Strangers and Neighbours: Rural Migration in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy 9781442623897

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures, Maps, and Tables
Acknowledgments
Strangers and Neighbours. Rural Migration in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy
Introduction
1. Measuring Mobility I: Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances
2. Measuring Mobility II: Annual Migration Rates
3. The Meaning of Distance: Migration and the Espace de vie
4. Temporary and Seasonal Migration
5. Migrants’ Reasons for Moving
6. What Attracted Migrants? The Geography of Internal Migration
7. Regulating Migration: The Integration of New Inhabitants into the Rural Community
Conclusion
Appendix: Sources
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Strangers and Neighbours Rural Migration in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy

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Strangers and Neighbours Rural Migration in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy

Jeremy Hayhoe

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

©  University of Toronto Press 2016 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-5048-0

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks. ______________________________________________________________________ Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Hayhoe, Jeremy, author Strangers and neighbours : rural migration in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy / Jeremy Hayhoe. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-3742-9 (bound) 1. Migration, Internal – France – Burgundy – History − 18th century. 2. Burgundy (France) – Population – History − 18th century.  3. Burgundy (France) − Rural conditions – History − 18th century. I. Title. HB2474.B87H39 2016  304.80944’4109033  C2015-905132-0 ______________________________________________________________________ This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

    Funded by the Financé par le Government gouvernement du Canada of Canada

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

Contents

List of Figures, Maps, and Tables  vii Acknowledgments  ix Introduction  3 1 Measuring Mobility I: Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances  16 2 Measuring Mobility II: Annual Migration Rates  42 3 The Meaning of Distance: Migration and the Espace de vie  65 4 Temporary and Seasonal Migration  80 5 Migrants’ Reasons for Moving  101 6 What Attracted Migrants? The Geography of Internal Migration  125 7 Regulating Migration: The Integration of New Inhabitants into the Rural Community  148 Conclusion  178 Appendix: Sources  187 Notes  193 Bibliography  241 Index  269

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Figures, Maps, and Tables

Figure 2.1 Duration of taxation in Corgengoux, 1700–89  56 Maps 6.1 Variation in the non-native proportion by commune  127 6.2 Ternant, birthplaces of its non-native inhabitants  129 6.3 Argilly, birthplaces of its non-native inhabitants  130 6.4 Argilly, places of residence of its natives who had emigrated  131 6.5 Corgengoux, birthplaces of its non-native inhabitants  132 6.6 Corgengoux, places of residence of its natives who had emigrated 133 Tables I.1 580 nominal lists from the 1796 census  10 I.2 Reasons for excluding 332 nominal lists  11 1.1 Exogamous and endogamous couples  19 1.2 Correlation between mobility (non-native proportion) and exogamy, 86 villages  21 1.3 Road distances travelled by non-native witnesses (aged 20+ years) from place of birth to residence  25 1.4 Medium- and long-distance migration of adult men and married women by sex and male occupation  32

viii  Figures, Maps, and Tables

2.1 Length of stay for mobile adults over twenty years old, 1796 census  46 2.2 Occupational categories of short- and long-term adult male migrants in 1796, except servants  48 2.3 Migration rates by age and sex  49 2.4 Place of death, native and non-native inhabitants, 1700–45  53 2.5 Non-native proportions in early modern Europe and northern Burgundy  60 2.6 Distances moved by internal migrants in early modern Europe and northern Burgundy  61 2.7 Annual migration rates and other statistics in early modern Europe and northern Burgundy  62 4.1 Seasonal migrant workers crossing departmental borders into the Côte-d’Or, 1810  86 5.1 Literacy by distance travelled, witnesses aged 20 years and over 105 5.2 Literacy by distance travelled, finer distance gradations  106 5.3 Change in tax assessment after moving, by occupation  109 5.4 Reasons for leaving Dijon, 1700–39  114 6.1 Factors influencing the mobility of a village’s population  137 6.2 Number of animals, correlation to non-native proportion by village  140 7.1 Village officers by migration status  171 7.2 Number of years that non-native officers had resided in the village 171 7.3 Migration status of inhabitants attending village assemblies  173 A.1 Principal samples constructed for this study  187 A.2 Sample nominal list from the 1796 census  189

Acknowledgments

Most of the research for this book was carried out in Dijon, at the departmental archives of the Côte-d’Or. Owing to the nature of the research, I routinely ordered more than a dozen folders per day over a cumulative sixteen-month period. Without the staff’s hard work and generous flexibility this book would simply not have been possible. Their friendliness and knowledgeable willingness to help were an added bonus. While my stays in other departmental archives were necessarily shorter, I found the staff to be equally helpful in the Saône-etLoire, Aube, Yonne, Ain, and Nièvre. Back home in Canada, Raymond Gallant and Charlotte Duguay of the interlibrary loan department of the Bibliothèque Champlain in Moncton, New Brunswick, located and brought in several hundred books and articles for this project. I am also indebted to amateur genealogists who have made available, for a derisory fee, the transcribed parish registers from hundreds of communities in the region. The Cercle généalogique de Côte-d’Or thus made part of this research possible, notably because of its decision to transcribe baptism and burial records, in contrast to the many genealogical societies that have exclusively transcribed marriage records. Several student research assistants contributed to the project in significant ways. Alex Karim Baccouche and Karine Lelièvre had short-term contracts with me to digitize and transcribe parish registers and assist with bibliographic matters. Marc-Alain Bonenfant worked for me over the course of two summers, much of which was devoted to the georeferencing of a large database and the transcription of some nominal lists from 1872. Finally, André Levesque, a professional geography technician, prepared the maps and performed the directional calculations presented in chapter 7.

x Acknowledgments

This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (standard research grant) and by the Faculté des études supérieures et de la recherche (Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research) at the Université de Moncton. Sabbatical leave allowed me to spend the 2009–10 academic year in Dijon, and researchrelated teaching reductions in most other years were also important to the progress of the project. During the writing of this book I was chair of my department, a combination of research and administrative tasks that was only possible because of the hard work and efficiency of the department’s secretary, Dianne LeBlanc. When in Dijon for research I was fortunate to enjoy the hospitality of many friends. Laura Sayre and Michael Evans let me stay in their home for extended periods, helped me acquire and repair a free bicycle for weekend excursions along the canal towpaths, and let me putter in their large allotment garden. Laura’s interest in rural and agricultural questions both past and present made for many stimulating discussions about my research and hers. Jerôme Loiseau, now of the Université de Franche-Comté, invited me to his home often and even took me skiing with his family. We have spent many hours discussing our research projects together. I rented Marie-Luce and Laszlo Ghib’s flat for four months in 2008, and they have welcomed me into their family many times since. Nathalie Joly and Thierry Bonnaud were incredibly hospitable and generous. At the Université de Bourgogne the Centre Georges Chevrier provided institutional affiliation during 2009–10, which allowed me to obtain an academic visa. Over the years I have had profitable discussions with historians from the Université de Bourgogne, often bumping into them at the archives. The list includes Jean Bart, Christine Lamarre, Françoise Fortunet, Benoît Garnot, Pierre Bodineau, David El Kenz, Philippe Salvadori, and Fabien Gaveau (of the Lycée Carnot). Christopher Corley and Jerôme Loiseau digitized several documents in France for me. I have presented parts of this book at various events, including the Society for French History, the Social Science History Association (twice), the Western Society for French History, the Society for French Historical Studies, the Seminar on Economic and Social History at the University of Girona, and Gérard Béaur’s rural history seminar at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. The first half of chapter 1 is similar to an article published in the Annales de démographie historique, and the first half of chapter 3 is partly derived from an article published in the Annales de Bourgogne. Richard Ratzlaff, Frances Mundy,

Acknowledgments xi 

and Angela Wingfield of the University of Toronto Press also provided much-needed encouragement, support, and copy editing. Several colleagues have read and commented on the manuscript. Gregory Kennedy, Tim Le Goff, Bob Schwartz, Rafe Blaufarb, James Collins, Jerôme Loiseau, and Fabrice Boudjaaba all read chapters and provided useful input, forcing me to rethink my arguments and rewrite in significant ways. Thanks are especially due to Leslie Page Moch, who read the entire manuscript within a period of only a few months and provided invaluable and detailed comments, as did two anonymous readers.

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Strangers and Neighbours Rural Migration in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy

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Introduction

Jean Boizot, a thirty-six-year-old ploughman living in the hamlet of le Brouillard within the parish of Vic-sous-Thil, testified in a court case in 1760. He told the court that he had moved to the village of Chazelle-enMorvan a few years earlier. He had stayed there for three years and then moved on to Vic-sous-Thil “where he only stayed for one year and from whence he came to le Brouillard to make his current residence.” While none of these moves involved large distances (Chazelle-en-­Morvan and Vic-sous-Thil were about 9 km apart, and the move from the centre of Vic to the hamlet of le Brouillard was about 2 km), Boizot had moved three times over a period of five years.1 In 1779 the community of Chevigny-Saint-Sauveur wrote to the tax authorities within the Burgundian provincial estates to request a reduction in the total amount paid by the community. The main justification for the request was that almost all inhabitants were poor cottagers who barely survived by raising cattle that they did not even own. Their second argument was that five tax-paying households had “quit the village, namely the widow Rigodet, Jean Boine, Jacques Bertaut, the widow of François Pesilard and Jean Cannet.” None of those departing were replaced by new inhabitants, except for one poor cottager who married and would start paying taxes in the coming year. In this small community of about 250 people and fewer than fifty taxpaying households, these departures represented a substantial loss of some 70 livres in taxes that would have to be borne by the other inhabitants.2 This book seeks to understand the experiences of mobile villagers like Jean Boizot and to analyse the ways in which communities like Chevigny dealt with the issues created by their migration. It is a case study that is neither micro-historical nor national in scope but one that

4  Strangers and Neighbours

focuses on the region that was part of the province of Burgundy in the eighteenth century and became the department of the Côte-d’Or in 1789. While national and local studies have a great deal of value for understanding internal migration, there is also a need for mid-scale work.3 Work at the national scale is useful to establish average mobility rates and proportions, to calculate distances, and to understand motivations. But in order to analyse the ways in which mobility affected communal life and was regulated on a local level, some work on a smaller scale is required. However, the incredible amount of variation among communities means that although village monographs allow us to see certain patterns more clearly and examine migration more closely, there is no way to confront the question of representativity.4 Historians and Rural Migration A number of historians have written about geographic mobility in rural communities. Until fairly recently, many who did so argued that rural-torural migration was rare and generally occurred over distances so small that it held little importance in terms of village social structure. From their analysis of geographic endogamy proportions and marriage horizons from parish registers, several demographic historians concluded that most people remained within or near their parish of birth throughout their life.5 In 1994 Jean-Pierre Poussou argued that while there was some mobility over short distances, most people remained in their village of birth and virtually none left the canton.6 Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie’s recent survey of French demographic history similarly argues that France “was a country with little mobility, whose population was fundamentally stable. People lived in the parish in which they were born or close by.”7 These historians did not generally argue that villagers were entirely sedentary. Jean-Pierre Poussou preferred to describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French villagers as “micro-mobile,” arguing that any mobility among rural people generally occurred over distances too short to be classified as migration. Since ordinary people almost always moved to places in which they already knew everyone, and remained within the area of a few villages that they knew well, rural society was fundamentally stable. One of the earliest and most important contributions to French demographic history, by Jean Ganiage in 1963, includes an analysis of mobility. The villages he studied near Beauvais were not “closed”: “the game of alliances, the moves of individuals or of entire families demonstrates it, as do trips to Paris and the transportation of grain to regional

