by a cont inuous"redrawing of the m a p " , in the words of FernandBraudel ' : Lis and Soly, op. cit., 6 3 - 8 .

41 Eric R . Wolf, Europe and the People WithoutHistory (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982) especiallychap. 12 , 'The n e w labourers ' . Wolf's thesis is ' thatthe world of humankind constitutes a manifold, atotality of interconnected processes, and inquiries

that disassemble this totality into bits and then failto reassemble it falsify reality'.

42 Roll ison, Local Origins, op. cit., chap. 2.43 ibid., chap. 5.44 Thus Vivien Brodsky Elliott, 'Single w o m e n in

the London marriage market: age status and mobi l -ity 1598-1619', in R . B. Outhwai te (ed.), Studies inthe Social History of Marriage (London, 1981), 93-5'shows how some young female migrants toLondon naturally sought out their relations', andDavid Cressy, 'Kinship and kin interaction in earlymodern England', Past and Present, cxiii (November1986), 51, concludes that 'family networks linkedtown and country and helped tie the provinces tothe metropolis'.

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this purpose the archive is treated as a source of evidence as to the physical spaces travelled andconceived by the producers (and referrants) of the document. These implied physical spacescan then be compared to the formal constitutional spaces for signs of conformity and trans-gression. It may be possible to measure fairly accurately if and when informal movementsovertook the old constitutional formalities.

The study of the construction of new networks in space is highly relevant to the traditionaltopics of early modern historiography. Historians of the Reformation have discovered forthemselves the relevance of Braudel's characterization of towns as'transformers'. When a placewas touched by the current of trade, it exploded in unpredictable movement. Why, for example,were certain specific areas and communities (the West Country woollen cloth manufacturingdistricts, say, or south Lancashire) more susceptible than others to new Protestant ideas? 'Therewere two main routes into heresy,' writes Christopher Haigh, 'one to Lollardy via trade, theother to Lutheranism via learning.'45 I have suggested elsewhere that Lollardy is more charac-teristic of the popular reformation than Lutheranism. A great colonial merchant who sidedemphatically with king and aristocracy in the Civil Wars of the 1640s, was still a revolutionaryin that his activities created and/or sustained new and expanding international networks, neworganizations of space which older forms of government power could never fully grasp withoutchanging.

'Commonalty' is the sixteenth-century word for the great revolutionary agency whichcoursed through English, British and imperial constitutional life from the sixteenth to the twen-tieth centuries. The history of the past five or six centuries is the history of the commonaltytransgressing the constitutional space of feudal kings, aristocrats, gentry and high churchmen,and finally taking it over. In the early days of this movement, 'market' meant a formally char-tered place where, at specific times, buying and selling could take place under the watchful eyeof a great stone market cross. The history of capitalism is the history of how trafike broke outof the places designed to imprison and restrict it, and conquered the world. This movement isbest understood as precisely that: a gathering tidal movement of goods and people that is readilyrecoverable from numerous archival sources.46 Every clothier's wain, every journeyman'sjourney, every whipped (and unwhipped) vagrant, herd of Welsh or Scottish cattle, soldier'senlistment and so on - each of these left a mark on the landscape, and mapped out a new world.In aggregate, they add up to the most consequential movement of modern times, the explosionof the English.

Revisionists of many different persuasions have been uncomfortable with the idea thatEngland was ever a revolutionary society, and have been at pains to show that, when all is saidand done, nothing much happened, and nothing ever happened quickly, in early modernEngland. Court-centred history has always been fashionable in England, and is not necessarilya bad starting point for the introductory student. And it is difficult to imagine England withoutits monarchy. But that is not where the consequential changes were taking place. To grasp these

45 Chr is topher Haigh, Reformation and Resistancein Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), 84: ' T h epattern of settlement had important effects onsocial structure and habits, and ultimately o n thereligious development of the area', 91.

46 'To follow the movement of marketers and

stock through the system is an ideal way to begin tostudy the economy and to trace the distribution ofeconomic and political power in society': Sidney W.Mintz , cited in Richard Hodges , Primitive andPeasant Markets (Oxford, 1988), 1.

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requires a decentred approach which emphasizes not settlement, but movement; not centres,but changing relationships in space. Early modern England was the nucleus in which theelements of the modern world first emerged, and were first expressed. The aim is to under-stand a culture that, for good or evil, was exploding into a world civilization.

University of Western Sydney, Macarthur

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