Introduction 5 

markets.” Although he showed that there was a great deal of population turnover, Ganiage argued that the villages were not “mobile,” because the distances were so small.8 Jean Vassort’s book on rural life in the villages around Vendôme makes a similar point. Based on extensive analysis of exogamy and the census of 1796 (Year IV in the revolutionary calendar), he showed that movement characterized this rural society in which fewer than half of the inhabitants lived where they were born. Like Ganiage, Vassort argued that the short distances involved in most moves allowed internal migrants to remain tied to their social and familial networks, and he therefore insisted that his work did not challenge the image of a stable rural society.9 In one of the most important recent publications in French rural history Antoine Follain argued that almost no peasants moved or travelled more than ten to twenty kilometers, and he emphasized that people remained solidly anchored to a single village.10 A few historians challenged the idea that eighteenth-century rural society was fundamentally stable. T.J.A. Le Goff demonstrated that one family in five disappeared from the tax rolls each year in the countryside around the small Breton city of Vannes.11 D.M.G. Sutherland showed that about 10 per cent of tax-paying households moved away each year in two villages analysed.12 Bernard Derouet studied the links among geographic mobility, landowning, and inheritance patterns for villages in the Paris basin. He argued that during a period of thirty years up to three-quarters of families disappeared from the records. Even though distances were generally under 20 km, in time most families became spread out over a large area.13 Gérard Bouchard calculated that the community of Sennely-en-Sologne had in-migration rates of about 5 per cent a year.14 James Collins used tax records and declarations of domicile transfer to show that many peasants moved each year, often in search of better leasing terms.15 He argued that communities were unstable groupings of people but that a small number of wealthy families stayed in place for generations and ensured a degree of continuity. Still, the departure of a single wealthy farming family could throw village finances and political life into disarray. The years at the end of the twentieth century saw the publication of several important works on rural migration. In 1999 Alain Croix argued that villages were open to the outside world because, among other reasons, they were characterized by a high level of migration and mobility.16 Around the same time, Vincent Gourdon and Marion Trévisi published an analysis of migration patterns into the village of la RocheGuyon near Paris. They emphasized that close to half of the villagers

6  Strangers and Neighbours

were born elsewhere, and showed that a surprising number of people moved relatively late in life.17 In a book and several articles Paul-André Rosental analysed mobility in nineteenth-century France in a national sample of demographic data, using the places of birth and residence that were given in marriage records.18 He argued that rural society was far more mobile than most historians of France acknowledged, and he presented migration as a project carried out by families (lineages) as strategies of social mobility. The years since 2000 have also seen the publication of an important book by Daniel Roche on movement and travel in early modern France; an edited volume on migration and family logics; and a special issue of the journal French Historical Studies devoted to the issue of mobility in French history.19 Although there is some debate among rural and demographic historians about the way to characterize migratory patterns in early modern France, the community of migration historians has reached a consensus that pre-industrial rural society in Western Europe was highly mobile over short distances. This consensus was reflected as early as 1992 in Leslie Page Moch’s important synthesis on migration in Western Europe.20 More than a decade ago Martin Dribe noted in an article on Sweden that the widespread mobility of early modern Europe was “widely accepted,” a statement echoed in an article on nineteenth-century Italy by Matteo Manfredini.21 In 2003 Michel Oris expressed his surprise at the fact that some historians still felt the need to argue against the notion that past societies in Europe were sedentary, because specialists had already agreed for at least twenty years that migration and mobility were commonplace and massively important.22 Migration historians have shown that there was mobility in early modern Europe and have gone some way to explain the factors that made individuals or families more likely to move. There remains, however, work to be done on rural migration, notably in analysing the ways that communities dealt with the challenges of migration, and in determining how rural historians can integrate migration into research on the relationships among village inhabitants and the ways that rural communities related to the state and the seigneurie. Sources and Methods: Witness Depositions Migration, defined here simply as a “permanent or semi-permanent change of residence”23 that involved crossing a village or parish ­boundary, was by far the most common demographic event experienced by northern Burgundians.24 Unlike birth, marriage, and death,

Introduction 7 

however, changes in place of residence did not generate an automatic notation in an archival document. Mobile ordinary people appear in a wide variety of records, but historians of early modern migration generally have to work by extracting data from a large number of individual and often scattered records and by linking different types of documents through name matching. These include documents that were created with the express purpose of regulating or measuring mobility at the time, such as laws, censuses, government enquiries, and the reception of inhabitants as bourgeois.25 Tax rolls and other fiscal records provide snapshots of households present in the community each year.26 Parish registers allow the calculation of geographic exogamy proportions, the comparison of baptism and burial records, and the possibility of counting those missing, in family reconstitution studies.27 Other types of documents provide information as well, such as apprenticeship contracts, hospital registers, criminal interrogations, inheritance declarations, and even journals and diaries.28 While this book makes reference to several of these types of records (appendix A provides a list of the sources used to construct nominal databases for this study), its analysis of internal migration is primarily based on witness depositions in local courts and nominal lists from the census of the Year IV. Seigneurial courts in northern Burgundy noted the place of birth of those who testified in civil lawsuits and criminal cases throughout the seventeenth century. For unknown reasons, however, most of these local courts stopped doing so in the 1720s. Fortunately the seigneurial court clerks within the appeal jurisdiction of three bailliages (bailiwicks), Nuits, Beaune, and Chalon-sur-Saône, continued to record the witnesses’ place of birth until the courts were abolished in 1790.29 Seigneurial courts in Burgundy remained active and busy through to the end of the eighteenth century, and ordinary people frequently appeared as litigants and witnesses. This means that depositions provide a relatively broad sampling of the rural population. While the records give the place of birth for witnesses but not for litigants, the number of witnesses who testified in the courts is impressive, and I was able to create a database containing 15,181 depositions in fifty-eight seigneurial courts between 1700 and 1790.30 A number of people testified more than once, and therefore as many duplicates as possible were removed, leaving 12,874 witnesses.31 Each witness provided his or her name, age, occupation (or that of husband or father), ability to sign, and places of residence and birth. I divided witnesses into those who were living in their place of birth and those who were living elsewhere, and then compared the two samples according to

8  Strangers and Neighbours

these criteria. In addition, it was possible to calculate the distances travelled by migrants from their place of birth. Historians of England discovered widespread mobility during the early modern period in large part through an analysis of witness depositions, but historians of France have not, to my knowledge, used these documents for such purpose.32 In Burgundian seigneurial courts, some people were more likely to testify than were others, as litigants obviously preferred to choose respected male members of the community as witnesses. One significant challenge is thus the under-representation of women, as only about 25 per cent of witnesses were women and girls.33 While the statistical under-representation of women is real, the sample contains information on over 3,000 women. Depositions therefore provide a great deal of information about the migration of women. The over-representation of wealthier inhabitants among witnesses presents another challenge. As a result, not only will we know less about the migration of the poor than about that of the rich, but also, given the inverse relation between wealth and mobility, we will see that witnessing produced a built-in bias for sedentariness. Laboureurs, prosperous plough-owning farmers, account for 21 per cent of adult male witnesses, which is substantially greater than the 7 to 10 per cent of occupations that they account for in the region’s tax records and censuses. Still, witnessing was not limited to the village elite.34 Witnesses paid only 10 per cent more than average in taxes, which means that non-witnesses were almost as wealthy as witnesses.35 Furthermore, the problem becomes less significant when we divide the sample by occupation. There is, for example, no reason to think that the mobility information on ploughmen or on manouvriers (cottagers) is strongly skewed by the witnessing process. A very broad spectrum of people appeared as witnesses, including those absent from sources generally used by historians of early modern migration. Tax records, censuses, parish registers, and even population registers focus our attention almost exclusively on those who were considered to be residents of the community, and therefore largely ignore or undercount temporary kinds of migration. Historians have used other sources to compensate for this, especially the Napoleonic enquiry into labour migration,36 but more work is needed to situate these migrants in their place of arrival. Those who appear as witnesses include temporary migrants from the mountains, like masons, pit sawyers, and peddlers; and seasonal workers from close by, such as threshers, hemp carders, and harvesters; as well as the very numerous groups of domestic servants and journeymen artisans. Most of these young migrants moved repeatedly, and it is unfortunate

Introduction 9 

that we do not have their migratory life histories, but their depositions sometimes contain information concerning the length of their stay in the community and a few clues as to their experiences on the road. Nominal Lists from the Census of Year IV Witness depositions allow for the calculation of native and non-native proportions for various groups and communities, and of distances travelled from place of birth to place of residence. They also provide information on the mobility patterns of non-resident temporary migrants. The depositions have, however, a serious disadvantage in that they reduce all of the complexity of migration to a simple dichotomy between those living in their birthplace and those living somewhere else. In other words, they provide no information concerning the multiple moves that people made over the course of their lifetime.37 Fortunately, we can partially compensate for this lack of information about length of stay and migratory persistence with the census of the Year IV, the other main source used in this book. The documents take the form of nominal lists for each community and include information on all inhabitants over the age of twelve.38 The main purpose of these lists was not to measure the nation’s population but to impose peace and order in the context of civil war and revolution. The revolutionary decree of 10 Vendémiaire Year IV (2 October 1795) that ordered the preparation of the nominal lists was passed in order to make all communities collectively responsible for violence committed by any of its inhabitants.39 The lists (called tables in the decree, which never uses the word recensement) were to be prepared in duplicate and sent to the canton and department administrations.40 The decree required that any inhabitant who had been in the community for less than a year present himself or herself to the municipal agent within two weeks to declare his or her occupation and place of last residence, on threat of being punished as a criminal vagabond. The decree also dealt with the issuing of passports for travel and described the way in which victims of violence could make claims against the community by invoking the new law. Local authorities rarely applied the collective responsibility provisos of the decree, but military commanders sometimes used them when they declared a state of siege in a region.41 Few historians have analysed the nominal lists from the 1796 census. It is possible that large number of communities never prepared the lists. According to a sampling of departmental archives carried out in 1963, only 3 per cent of communes had any nominal lists for the years 1794 to 1798.42

10  Strangers and Neighbours

Marcel Reinhard found nominal lists from this census in the départements of the Calvados, Seine-et-Oise, and Côtes-d’Armor and for the cities of Caen, Toulon, Nancy, and Strasbourg, and we know from other sources that they exist in Bayeux and for occupied Belgium.43 When I looked for them in departments bordering on the Côte-d’Or, I found lists in the Nièvre and the Yonne but not in the Saône-et-Loire. To my knowledge, only three publications use this source to analyse geographic mobility in rural France: a book and an article on the Vendômois by Jean Vassort and an article by Vincent Gourdon and Marion Trévisi about a village near Paris.44 A substantial number of nominal lists exist for the Côte-d’Or: there are 580 in a department that today counts about 700 communes. These nominal lists are an excellent source concerning geographic mobility in the eighteenth century, but they pose a few problems of interpretation. The lists exclude children under the age of twelve, but, since historians generally focus on the migration of adults, this is not a major problem. A more serious challenge is that we can only study inmigration. Finally, there is difficulty in knowing whose “arrival” in the community was noted and whose was not. The lists asked for the year of arrival in the community but gave no explicit indication of how to deal with return migration. The law ordering the lists mentioned passports and assumed that recently arrived inhabitants were not known to the community officials. This means that return migration was not uppermost in the minds of legislators. In fact, communities did not include among those who “entered the community” the native-born inhabitants who had left and then returned. Generally, in the column for “date of arrival,” they distinguished between those designated as either “born in the village” or residing “since birth” and those who had arrived in a given year. Not a single list specified that anyone had migrated out and then returned to the village. The forms therefore allow us to calculate the proportion of inhabitants in 1796 who were living in their village of birth, and not the proportion that had never lived anywhere else. Of the 580 existing nominal lists from the Côte-d’Or, only 248 were considered to be reliable and complete enough to analyse (see tables I.1 and I.2). Some lists were blank in the column concerning the date of Table I.1.  580 nominal lists from the 1796 census Transcribed

Counted native and non-native residents

Excluded

86

162

332

Introduction 11  Table I.2.  Reasons for excluding 332 nominal lists Mobility information not given (column left blank) Women and girls excluded Data unclear or missing Mobility under-reported Mobility over-reported

98 109 67 53 5

arrival or did not distinguish native from non-native inhabitants. Others misinterpreted the directions, assuming that the masculine citoyens in the instructions meant that the lists should only include men. And finally, sixty-seven lists were unusable because the columns did not align across the pages, the information was given by household rather than by individual, idem was used confusingly, or a marginal comment made it clear that not all migration had been counted. These reasons account for most of the excluded documents, but there were fifty-three additional lists where I judged that mobility was underreported, and five additional lists that seemed to over-report, probably because they counted moves from one hamlet to another within the same community. In those that I judged to be under-reporting mobility the enumerators often did not reliably distinguish native from non-native inhabitants. In Arnay-sur-Arroux they listed the date of arrival only on the first half of the pages, while in other cases the number of non-natives was simply implausible. In Vannaire only three out of 114 were born elsewhere, while in Châtellenot only five out of 203 were born elsewhere. In addition, a number of communities listed only recent arrivals, generally those who had arrived since the start of the Revolution seven years before. The military purpose of the census was no doubt clear to villagers, and the decree’s explicit focus on those who had arrived within the previous year meant that some communities did not provide migration data for long-time residents. The fifty-three lists excluded for under-reporting migration indicated that only about 4 per cent of the inhabitants were non-natives, which is only about a tenth of the real proportion as found in both the sample of villages retained and the witness depositions. This proportion is far below even the amount of turnover generated by exogamy, which by itself accounts for only a small part of internal migration. The Year IV census divides village inhabitants into those born there and those born elsewhere. This allows confirmation of the analysis of the witness depositions through the calculation of native and

12  Strangers and Neighbours

non-native proportions for various groups by age, sex, and occupation. It also adds new elements. First, although depositions deal only with individuals, the census lists that were retained for the transcribed sample arrange households together and therefore allow us to analyse the role of marriage within migration by distinguishing between those who were single, widowed, or married. Second, and most important, the census provides the year of arrival into the community. This means that we can study the length of stay of non-native inhabitants and measure their tendency to persist in their new place of residence or to move on to another place. Moreover, by focusing on the moves that occurred within the year prior to the census, we can calculate annual migration rates, which is much more useful than the native or non-native proportion in understanding the overall role of migration within a society. In addition to measuring the amount of migration and reconstructing the patterns of mobility in space and time, this book addresses the ways in which village communities dealt with migration and migrants. Rural mobility affected the collection of taxes, the definition of residency, the nature of local identity, and the access to common land and resources. Analysing these issues requires the use of a diverse corpus of sources. These include records of the Parlement of Dijon and the provincial estates. Communal archives contain some information on local regulations, and the records of seigneurial courts contain a great deal more, given that in northern Burgundy so much village business was conducted in front of the local judge. In some court cases, witnesses testified about migration, new inhabitants, strangers, and travel. Finally, in order to evaluate the integration of immigrants into village communities, and the relative economic and social disadvantages faced by newcomers, I have matched various types of records, including tax rolls, minutes of village assemblies, parish registers, and the 1796 census. This study argues that mobility was ubiquitous in the villages of eighteenth-century northern Burgundy. A substantial majority of villagers changed the community of their residence at least once, and many did so repeatedly during the course of their life. The distances that people moved, while relatively small, were larger than many historians have realized. There were several different kinds of migrants, but most newcomers to a community subsequently left to go somewhere else, and only a minority stayed in place for a long period. This is important in understanding the ways in which local communities and provincial administrators dealt with mobility. In serf villages the seigneurial right of mainmorte imposed significant limits on migration, but in free

Introduction 13 

communities there were few formal limitations. According to both provincial policy and local practice, ordinary people were free to live where they wanted and could therefore choose their place of residence as they saw fit. However, the short stay of so many migrants meant that longer-term residents needed to put in place informal ways of limiting the damage that newcomers could do to village resources. The first two chapters evaluate the amount of migration in the villages of northern Burgundy in the eighteenth century. As historians have often analysed internal migration through exogamy, chapter 1 begins by investigating the link between migration and marriage. Only a small proportion of the many moves that people undertook involved exogamy, and the distances involved in marriage-related migration were generally smaller than they were in other types of moves. Different sources and approaches are thus needed, and the first chapter focuses primarily on the information that can be extracted from witness depositions. The second chapter focuses on the calculation of annual migration rates, first from the 1796 census and then from a case study of a single village through a variety of linked nominal sources. The chapter ends with a comparison of various migration indicators from northern Burgundy with those provided in studies of other European countries in the same period, and shows that the notion of a particularly French rural immobility will not stand up to close examination. Some historians have argued that most moves involving ordinary villagers should not be considered to be migration, because the distances were short enough that the villagers remained within the territory with which they were already intimately familiar. Chapter 3 thus examines the question of the meaning of distance and the frequency with which ordinary people moved outside of their espace de vie. I reconstruct the geography of everyday life by using lawsuits, criminal investigations, and estate auctions recorded in local seigneurial courts. Comparing these distances to the geography of internal migration shows that over half of non-native inhabitants likely lost almost all contact with their place of last residence and had to reconstruct their social and economic networks in their new home. To understand the impact of mobility and migration on rural society and the village community, it is important to analyse the profiles and experiences of temporary residents who did not acquire the status of village inhabitant. Temporary and seasonal migration is therefore the subject of chapter 4. All villages received a veritable host of temporary residents each year, and a very sizeable proportion of settled

14  Strangers and Neighbours

inhabitants participated at least occasionally in seasonal or temporary labour migration elsewhere. Chapters 5 and 6 address the reasons that people moved. Sociooccupational data and name-signing proportions show that migrants were generally poorer than those who stayed put. Many of those who moved were seeking different economic circumstances, although social mobility is more evident for some groups of migrants than for others. While economic motivations were always important, there were diverse motivations and experiences among migrants. Ordinary people took a large number of factors into consideration when they chose their destinations. The last chapter analyses the ways in which rural communities dealt with mobility. All communities were continually confronted with issues concerning the definition of residence. With the significant exception of serf villages, there was basically a free market in migration in northern Burgundy. Not all residents had the same status, however, and at least a decade of residence in a community was required in order to be trusted with any kind of responsibility in the form of local political office. Even several decades of residence was not enough to gain access to the inner circle of villagers who were making the decisions that had an impact on local resources. This was an understandable and intelligent reaction to the presence of a large number of semi-permanent residents in all rural communities. Throughout the book I use the adjectives native and non-native. These terms simply distinguish between those who were living in their place of birth and those who were not, at the moment they appeared in the documents in question, when they witnessed in court, when they were listed in the census of 1796, or when they paid taxes. The non-native proportion designates the proportion of people (in a community, age cohort, occupational group, or sex) who were living outside their place of birth, and the native proportion is the proportion of these groups who were living where they were born. The native proportion for a parish would correspond to what Ravenstein referred to as the “parochial element,”45 although the geographic unit is the village rather than the parish (the two units generally overlap in Burgundy, however). I occasionally also use native and non-native (and their plurals) as nouns, simply as shorthand for native (or non-native) inhabitant or villager. I have chosen to translate most occupational categories into English. This is slightly problematical for agricultural occupations, as the designations used in French have no direct equivalents in English. Laboureurs,

Introduction 15 

relatively prosperous farmers who possessed a plough and owned or rented the animals (oxen or horses) with which to pull it, has been translated as “ploughmen.” Some owned the land they worked, and others rented or share cropped. Manouvriers were small-hold farmers who were too poor to have a plough and team. They generally did not have enough land (whether rented or owned) to make a living from their own farming operations and hired themselves and their families out for part of the year. I have translated this occupation as cottager. Journalier translates relatively directly as “day labourer.” I have kept the French word vigneron, a term generally familiar to English speakers. Except when specified, statistical significance is indicated at a 95 per cent confidence level.

1 Measuring Mobility I: Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances

The analysis of the mobility of early modern rural men and women in France presents some source problems.1 The nineteenth century saw the development of a new type of source, recurring nominal censuses, including the census of 1872 that provides the village and department of birth for all inhabitants of each community. This has allowed historians of the nineteenth century to calculate the proportion of villagers born in their municipality and department of residence.2 For earlier periods, however, few nominal lists provide data on place of birth, and historians have shown themselves highly creative in their search for documents that follow the movements of ordinary people. Documents such as registers of entry and exit for hospitals, interrogations of criminals, apprenticeship contracts, and receptions of new bourgeois inhabitants in cities have all been analysed. Historians have also used tax records, including both village listings and official change-of-­ residence forms (translations de domicile), although it is clear that much more information on mobility can still be mined from them.3 Most of these documents, however, result from a process of selection and therefore over-represent or exclude some groups (the poor, women, a single stage in the life course, for example). Parish marriage registers have thus proved to be an important source for studies of the mobility of rural people in ancien régime France. Marriage registers are plentiful and relatively socially representative, and many historians conducting family reconstitution can easily calculate proportions of geographically endogamous and exogamous marriages. On the face of it, there seems to be little reason to think that the mobility of mostly young people at one specific time in their life is a useful way to consider all of the movement within a society. Historians have argued,

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   17 

however, that within the rural world there was little internal migration that was not linked to marriage; therefore, in describing exogamous marriage, they were describing rural mobility in general.4 But is it true that exogamy accounts for the majority, or even a substantial proportion, of rural migrations? This is a question that cannot be answered from exogamy statistics alone, since by definition such calculations exclude all mobility unrelated to marriage. We need some way to calculate both the total number of moves within a given society and the number of people who moved to their spouse’s place of residence. Other questions arise, too, such as the similarity of exogamy migrations to other types of moves and whether the communities and socio-occupational groups that were highly exogamous were also generally highly mobile. A few historians of France have criticized the use of exogamy as a proxy for mobility. Alain Croix, for example, points out that exogamy does not account for the mobility of the unmarried. He also notes that family reconstitution excludes the mobile through the selection of “complete” families, but Dupâquier and Poussou have pointed out that historians have generally calculated exogamy rates for the entire set of marriages rather than simply for the reconstructed families. Gourdon and Trévisi note the number of senior citizens who migrated long after marriage. John Dickinson also points out that studies of marriage choice tend to exaggerate the stability of early modern societies, and James Collins has argued that many migrations took place that had no link to marriage at all.5 If some French historians of mobility continue to analyse mobility through exogamy, those working on other western European countries have mostly abandoned this source.6 A number of historians of England have registered serious reservations towards this use of exogamy statistics. Pain and Smith note that English registers generally state spouses’ places of residence rather than their places of birth, which means that those who moved to a community before marrying are excluded. According to their calculations, less than a tenth of those who had moved away from their place of birth before marrying are counted as mobile in exogamy proportions.7 Their verification method, the comparison of stated places of origin in marriage registers with birth records, is laborious and has not been done for France. French parish registers are generally more reliable than English ones and notably state the place of residence of the two parents, which must reduce the margin of error. Anne-Sofie Kalvermark is highly critical of the use of exogamy statistics. She compared censuses and local church records with exogamy numbers in a Swedish sample and demonstrated that

18  Strangers and Neighbours

marriage mobility took place over shorter distances than did other types of migration, which makes exogamy a poor proxy for mobility with respect to distances travelled.8 Exogamous Couples The census of 1796 allows a detailed comparison of exogamy and mobility patterns, and the analysis of this source demonstrates clearly that exogamy is a very poor proxy for mobility. The eighty-four villages whose lists were transcribed were selected because they grouped households together and provided the year of arrival for all individuals.9 This makes it possible to distinguish couples where both were living in their parish of birth (endogamous couples) from couples where one had arrived from outside the village. The exogamy statistics calculated from the census of 1796 are not identical to those produced from parish registers, notably because one accounts for the place of marriage and the other for the place of residence. For couples who moved after marriage, it is not possible to determine whether the husband and the wife were born in the same village, as place of birth is never given in the census. Exogamy rates from the census will therefore be about 5 to 10 per cent lower than those from parish registers. Slightly fewer than half of the 4,809 married couples in the transcribed sample from the 1796 census (45 per cent) were clearly identifiable as exogamous. This is not much different from results discovered by demographic historians; in a national sample based on parish records, 39 per cent of marriages between 1740 and 1829 were geographically exogamous. While wives had moved more often to their husband’s village than the inverse, the difference was relatively minor, as the husband was mobile in 44 per cent, and the wife in 56 per cent, of exogamous marriages. The tendency towards patrilocal marriage was, therefore, quite weak in northern Burgundy, which is probably a reflection of the fact that daughters, as well as sons, could inherit land.10 If nearly half of the marriages are clearly identifiable as exogamous, the other half cannot all be described as endogamous. Only slightly more than a quarter of couples were composed of two people both living in their village of birth (see table 1.1), a situation that applied to 35 per cent of married individuals. In other words, close to three-quarters of married couples in rural late-eighteenth-century northern Burgundy had at least one person living away from her or his village of birth. A quarter of married individuals had moved to their new village together

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   19  Table 1.1.  Exogamous and endogamous couples

Endogamous couples Exogamous couples Both born elsewhere, arrived the same year Both born elsewhere, arrived in different years

Couples

Individuals

1,291 (27%) 2,175 (45%) 866 (18%) 477 (10%)

2,582 (35%) 2,175 (29%) 1,732 (23%) 954 (13%)

with their spouse, and the number of married people who moved with their spouse was almost as high as the number of individuals who moved within the context of an exogamous marriage. Another way to approach the question is to calculate the overall number of native and non-native inhabitants in the villages sampled and to compare this to the number who had moved for marriage. Among 18,576 people in the villages studied, 7,947 were living outside of their place of birth, which is 43 per cent of those over the age of twelve or 47 per cent of those twenty years and over. This is four times higher than the number of those moving for exogamous marriage. To state this another way, exogamy counts about half of those married adults who had left their village of birth but only about a quarter of all adults (married or not) who had moved. But even this figure vastly overestimates the significance of marriage in the mobility patterns of ordinary Burgundians since it does not take into account the number of moves, the risk of migrating, or the question of persistence. Only a very small proportion of internal migrants were moving within the context of exogamous marriage. The list of those who had moved in the year prior to the census provides a way to gauge the total volume of migration that likely occurred each year and the proportion of these moves that involved exogamous marriage. Within the year prior to the census, only 15 per cent of moves were made by brides or grooms moving to their spouse’s home village, as there were 116 brides or grooms in exogamous couples among the 768 registered moves during that year. Even among those aged twenty to thirty years, the age group most likely to be marrying, there were only 73 people moving for exogamous marriage, while the same age group saw a total of 327 moves.11 There were 169 couples who had moved together in the year prior to the census, which means that almost three times as many individuals moved as part of a mobile couple as the number of individuals who moved for an exogamic marriage. Married couples had an annual migration rate of 0.035.12 This rate was lower than that for the

20  Strangers and Neighbours

unmarried of about the same age (0.065 for women and 0.093 for men; see below and chapter 2), but it is far from negligible because a third of marriages that lasted ten years would have involved at least one post-marriage move. Moreover, since those filling out the census forms generally did not count moves back to the village of birth, some moves by married couples are counted as moves for marriage. Marriage did not necessarily mean that people stopped migrating. Married people did more moving about during their twenties: 38 per cent of couples who arrived together had moved between the ages of twenty-two and thirty-two, and 57 per cent had moved before the age of thirty-two. Furthermore, a significant number of married couples had children with them when they moved. Among the 866 couples who were already married when they moved to the village, 244 were accompanied by at least one child. However, this number is far too low, given that the census excludes children under the age of twelve. Only 358 of these 866 couples had any children over twelve living with them when the census was taken, including 244 whose children were born before the move and 114 whose children were born afterwards.13 Wealthy farmers are heavily over-represented among these whole-family migrants, as ploughmen made up a third of them (83 couples, as opposed to only 43 cottagers and 14 vignerons). Artisans are also over-represented, notably those working in construction and wood trades; this group made up about a quarter of migrants moving with children. Poorer villagers were far less likely to have adolescent children living at home because they sent them out to work as domestic servants, but it probably also reflects the mobility patterns of wealthy tenant farmers who could afford to pack their whole family up to move from lease to lease.14 Mobility and Exogamy by Occupation Some occupational groups migrated often but only rarely engaged in exogamous marriage, while other groups tended to marry outside the village but mostly stayed put thereafter. Non-native and exogamous proportions are relatively close for farmers (44 and 47 per cent, respectively), whereas exogamy rates badly underestimate the degree of mobility for artisans and local notables. More problems appear with finer occupational subdivisions: exogamy overestimates the mobility of wealthy farmers (who moved relatively seldom once married) and underestimates the mobility of vignerons, who married locally more often than did other farmers but were more likely to move around after marriage.

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   21 

Among ­artisans working with cloth (primarily weavers) or food the nonnative and exogamous proportions are quite close, but among those who worked in construction and forest trades the exogamy proportion is far lower than the non-native proportion because many of them moved for work both before and after marriage. Exogamy is also a poor indicator of mobility for local notables because liberal professionals, merchants, and bourgeois frequently moved with their families, following economic opportunity. Finally, exogamy entirely excludes domestic servants, among whom 73 per cent lived outside their place of birth. Generally, most of those hired by seigneurs and the village community – seigneurial and communal forest guards, gardeners, communal herders – came from outside the community, and for them exogamy had virtually no relation to mobility. Villages within the same region could have highly divergent mobility and exogamy patterns.15 Exogamous couples account for between 18 and 72 per cent of married couples in different villages, and the nonnative proportion could vary from 25 to 75 per cent. Within the same department, then, one village could have up to three times more exogamous couples and non-native residents than those of another nearby community.16 What is more, there were some villages with a high proportion of exogamous couples that nevertheless had few non-native residents (and the inverse, too). The village of Pont, for example, had only 27 per cent non-natives, but 56 per cent of couples were exogamous, whereas in Marandeuil 56 per cent of residents were born elsewhere, but only about 33 per cent of couples were exogamous. Correlation coefficients between the non-native proportion and the exogamy rates by village are a good way to see whether Pont and Marandeuil are exceptions and to test whether exogamy proportions varied in relation to overall mobility. The results are presented in table 1.2. Table 1.2.  Correlation between mobility (non-native proportion) and exogamy, 86 villages Unmarried All inhabitants 25+ years Exogamous Population (12+ years old) old couples Unmarried All inhabitants (12+ years old) 25+ years old Exogamous couples Population

1 0.72* 0.87* −0.08 −0.0005

1 0.95* 0.02 −0.07

*Significance at 95 per cent confidence level

1 0.006 −0.05

1 −0.19

1

22  Strangers and Neighbours

The most important conclusion from this analysis is the lack of a correlation between mobility and exogamy. The size of a community (see population) correlates negatively and significantly to exogamy. As demographic historians have long affirmed, young people were more likely to be forced to find their spouse outside the community when their village was small. It is therefore clear that in order to determine whether a community contained a large proportion of non-native inhabitants, it is not useful to calculate the percentage of exogamous couples living in it. For the Côte-d’Or, at least, the best short cut would be to calculate the nonnative proportion among the unmarried, which displays a very high correlation with the mobility of the entire population. Distances in Exogamous Marriages If exogamy underestimates how often people moved and misrepresents the type of people who were most likely to do so, is it nevertheless possible to use the distances separating spouses in exogamous marriages as a proxy for the distances involved in internal migration generally? Unfortunately the census of 1796 does not provide an answer, since the nominal lists do not state place of birth or previous residence, making distance calculations impossible. A comparison of the distances involved in exogamous marriages listed in parish registers to the distances between place of birth and place of residence given in witness depositions reveals, however, that marital migration took place over shorter distances than did other types of mobility. From the sample of depositions I chose five villages whose registers have been transcribed by the local genealogical society.17 This yields a total of 1,348 exogamous marriages and 653 non-native witnesses, for a total of about 2,000 distance calculations. As demographic historians have long known, some care is needed when interpreting proportions of exogamous marriages. The first problem is that marriage in a village did not mean that the couple actually lived there. There was a strong tendency to have the ceremony in the village of the bride’s parents.18 In Bligny-sur-Ouche 80 per cent of brides were listed as inhabitants of the village, but only 48 per cent of grooms. In exogamous unions within the same parish, 69 per cent of brides were from the parish, and only 16 per cent of grooms. In Argilly 84 per cent of brides were from the village, but only 65 per cent of grooms, and in exogamous unions 66 per cent of brides were from the parish and 25 per cent of grooms. Witness depositions show, however, that

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   23 

in these villages there was close to the same proportion of non-native men as women. In Argilly 60 per cent of male witnesses and 55 per cent of female witnesses were non-native, while in Bligny 43 per cent of male witnesses and 47 per cent of female witnesses were non-native. In general, the distances travelled by men and women in exogamous marriages were about the same, except that fewer women travelled very large distances. In both Bligny-sur-Ouche and Argilly, median distances in exogamous marriages were very close for men and women. However, in Serrigny, brides came from further away than did grooms (median distance was 19 km for women and 13 km for men in exogamous marriages), but this was because women from Serrigny almost never married outside their village – out of 342 marriages celebrated here, only 44 involved a bride from outside. A strong tendency to marry in the bride’s village will mechanically inflate the distances travelled by brides in exogamous unions since the tendency is likely to be strongest for unions involving short distances. Out of 2,610 marriages celebrated in the five villages throughout the eighteenth century, 1,262 were geographically exogamous, for a relatively high exogamy proportion of 52 per cent. In these same villages about half of witnesses lived in their parish of birth. More important, the average distance in exogamous marriages in these villages was about 30 km, while the average distance travelled by non-native witnesses was 43 km (median distances were 11 km and 16 km, respectively).19 Those living outside of their place of birth had travelled about one-and-a-half times further than marriage horizons would suggest. Marriage horizons are therefore a poor guide to the distances travelled by migrants in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, just as they are for early modern Scotland.20 Marriage requires getting to know someone very well and seeing them frequently, but moving requires only having access to information concerning an economic opportunity. In 1970 Yves Blayo mentioned the possibility of using parish registers to analyse the geography of mobility, but he underlined that “nothing proves that marriage horizons represent the sum of migrations from a geographic point of view.” His warning turns out to be salutary: the geography of marriage likely corresponds to the espace de vie in which ordinary people circulated and which they knew relatively intimately, but people often migrated over greater distances.21 In virtually every way, exogamous marriage turns out to be a poor proxy for mobility. Movement from the village of birth to a spouse’s place of residence is only one form of mobility among many others,

24  Strangers and Neighbours

including that of the young and unmarried, married couples, families with children, and the old. Exogamy rates badly underestimate both the number of people living outside their place of birth (by a factor of four) and the overall volume of migration within this society (by a factor of eight). When it comes to accounting for the age and occupation of those who moved, there are also substantial problems. There is an overestimation of the mobility of wealthy farmers and an underestimation of that of poor cottagers and day labourers, as well as a significant underestimation of the mobility of the non-agricultural rural elite. There is also no justification for thinking that villages or regions with large numbers of exogamous marriages were necessarily more mobile than those with small numbers of such marriages. The distances calculated from marriage horizons were appreciably smaller than the distances travelled by those migrating. It is a mistake to think that by measuring the proportion of marriages that were exogamous, we evaluate the tendency of a population to migrate or stay at home. What, then, do geographic exogamy rates actually measure? First and foremost, they are determined by the size of a community. Exogamy seems to reflect the espace de vie in which people circulated on a regular basis. If other sorts of documents can be used to study the geography of everyday life, like journals, diaries, account books, and judicial sources (as we will see in chapter 3), the widespread availability and the density of the geographic coverage of parish registers make exogamy one of the best ways to approach the subject. Other uses of exogamy rates are possible. Recently Keith Snell analysed English exogamy patterns in the nineteenth century as part of the history of a sense of locality, belonging, and local xenophobia.22 His discovery of a massive decline in the extent of exogamy in rural England from 1740 to 1820 is not evidence of a decline in mobility in that society but rather the result of a decision by local communities to limit more strictly the access to local girls by suitors from outside the village. This does not mean that parish registers contain nothing related to geographic mobility and internal migration. The information about the place of residence of witnesses at both baptisms and marriages tells much about the espace de vie. Gaps and holes in family reconstitutions can and have been used to estimate the amount of mobility,23 while registers also allow the calculation of the chances that a person had, at birth and marriage, of dying in the same village. However, simply reconstructing the geography of exogamous marriage is not a useful way to study migration to and from rural communities in ancien régime France.

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   25 

Distances and Occupational Categories Northern Burgundian villages in the eighteenth century were composed of almost equal numbers of native and non-native adults, as confirmed by witness depositions and the 1796 census. Among the 12,875 men, women, and children who testified between 1700 and 1790 in the seigneurial courts studied, 7,145 were living in their place of birth, and 5,729 were not, for an overall non-native element of 44 per cent. Among adults (those aged twenty years and over) the proportion is similar, since the small number of very young children who testified is almost cancelled out by the larger number of more mobile adolescents: 46 per cent of those over the age of twenty were living outside their place of birth. This proportion is very close to that found in the villages analysed by using the census of 1796, where 47 per cent of those over twenty were not born in the village where they were living. The results for the 1796 census reflect a selection of villages for transcription. In the larger sample of all the communities that provided complete listings in the 1796 census, there was a non-native proportion of 40 per cent for all adults in the entire sample. Comparison to the witness depositions suggests that the transcribed sample is probably more reliable than the counted sample. This may partly reflect the large number of communities in the larger sample that separated men from women in the lists. The separation of men and women likely means that an initial version was submitted that included only men, and the section on women may have been prepared more hastily and therefore be less reliable than in the transcribed sample. In any case, most of the discussion of the census of 1796 focuses on the eighty-six transcribed lists. Although ordinary villagers would sometimes move far away, in most cases they migrated over short distances. Non-native villagers were living an average of 38 km away from their place of birth by road (median distance of 13 km) and 28 km by crow’s flight (median Table 1.3.  Road distances travelled by non-native witnesses (aged 20+ years) from place of birth to residence

Native Less than 15 km 15–50 km 50+ km

All witnesses

Men

Women

54% 24 13 8

56% 22 12 9

48% 31 14 6

26  Strangers and Neighbours

distance of 10 km). Half of the non-native inhabitants had moved less than 10 km by crow’s flight, and about three out of five were living less than 15 km road distance from their place of birth. While long-distance migrants were always in the minority, about one in four adult inhabitants was nevertheless living outside of the area in which he or she likely circulated on a regular basis. About 18 per cent of all migrants had travelled more than 50 km, and 46 per cent of migrants had moved from further than 15 km. Distances presented in this book are almost always calculated between the place of birth and the place of residence rather than between the current and the previous places of residence. It is difficult to know whether distance from the place of birth corresponds generally to the distances involved in each move, especially given that many people moved more than once. Ravenstein argued that people often move in steps, ending up further from their place of birth with each successive move, but few historical studies have found this to be the case.24 Christopher Pond found that in eighteenth-century eastern England the distributions of distances were similar regardless of whether the place of birth or the place of previous residence was used, but that distances from the place of birth were, on average, slightly greater than the distances from the previous residence.25 He does not provide an overall multiplier, but in a hand-drawn graph the difference seems to be about 10–15 per cent. Fewer women than men were living in their parish of birth (see table 1.3). The difference disappears, however, with the threshold set at 15 km, as approximately 78 per cent of both men and women remained within this distance (that is, the sum of those living in their place of birth and those who had moved less than 15 km away was the same for men and for women). This adds nuance to the notion popularized by Ravenstein that women moved more than men, but over shorter distances. Other historians have contested this idea,26 but even if it is true, it obscures a fundamental similarity in the mobility patterns of men and women, which is that, at least in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, almost exactly the same proportion of adults of each sex had moved beyond the area with which they were likely familiar. All villages contained inhabitants who had moved over relatively large distances. Among sixty-six villages providing distance data for twenty or more non-native witnesses, fifty-four had at least one inhabitant who had travelled over 100 km, while thirty-eight villages had someone from over 200 km away. Only two villages had no witnesses

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   27 

who had migrated over 50 km (in Comblanchien the greatest distance was 39 km, while in Détain-et-Bruant it was 46 km).27 These statistics are not easy to interpret, because the depositions are spread over the entire eighteenth century and never include anything close to all of the inhabitants. It does seem safe to conclude, however, that all villages had some inhabitants who had arrived from well outside the region. This book focuses on the mobility of rural people. But there are a considerable number of city dwellers who witnessed in rural seigneurial courts: the cities of Beaune, Nuits-Saint-Georges, and Seurre provided 290, 642, and 228 witnesses respectively, which is a good indication of the interconnectedness of city and countryside and demonstrates that all peasants had innumerable economic and social connection to the city. These three cities had about the same number of migrants as did most villages: the non-native proportion was 57 per cent for Beaune, 46 per cent for Nuits, and 48 per cent for Seurre. The proportion of nonnatives among the inhabitants does not tell the whole story, however, since it gives no indication of the actual number of new inhabitants who then left each year. In chapter 2 we will see that most in-migrants to villages left after a relatively short stay, and the same was likely true of cities, which probably saw a greater number of both in- and out-migrants than did rural communities.28 Cities also recruited their migrants from further away than did villages, as several urban historians have argued.29 With average distances of 50, 61, and 111 km respectively for non-natives, the cities of Beaune, Nuits, and Seurre recruited from significantly further away than did most villages. The median distances are shorter, of course, at 20, 25, and 37 km respectively, but these distances are nevertheless considerably greater than those found in most rural communities. The city of Seurre, situated along the Saône river and not far from the provincial border with FrancheComté, drew people from especially far away, notably from distant parts of eastern France. Most moves into these small cities involved short distances, however, as even in Seurre a third of all non-native witnesses had travelled less than 15 km. The proportion of villagers living outside of their place of birth varied according to occupation. Men practising an agricultural occupation were the least likely to be living outside their place of birth. This is particularly true of ploughmen, among whom some 65 per cent lived where they were born. The peculiarities of ploughman mobility are a relatively high proportion of native men and a large gap between the native proportions of men and women. The relative immobility of men

28  Strangers and Neighbours

in this group is explained by the size of their farming operations and the number of small parcels of land that they owned or rented, which made moving virtually impossible for landowning ploughmen and relatively complicated even for tenant farmers. The difference between husbands and wives in this category results from their strong tendency towards patrilocal exogamy, as the wives of ploughmen moved to their husband’s community in 66 per cent of exogamous marriages. This is an indication of the importance of inheritance patterns for wealthy peasants and of a relatively strong tendency to privilege male over female heirs within this occupational group. The case of vignerons is somewhat puzzling because the data from the census and from the depositions diverge significantly (35 per cent non-natives in depositions, and 47 per cent in the census). Other studies of vignerons have also found contradictory results. Marcel Lachiver has argued that vignerons were the least mobile of all villagers. Lachiver’s argument is based on exogamy for vignerons, which could be as low as 10 per cent for men and 5 per cent for women in the villages around Paris that he analysed.30 In the Beaujolais, however, Durand has shown that villages with more vignerons actually had higher rates of exogamy than did mixed farming villages, and that wine villages drew spouses from greater distances.31 While this is not inconvertible proof that the Beaujolais vignerons were more likely to move than were those around Paris, it does show that Lachiver’s model of vigneron sedentariness does not apply everywhere in France. Furthermore, close to the Beaujolais, in the Mâconnais and the Chalonnais, vignerons were also quite mobile, with non-native proportions near half in 1876. Grape growing and winemaking in the Mâconnais and Chalonnais were organized around one-year vigneronnage contracts in a context of very little vigneron land ownership, making those working the land highly mobile.32 In the Vendômois, vignerons tended to be least mobile in places where they were numerous, and more mobile in communities where they made up only a minority of inhabitants.33 Vignerons thus clearly had different mobility and exogamy patterns in different regions. Within northern Burgundy the difference between the census and the depositions may be explained by the geographic coverage of the two samples. The wine-producing villages studied in the depositions, situated in the bailliages of Nuits-Saint-Georges, Beaune, and Chalon, were creating far better and more expensive wine than were those villages studied in the census of 1796 in the northeast of the department, and it seems plausible that mobility was restricted in places where land was more

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   29 

expensive and intimate knowledge of local conditions could translate into more income. The relatively poorer vignerons studied through the census of 1796 had mobility patterns that were very similar to those of poor cottagers, while the vignerons along the Côte had approximately the same non-native proportion as wealthier ploughmen, although more work is needed to account for the variation by region in the migration patterns of vignerons. Among non-agricultural occupations, non-natives outnumbered native inhabitants. Not only were non-farmers more likely to be living outside their place of birth, but they moved over considerably greater distances.34 With a median crow’s flight distance of 12 km, merchants moved the shortest distances of all non-farmers, but this was still 30 per cent further than that of the most mobile farming categories. Male artisans moved over greater distances than did farmers, although their wives tended to be less mobile. The case of artisans in forest and construction trades is somewhat anomalous owing to the presence of masons and pit-sawyers, temporary migrants from central France who spent part of the year in Burgundy, but cloth artisans had travelled 1.5 times further than their wives, while butchers and bakers had travelled almost twice as far as their wives. It seems likely that artisans frequently settled in the area around their wife’s place of birth, but not necessarily within the village itself. Artisans display no clear tendency towards patrilocal exogamy, as wives and husbands moved about equally in artisan marriages (52 per cent of cloth artisan exogamous marriages were patrilocal, as were 48 per cent of food artisan exogamous marriages). Long-Distance Migration Close to half of all villagers in northern Burgundy in the eighteenth century lived in their village of birth, and over three-quarters were living less than 15 km away from it. The prevalence of short-distance movement is characteristic of the vast majority of human societies. It remains true even in twentieth-century England, where the rise in average distance moved as compared to that in the nineteenth century is mostly explained by the greater distances travelled by those who were moving long distances rather than by an overall increase in median distances.35 In eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, while most migrants moved over short distances, a substantial number of migrants came from relatively far away, and their experiences reveal a great deal about the openness of rural communities to outside influences.

30  Strangers and Neighbours

The distinction between short- and long-distance migration is meant to separate those whose movement occurred within the territory with which they were intimately familiar from those who moved to places with which they had had only limited contact. Historians have proposed various types of thresholds to distinguish the two types of migration. Daniel Roche places what he calls the “threshold of rupture” at 100 km, for example.36 At about five days’ walk in each direction, however, this distance is far too great to represent a distance that ordinary people could travel without leaving behind their familiar world. It seems more helpful to think in terms of whether a move took people away from their economic, social, and familial networks, as several historians have argued. Jean-Claude Farcy and Alain Faure focus on those moves that took people away from their canton of birth and one canton immediately adjacent to it.37 This is a useful approximation for their purposes because their sample is too large to permit the calculation of distances, but they offer no evidence that people regularly circulated within an area this large.38 Jean Vassort distinguishes between moves that took people outside of their canton of birth and those that did not.39 This simplifies things because distances do not need to be calculated, and it provides useful orders of magnitude, but people moving even a single kilometre across a canton border are counted as long-distance migrants. Rosental places the threshold at 25 km, arguing that by this distance people had travelled through at least three or four other villages after leaving home and found themselves in an area of which they did not necessarily have intimate knowledge.40 It is possible to approach this question empirically, by combining information from the depositions on the ability to sign one’s name, with information on distances travelled. There were substantial and important differences in terms of literacy between short- and long-term migrants that were most significant at a threshold of 15 km. Among witnesses who moved less than 15 km, 26 per cent could sign their name, whereas of those who moved between 15 and 30 km, 36 per cent could sign. This is a greater increase than with the threshold set at 25 km (28 per cent and 35 per cent could sign below and above this distance, respectively), and the jump in literacy rates at around 15 km applies irrespective of sex. Migration over distances greater than 15 km therefore drew from different groups than did that over shorter distances. These distances are modern shortest-road distances rather than the crow’s-flight distances used by many historians; and a road distance of 15 km is equivalent to a crow’s flight of about 12 km.

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   31 

Most long-distance movers were men, but this does not mean that women moved only short distances. Accounting for their under-­ representation as witnesses, women likely made up slightly more than a third of villagers who came from further away than 50 km. As the distance rose, the proportion of women declined: they made up 30 per cent of migrants who had moved over 100 km, and only 17 per cent of the small number who had moved over 200 km. In addition, there was a substantial number of witnesses who were seasonal workers, most of them either masons or log-sawyers from Auvergne. This type of seasonal labour was almost exclusively a male phenomenon, and women are more numerous among the witnesses who were living permanently within the community where they testified, accounting for 35 per cent of those who had moved over 100 km, and 24 per cent of those who had travelled over 200 km. Migrants travelling over longer distances had several distinguishing characteristics. Table 1.4 provides the proportion of all migrants, both men and married women, who had travelled over 15 km and over 50 km from their place of birth. There is a close relationship, for most occupational groups, between the propensity to migrate and the tendency to travel large distances. Among most male occupations with a nonnative proportion over 60 per cent, at least a quarter of the migrants had travelled over 50 km. The main exception to this is domestic servants, whose very high non-native proportion did not mean that they travelled over large distances. Servants are also the only occupational group to have virtually identical mobility patterns for men and women, with about four out of five living outside their place of birth, and close to one in five migrantshaving travelled more than 50 km. Agricultural occupations display a familiar pattern, in that cottagers and ploughmen had very distinct forms of migration. About 65 per cent of non-native ploughmen had travelled less than 15 km, and only 10 per cent had gone more than 50 km. Among their wives, only 6 per cent went further than 50 km. Cottagers and their wives were both more mobile and more likely to move greater distances, as 43 per cent had moved more than 15 km. Finally, the distinctiveness of vignerons’ migratory pattern is confirmed, as 75 per cent of migrants had gone less than 15 km, and 95 per cent had travelled less than 50 km. Among all male vignerons, both native and non-native, only about 9 per cent had travelled over 15 km, and only 2 per cent had travelled over 50 km. Like the wives of ploughmen, the wives of vignerons had a greater chance of living outside their place of birth but migrated over distances that were identical (very short) to those of their husbands.

Table 1.4.  Medium- and long-distance migration of adult men and married women by sex and male occupation

Liberal profession Artisan (wood and construction) Artisan (cloth and clothing) Artisan (food) Servant Ploughman Cottager and day labourer Vigneron Herder Innkeeper Bourgeois Merchant Guard Schoolmaster   *Total

Men,*

Non% of all male native % migrants born 15+ km away

% of all male Women,** Non% of all female % of all female migrants born native % migrants born migrants born 50+ km away 15+ km away 50+ km away

109 885 291 119 250 1,688 860 2,381 96 93 39 506 136 87

65 62 56 62 79 35 52 35 73 59 56 47 62 91

14 44 31 26 18 10 17 5 21 27 14 21 25 42

63 68 60 57 47 34 44 25 46 49 59 51 58 78

28 188 95 72 52 337 275 646 39 45 14 110 14 21

61 57 53 54 85 54 63 52 82 53 57 59 71 86

35 43 44 38 45 26 42 19 62 38 100 51 70 78

number of men in each occupational category, including both native and non-native inhabitants. **Total number of married women in each male occupational category, including both native and non-native inhabitants.

6 10 10 3 18 6 13 5 19 12 62 14 20 28

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   33 

Among men, artisans had the greatest numbers of long-distance migrants. While the category of wood and construction workers is somewhat inflated by the presence of itinerant masons from Central France, in general it is safe to say that over half of migrant artisans had come from more than 15 km away, and close to a third had come from over 50 km away. Their wives had very different distance patterns, with only about one migrant in ten coming from further than 50 km. Villagers who were neither artisans nor farmers tended to live outside of their village of birth more often than not, regardless of whether they were women or men. And among those who had migrated, a majority had come from more than 15 km away. Interestingly, however, relatively few had travelled more than 50 km. More cottagers than liberal professionals or their wives had migrated over a long distance. Very-long-distance migrants stand out among the other migrants. Very few wealthy farmers had moved over 100 km; ploughmen and fermiers made up over 15 per cent of all witnesses (and about one male witness out of five), but only 3 per cent of those had moved over 100 km. Few vignerons had moved more than 100 km, as this occupation accounts for almost 20 per cent of male witnesses but less than 3 per cent of the very-long-distance migrants. Among agricultural occupations, cottagers were the most likely to move very large distances. Gardeners frequently had come from far away, mostly hired by seigneurs to look after the park and vegetable garden while growing some vegetables on the side to sell for their own account. Male artisans were by far the most likely villagers to have migrated from over 100 km, as they account for about 50 per cent of very longdistance migrants but for only about 5 per cent of the witnesses overall.41 These included artisans working in food preparation, primarily bakers and butchers, as well as weavers, leather workers (tanners and shoemakers), and smiths. Many artisans travelled large distances when they were young, beginning with an apprenticeship that was generally away from the place in which their parents lived, and, in the process of moving through a substantial number of villages, they may have come to know of places that were in need of an artisan practising their profession. Rural bakers, shoemakers, and smiths likely moved to fill a void left by a departure, and needed information about the market for their service. Other artisans produced for a wider market or transformed the local primary resources, and in these cases a substantial number of craftsmen could live and work in the same community. Stone cutters needed access to a quarry, weavers worked where merchants had

34  Strangers and Neighbours

set up cottage industry networks, and log cutters were concentrated in forested regions. Migration over the Longue durée, 1700–1900 The notion that pre-modern societies were generally less mobile than modern societies has proven highly resilient within the social sciences. The clearest description of the link between migration and modernization was made by Wilbur Zelinsky in the 1970s. He argued that “there are definite, patterned regularities in the growth of personal mobility through space-time during recent history, and these regularities comprise an essential component of the modernization process.” All societies pass through a migration transition around the same time that they experience a demographic transition; a “transition from a … condition of severely limited physical and social mobility toward higher rates always occurs with modernization.”42 This fits well with a history of migration focused on the rural exodus of the nineteenth century, but a great deal of recent research on early modern Europe casts doubt on the argument that there was little mobility before the modernization, industrialization, and urbanization of the nineteenth century. Historians of internal migration in early modern Europe have generally contested the notion of a mobility transition, arguing that the theory vastly exaggerates the sedentariness of this pre-industrial society. Despite noting a modest increase in the number of migrants and migrations over time, Pooley and Turnbull point out that mean distances travelled by English migrants remained stable at around 35 km throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until about 1880.43 Paul-André Rosental has also argued that France was not appreciably more mobile in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth century and that the rural exodus primarily represented a change in mobility patterns (rural-to-rural mobility declined as rural-to-urban mobility rose) rather than an increase in the number of people moving.44 A survey of English mobility from the sixteenth to the early-nineteenth century argues that despite major economic and social changes, mobility patterns remained remarkably stable.45 And Leslie Page Moch argues that images of rural sedentariness “may be most inaccurate for the pre-industrial period.”46 While there is broad agreement that pre-industrial Europe was hardly immobile, some recent work has argued that the late-nineteenth century was indeed more mobile than the eighteenth century. Steve Hochstadt shows that German migration rates rose precipitously over the course

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   35 

of the nineteenth century, and he sees a link to modernization through increased rural landlessness and the transfer of manufacturing to cities. He notes, however, that Germans moved a great deal less in the early-twentieth century than they had in the late-nineteenth century, and he argues against making any simple link between modernization and migration patterns.47 Jelle van Lottum argues that there was a peak in international migration in northern Europe in the late-nineteenth century. While more people crossed national borders in the late-­nineteenth century than they had earlier, however, van Lottum also finds an earlier migration peak in the sixteenth century, and he emphasizes the similarity in the causes of the two migration waves and the permanence of the migration system centred on the Dutch Republic. He also notes that it is not possible to provide accurate numbers concerning the nineteenth-century increase in mobility, in part because of the decline in temporary and seasonal migration that occurred at the same time.48 In an important large-scale analysis, Jan and Leo Lucassen attempt to quantify levels of mobility in Europe from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. They argue that there was indeed a staggering increase that occurred over the second half of the nineteenth century. Within the six types of migrations that they considered, there were, they estimate, some 20 million migrants between 1750 and 1800, and 120 million from 1850 to 1900. Like Hochstadt, they argue that modernization was not the primary cause of the increase, and they also note that the twentieth century was much less mobile than the late-nineteenth. Their analysis, however, excludes rural-to-rural migration, focusing on moves towards cities, departures from the European continent, and the colonization of “empty space.”49 Josef Ehmer argues that the Lucassens’ exclusion of rural-to-rural and journeyman migrations means that historians still have not conclusively demonstrated that there was more migration in the late-nineteenth century than during the early modern period. Even if it is eventually shown to be the case, Ehmer posits that it would be because early modern patterns of mobility continued to exist, with the superposition of new patterns linked to urbanization and industrialization. Modern societies are no more mobile than pre-modern societies, and the ending of the period of overlap between the two systems would explain why migration rates declined in the twentieth century.50 The sources used in this book do not resolve the question of whether Europeans migrated more in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth century, but they do allow us to address a few questions of change over time for the period from 1700 to 1872. Doing so reveals the impressive extent of continuity over these two centuries, but it also highlights a

36  Strangers and Neighbours

few changes that occurred in mobility patterns. The most striking result of the comparison is that rural communities in 1872 had slightly fewer non-native inhabitants than they did in 1796, and on average the distances involved in in-migration to Burgundian villages were about the same in 1872 as they were throughout the eighteenth century. This does not mean that villages were less mobile in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth century, as the 1872 census allows us to count the number of migrants rather than the number of migrations, but the extent of the continuity is nevertheless striking. Continuity throughout the Eighteenth Century Over the course of the eighteenth century, mobility patterns changed very little. Non-native proportions among witnesses remained constant, and distances rose only slightly. Male witnesses born after 1720 were no more likely to be living outside their place of birth than were those born before that date, although there was a slight decline in both non-native proportions and distances for women. Of women witnesses born before 1720, 54 per cent were living outside their place of birth, a proportion that dropped to 50 per cent for those born after 1720. The distance that migrant women were living from their place of birth declined from an average of about 25 km to about 22 km. At the same time, the distances travelled by men increased, from 39 km to 43 km. The most likely explanation for the declining mobility of women seems to be that the pull of the city was increasing gradually over the eighteenth century. If slightly more women were moving to the city after 1750 than was the case before that date, this could have the effect of increasing the economic opportunities for the remaining women in the countryside, who might therefore be slightly less motivated to move for economic reasons. However, it is important to emphasize that the decline in rural women’s mobility over the course of the eighteenth century was very slight. While overall mobility and distances did not change much over the course of the eighteenth century, there were some small changes for some social groups. Among men, there was a slight drop in the mobility of farmers and artisans. Less socio-professional information is available for women, but it is nevertheless possible to divide them according to marital status, which reveals that the mobility of widows and unmarried women other than servants declined, while that of servants and married women remained unchanged. Young people became slightly more mobile, as witnesses under the age of twenty-five saw

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   37 

their non-native proportion rise from 33 to 36 per cent after 1750, and the average distance moved by the migrant young rose from 29 km to 34 km (medians rose from 11 km to 12 km). The eighteenth century, then, was not characterized by an increasing amount of mobility, nor did the construction of canals and better roads stretch the distances that ordinary people moved once they took to the road.51 It is important to emphasize here that this does not account for the number of migrations. It is possible that non-natives in 1800 moved a greater number of times than they did in 1700, although there would seem to be no a priori reason to expect this. Movement to cities and towns are also excluded from the analysis, but the attraction of cities to migrants probably did not grow enough to support the notion that mobility ­patterns in 1800 were much different than they had been in 1700. Comparing the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries If the eighteenth century saw little change in mobility patterns for the inhabitants of rural northern Burgundy, what happened in the nineteenth century? The following discussion compares the census of 1872 to that of 1796. The census of 1872 is familiar to historians.52 The nominal lists, which survive in large numbers, provide the village and department of birth for all inhabitants not born in the village (in addition to name, age, profession, and household composition), which explains why nineteenth-century historians have made use of these documents to analyse mobility patterns in several different parts of France. The sample includes 6,426 individuals living in twenty villages selected among those included in the transcribed sample from the 1796 census.53 The greatest difference between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries is that the twenty communities studied shrunk gradually over the course of the nineteenth century, as can be seen from the net migration rates per community that were calculated by using the censuses of 1836, 1856, and 1872 in conjunction with the ten-year summary tables (tables décennales) listing births and deaths by village for the period 1836–72.54 The twenty villages saw their populations decline by an average of 0.2 per cent per year from 1836 to 1856, which had accelerated to 0.7 per cent per year by the period 1856–72. The speed at which village communities were shrinking more than tripled, and people no doubt started to notice the decline by the second half of the century. These changes, however, were not primarily caused by the departure of villagers for the cities but largely reflected the declining number

38  Strangers and Neighbours

of births. From 1835 to 1856 there were 467 more births than deaths, whereas between 1856 and 1872 there were nine more deaths than births in the same communities. The annual average net out-migration rate for these communities was 0.053 per cent for the early period, which rose only very slightly to 0.066 per cent in the later period. Paul Hohenberg argued in 1974 that the population decline in French villages in the second half of the nineteenth century was caused more by the ratio of births to deaths than by net rural out-migration.55 The data for the twenty villages confirms this, at least for the period up to 1872. The census lists from the nineteenth century provide no indication of the destinations of out-migrants from these villages. The situation, however, was clearly more complicated than a simple rural exodus whereby young peasant men and women moved to the city. Perhaps cities drew from large towns, towns from large villages, and large villages from smaller ones. What is clear, though, is that net out-migration accounted for only a small number of the moves made by ordinary villagers. With an average annual out-migration rate of 0.0055 for the entire period, these twenty villages together lost only about forty-one people per year. We will see in chapter 2 that villages had annual in-migration rates of about 0.05 in 1796, almost ten times greater than the net out-migration rate. Rural France in the nineteenth century was not a stable society that was gradually becoming mobile, but rather a society long characterized by mobility that was seeing a slow population decline combined with a gradual increase in the attraction of towns and cities. Many elements in the mobility system of rural northern Burgundians continued to function in much the same ways as they had in the eighteenth century. The twenty villages studied attracted slightly fewer in-migrants in the late-nineteenth century than they had in the lateeighteenth. In Year IV these villages had a non-native proportion of 50 per cent for those aged twenty years and over, slightly higher than in the overall sample from the same census (47 per cent). By 1872, by contrast, 44 per cent of the inhabitants in this age group in the same villages were residing outside their place of birth. Furthermore, villages that attracted in-migrants in the eighteenth century generally continued to do so in the nineteenth, as there is a correlation of 0.505 between the non-native proportions within the same villages in 1872 and 1796. It is important to note that these statistics are not migration rates and give no indication of whether people were moving around more often in the nineteenth than in the eighteenth century. It could be that approximately the same number of people left their place of birth as in the eighteenth

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   39 

century, but that those who left moved a greater number of times. What is clear, however, is that the distances travelled by in-migrants to come to the villages did not increase much over the course of the nineteenth century. Since the census of 1796 does not provide the place of birth or of previous residence, the data from the witness depositions must be used, while keeping in mind that this data does not apply to the villages analysed from the 1872 census sample. Among those witnesses testifying in the last half of the eighteenth century, migrants over the age of twenty-five moved an average distance of 42 km (the median was 12.8 km), statistically indistinguishable from the average distance of 41 km and the median of 13 km in the villages studied in 1872.56 This data does not address changes to distances in migrations to towns and cities, which generally involved greater distances than moves to villages and which became more numerous in the nineteenth century, but it does demonstrate that village recruitment basins did not change very much over the two centuries in question. The overall decline in the proportion of non-natives primarily reflects the lowered mobility of the poorest inhabitants of Burgundian villages, namely day labourers, cottagers, rural artisans, widows, and spinsters. The non-native proportion within these groups, taken together, dropped from 49 per cent in 1796 to 38 per cent in 1872. These were the groups most likely to be drawn away from the village towards towns and small cities.57 Villages therefore exerted a weaker pull on poorer young people on the move, which would explain why their non-native proportions for these groups declined slightly. Those people who chose to remain in the countryside rather than go to a town or city were perhaps less prone to take the risks involved in moving, were less adventurous, or had more ties to the local community than those who migrated to the city. The size of the effect should not be overestimated, however; rural communities in 1872 attracted only slightly fewer migrants than they had in 1796, and many occupational groups saw little change over the period. Marriage continued to bring new inhabitants into the villages in much the same way as it had in the eighteenth century. In the 1872 sample there are 1,407 couples, of which 894 (64 per cent) were exogamous in that the husband and the wife were born in different communities. This seems appreciably higher than the 45 per cent found in the census of 1796. But the census of 1872 provides place of birth rather than year of arrival, and the estimated adjusted exogamy rate for 1796 would be approximately 64 per cent if one applied the method used for 1872.58 The percentage of exogamous marriages involving mobile women also

40  Strangers and Neighbours

remained the same, being 57 per cent in 1872 and 56 per cent in 1796. Finally, distances travelled in the search of a spouse are also similar in 1872 to those found throughout the eighteenth century. From five villages over the course of the eighteenth century there are 1,348 exogamous marriages for which distances can be calculated. The average distance was 30 km and the median distance was 11 km, whereas in 1872 the average was 36 km and the median was 12 km.59 There was an impressive degree of continuity in mobility patterns over this period of almost two centuries.60 Distances moved by migrants showed little tendency to rise over time, with averages for people moving into villages being around 35 km and medians being between 10 km and 15 km (crow’s-flight distances were slightly shorter, with average and median distances being about 25 km and between 8 km and 12 km, respectively) throughout the eighteenth century and in 1872.61 Furthermore, communities that were highly mobile or immobile in 1796 generally remained so in 1872. However, there were also some changes in the mobility of ordinary Burgundians. Chief among these is the slight increase in the number of people moving to towns and cities, which meant that, overall, Burgundian country dwellers were more mobile in the nineteenth century than they were in the eighteenth. If it is true that rural-to-urban movement was increasing throughout the nineteenth century, it is nevertheless important not to exaggerate its significance. In Rosental’s sample of seven departments in northern France, about 70 per cent of movement was rural to rural, which means that the rural exodus was only one part of a much larger mobility system.62 Many of the changes occurring in the nineteenth century had already begun in the eighteenth. In particular, the decline in the mobility of poorer farmers and agricultural day labourers began slowly in the eighteenth century and then accelerated throughout the nineteenth as the pull of cities and towns grew stronger. The same was true of master artisans, who were among the most mobile villagers in the early-eighteenth century and had become the most sedentary by the mid-nineteenth. In the 1990s the annual communal migration rate for France (the risk of moving to another commune over the course of a year) was 0.053, meaning that about 5 per cent of the nation’s population changed its commune of residence each year. The rate was highest for those in their late twenties and remained relatively stable until their retirement.63 These patterns are strikingly similar to those of eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, as we will see in detail in the next chapter. This does not mean that internal migration patterns have not changed, especially

Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances   41 

since the comparison involves national averages and local rates that are calculated using different sources and methods, but the comparison provides a correction for a simplistic notion of a mobility transition occurring with the onset of demographic and economic modernity. Conclusion Much remains to be said about the patterns of movement in eighteenthcentury northern Burgundy, but several elements already stand out. The practice of an agricultural occupation was a significant factor affecting mobility: non-farmers were almost 10 per cent more likely to be living away from their place of birth than were farmers. Occupations that had the least to do with the land tended to be the most mobile. The least mobile artisans were weavers, rural artisans who often remained closely tied to agricultural practices and life.64 Butchers and bakers, however, were less attached to the land and hence more likely to migrate. Landowning probably explains most of the relatively low non-native proportion among ploughmen and vignerons, although this needs to be investigated in more detail. The situation for women was slightly different than for men, in that women in agricultural households were, on average, more mobile than their husbands, whereas non-farming wives were generally less mobile than their husbands, which seems to reflect a stronger tendency for exogamous couples engaged in agriculture to settle in the husband’s village. Generally, it is clear that the mobility patterns of wives closely resembled those of their husbands, with regard to both their chance of living in their place of birth, and, more significantly, the distances that they travelled. In some ways there is little here of surprise to those historians who emphasize the rootedness of country dwellers within a small circle around their place of birth. After all, three-quarters of all adult farmers lived within a day’s walk of their birthplace, and even among nonfarmers only one occupation, schoolmasters, had a median distance for non-natives of more than 20 km in a straight-line distance (about 26 km by road). Still, about half of all adults at any given time in northern Burgundy were living outside of their place of birth, and every village, no matter how small, had several inhabitants who had been born over 100 km away. Furthermore, calculating native and non-native proportions vastly underestimates the total amount of mobility, by ignoring all moves that may have taken place between birth and the time that the witnesses were deposed or that the census was taken in 1796.

2 Measuring Mobility II: Annual Migration Rates

Rural communities in northern Burgundy were made up of people with a wide variety of mobility backgrounds and experiences, none of which is fully captured by the presentation of data on residence and birth places. It is preferable to measure the amount of movement in a given society by calculating the average risk that an individual has of moving over the course of a year.1 The standardization involved in this calculation allows comparison across different societies and over time but is not always possible to perform for European countries before the nineteenth century. The two main sources used in this book divide people into natives and non-natives at a given time in their life, either in 1796 or when called as witnesses in a local seigneurial court. This provides information that is highly useful, especially on the nature of the rural world and the functioning of the village community, but it is problematic in the sense that if they are not used carefully, these sources lead to a serious underestimation of the total amount of mobility that occurred.2 They reveal nothing about how often people moved or how long they stayed in their new place of residence. Migration scholars have long underestimated the tendency for migrants to move repeatedly, notably by assuming that most migration was permanent.3 Steve Hochstadt’s approach to the issue is to calculate migration “efficiency” by subtracting out-migration from in-migration to a particular locality and dividing the result by the amount of in-migration. The resulting rates are astoundingly low in the nineteenth-century German cities he analysed because only about one migrant out of twenty stayed for the rest of his or her life. Five years after arriving, only a quarter of migrant males to Berlin were still residing in the city.4

Annual Migration Rates   43 

The accurate calculation of migration rates requires exceptionally detailed records that note each move made into and out of a given place. Population registers provide the needed information, although there is some concern that they undercount migrations.5 Annual lists of Easter attendance can also be used for this purpose, especially if they are linked to baptism, marriage, and death records.6 No comparably rich sources exist for eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, and while the linkage of tax records and parish registers can compensate in part, they focus on the fiscal household rather than on the individual. Fortunately, however, the census of 1796 provides the year of arrival for nonnative inhabitants. The moves that had occurred within the year prior to 1796 provide something close to an answer to the following question: “One year ago, did you live in your current community of residence, or somewhere else?” The proportion of people in the villages studied who had moved within the twelve months prior to the census is thus the annual migration rate for 1796, with the caveats presented below. While no detailed analysis of out-migration is possible, the study of migration into these rural communities is nevertheless useful.7 It would be preferable to have annual migration data over more than a single year. The problem is particularly acute because of the ongoing revolution and mass mobilization for war. We can partially account for some of their effects, such as the absence of a substantial number of young men, but other effects are more difficult to evaluate. The severe economic problems of the time may have increased the level of migration, although it might also have encouraged more people to remain close to home.8 There are ways of verifying the data from the census, of which the most useful is a comparison to the witness depositions. Another is a case study of a single community through the matching of various types of nominative sources, as I do below for the community of Corgengoux. While some uncertainty remains concerning the effects of the Revolution and the war on migration patterns, it is highly unlikely that these events disrupted patterns of migration into and out of rural communities to the point of invalidating the analysis presented here.9 The census of 1796 thus reveals many significant elements of the migration pattern of rural northern Burgundy that cannot be determined by using sources that simply provide birthplaces. Each year about one in twenty adults changed community of residence, a proportion that is similar to proportions found by historians in rural communities elsewhere in western Europe during the same period. Some people

44  Strangers and Neighbours

were at greater risk of migrating than were others, and the two most important factors were marital status and age. As today, young, single people moved much more frequently than did older, married people, although villagers of all ages could find themselves on the road for a variety of reasons. Many people moved more than once over their lifetime, and this chapter demonstrates that a large majority of migrants did not stay for long in their new place of residence. One of the main conclusions of this chapter is that most migration did not “stick,” and village communities could generally expect that over half of those who arrived in the village would leave within a few years. Migration Rates and Length of Stay In 1796, 767 out of 14,750 adults over the age of twenty in the villages studied had moved within the previous year, which gives an adult annual risk of migrating of 0.052. The annual risk of migrating for those aged twelve and over is slightly higher than that for adults, at about 0.057. It is unclear how the enumerators counted people who had arrived between one and two years prior to the census, so those who were counted as having stayed a year or less must include a few who should have been counted as having stayed between one and two years. However, any who moved more than once in a single year were counted for a single move. What is more, natives who had moved back were not counted as migrants. The selection of nominal lists to be transcribed probably led, though, to a slight overestimation of the annual risk of migration. Among the 162 villages for which I simply recorded the years in which people moved, rather than transcribing the lists, the annual migration rate for all those over the age of twelve in 1796 was 0.036. This is probably too low because it includes about a dozen villages with migration rates of less than 0.01 that almost certainly underreported migration. Their elimination raises the rate, but only to 0.039, which is still considerably lower than that applying to the transcribed sample. However, the sex ratio for people in their twenties was seriously skewed in 1796, being only about 0.45. Many young men were absent for the war, and communities may have left out some young men in order to protect them from conscription. Young men are the most mobile group by age and sex, and, after correction for their exclusion,10 the adult migration rate rises to 0.056 in the transcribed sample and 0.047 in the larger sample. The notion that about 5 per cent of adult Burgundians changed their village of residence each year can thus

Annual Migration Rates   45 

serve as a useful approximation, but this figure excludes return migration and includes only the most recent move of those who moved more than once in the period of a year. It also excludes the mobility of temporary migrants and those permanently on the road like journeymen artisans, pedlars, masons, and pit sawyers, whose mobility patterns are presented in chapter 4. Return migration was relatively common, and data from other times and places provides some useful comparisons. In late-seventeenth-­century England about 15 per cent of men and 14 per cent of women were living in their place of birth but had moved at least twice. Earlier in the seventeenth-century, before the migration slowdown that Souden and Clark have identified,11 about 20 per cent of English men and 17 per cent of women were living in their place of birth but had moved at least twice.12 In the small rural commune of Jussy near Geneva in the nineteenth century about 20 per cent of moves involved return migration.13 Return migration therefore probably accounted for more than one move out of ten, and perhaps as much as one move out of five. This would raise the average annual risk of moving from one municipality to another for settled rural inhabitants in the Côte-d’Or (including children) to as much as 0.06.14 The migration rates calculated here can be thought of as the risk that an individual has of being found living in a different community one year in the future, and thus do not account for multiple moves within that twelve-month period. A few historians of countries with population registers have been able to include multiple moves over a single year in their calculations. In the nineteenth century the Swedish agrarian community of Upsala-Näs had a migration rate of 0.025 when using a method comparable to mine, but a much higher annual rate of 0.035 when multiple moves within a year were included.15 In his study of the city of Duisburg in the nineteenth century, James H. Jackson Jr calculates that migration rates, defined as the chance of being found in a different place of residence one year later, would be about 87 per cent of the total number of moves found in population registers.16 While the calculation of overall annual migration rates for northern Burgundian rural communities is useful for comparing the region to other parts of Europe, the figures used here never include all the people who came into these villages. Most in-migrants to villages in northern Burgundy did not stay a long time, which makes the villagers here similar to most other groups of migrants both today and in the past.17 By far the largest group of

46  Strangers and Neighbours Table 2.1.  Length of stay for mobile adults over twenty years old, 1796 census

1 year or less 2 years 3 years 4 years 5 years 5 years or less 6–10 years 11–15 years 16–20 years

All

Men

Women

767 436 357 279 306 2,105 1,210 960 822

350 184 160 124 155 933 551 435 373

417 252 197 155 151 1,172 659 525 449

in-migrants had been there for a year or less, and as much as 40 per cent of migrants apparently left the village after a stay of a single year.18 Close to two-thirds of movers left within the first five years (see table 2.1). The decline is precipitous between one year and two years and amounts to about a quarter of remaining migrants per year through to the end of the fourth year. Once a migrant had stayed for five years, however, she or he generally remained in the village; almost twice as many nonnatives had been in the village for less than five years as those who had been there between six and ten years. As the length of stay increased, a growing number of migrants could be expected to disappear through death, and the relatively small size of the decline after ten years means that relatively few migrants left after a longer stay.19 Migration by Sex, Age, Marital Status, and Occupation Several factors distinguished long- and short-stay migrants from each other. Sex, however, was not a significant factor. The patterns for men and women were almost identical, with about the same steep decline between one year and two years and the same gradual decline thereafter until about five years. Age was much more important, as the young tended to migrate more temporarily than did the old. On average, recent migrants were almost seven years younger than long-stay migrants.20 While age mattered, however, marital status was the most important factor in determining which migrants persisted and which did not.21 Married women made up about 80 per cent of long-term female migrants and only half of recent arrivals, whereas unmarried women accounted for only 8 per cent of female long-term migrants and half of recent arrivals. The annual risk of migrating for married women

Annual Migration Rates   47 

was 0.043, while all other women over the age of twenty had a migration risk almost 1.5 times higher, at 0.065.22 About half of married women had moved away from their place of birth, and it is worth emphasizing that married women were far from sedentary, but they were significantly less likely to migrate within a given year than were unmarried women. The same pattern applies even more strongly to men. The annual migration risk for married men in 1796 was 0.035, whereas, at 0.093, the rate for unmarried men was almost three times higher.23 A tenth of unmarried men moved each year, a rate that would be higher still if almost half of twenty-something men were not missing owing to the war and if the mobility of journeymen artisans were included (see chapter 4). Even with domestic servants excluded, the risk of migration for unmarried men was higher than it was for husbands, at 0.063. Married people were at least as likely as the unmarried to have moved away from their parish of birth. About 48 per cent of married men were non-natives, while about 45 per cent of unmarried men were living outside their birthplace. The tendency was even stronger for women, as 53 per cent of the married and 41 per cent of the unmarried lived outside their birthplace. The higher non-native proportion among the married largely reflects exogamy, especially since a woman was more likely to move to her husband’s village than the reverse. Of the masses of people who arrived in Burgundian villages each year, then, most of those who were unmarried would subsequently leave again, often after a short stay of only a couple of years, while those who were married stood a better chance of remaining in place for a longer period. While married couples could and did move, they did so less frequently than did single people and remained in place for longer once they had moved. Occupation also affected length of stay. Among those who had arrived within the previous year, 24 per cent of men over twenty listed their profession as domestic servant, whereas this was the case for only 4 per cent of migrants who stayed for ten to twenty years. That mobile domestic servants frequently left the village after only a short stay will surprise no one; the average length of stay for mobile servants was approximately two years, far shorter than for any other occupational group. Owing to the large number of servants among short-stay migrants, table 2.2 excludes them in order to focus on the persistence patterns of other occupational categories.24 Ploughmen (prosperous farmers) were far more likely than any other significant occupational group to persist in one place once they had moved. This reflects the

48  Strangers and Neighbours Table 2.2.  Occupational categories of short- and long-term adult male migrants in 1796, except servants Poor farmers Ploughmen Vignerons Artisans (cottagers and day labourers) 1 year or less 76 (29%) 10–20 years 220 (29%)

46 (17%) 13 (5%) 157 (21%) 35 (5%)

NonOthers agricultural elite

55 (21%) 25 (9%) 178 (24%) 60 (8%)

50 (19%) 107 (14%)

difficulty involved in acquiring a significant amount of land to buy or rent in a new village. Ploughmen were not sedentary, but when they moved, it was generally over a short distance, and once in the new village they tended to remain in place for a relatively long period. Other than the fact that ploughmen were far more numerous among longstay migrants, the social make-up of short- and long-stay migrants was remarkably similar. The case of cottagers and day labourers is especially striking, since a significant proportion of these poor, landless farmers remained in place for a long time after they had moved. The same is true of vignerons, who account for a small proportion of migrants in both categories; artisans who are highly mobile but often remain in place for many years; and the non-agricultural elite. Rural northern Burgundy was not divided into two separate groups of mobile and sedentary people. While there are indeed differences between the migration rates of different occupations, all groups were at significant risk of migrating. Agricultural occupations had an overall annual migration rate of 0.034. Ploughmen, the least mobile of all villagers, were about a third less likely to move in a given year than were other farmers, but about one in five would nevertheless move over the course of a decade. Moreover, there is probably some underestimation of their risk of migrating because a ploughman who left a village because of economic hardship or misfortune might often be a cottager in his new village, since he would likely sell his oxen or horses as he lost money. Day labourers were the only agricultural occupation whose migration rate was substantially different from that of other farmers, being more than twice as likely to move. Their numbers, however, are very small because even poor villagers often managed to rent, buy, or inherit a small piece of land and thereby become a cottager, while spending much of the year working for wages. Much of the difference among various agricultural professions is explained by marital status. Almost no bachelors were

Annual Migration Rates   49  Table 2.3.  Migration rates by age and sex Age (years)

Annual risk of migrating

For women

For men

0–11 (estimated) 12–19 20–29 30–39 40–49 50–59 60–69 over 70

0.032 0.087 0.096 0.056 0.034 0.034 0.022 0.029

0.032 0.079 0.092 0.052 0.030 0.033 0.019 0.026

0.032 0.093 0.100 0.061 0.037 0.036 0.026 0.032

ploughmen, and the respective migration rates of day labourers who were married (n = 112) or unmarried (n = 30) were 0.054 and 0.167. Age and life course thus explain part of the diversity among occupational groups. The likelihood of migrating varied substantially by age (see table 2.3). During their twenties both men and women had a risk of migrating that was almost three times higher than they would have in their forties and fifties. In general, the older an adult was, the lower her or his risk of moving was over the course of the year. The decline in migration rates was not, however, constant throughout life. The drop was steepest between the twenties and the thirties, primarily because this represented the period during which domestic servants married and became poor farmers and day labourers. The risk of migrating for nondomestics in their twenties was 0.067. This means that, other than for servants, the decline in migration rates was about constant from the twenties to the forties. Between forty and sixty years of age, migration rates remained unchanged, dropping again after the age of sixty. Over the age of seventy there was a slight rise in mobility, as older people moved in with their children or made other arrangements.25 This is similar to patterns found in industrialized nations in the twentieth century, where the change of moving was highest between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five and then declined slowly until it flattened out at about sixty years old.26 The chance of migrating rose and fell in almost identical ways for men and women, but men had a slightly higher risk of migrating than did women at all ages. This contradicts one of Ravenstein’s main arguments, namely that while men moved greater distances, women were more mobile.27 More women than men were residing outside of their place of birth, but mobile men moved more times than did mobile women.28

50  Strangers and Neighbours

Migration of Older Villagers Ordinary rural Burgundians did not become entirely sedentary as they aged.29 It is not rare to find older people who had arrived in the village recently. The oldest migrant in the census was Bernarde Consublet, ninety years old in 1796, who had arrived in Tellecey at the age of eightyseven, but there were others, such as Jean Baptiste Clere, a day labourer, who arrived in Échalot at seventy-six years old. The least mobile decade was from sixty to seventy, and people over seventy were only slightly less mobile than those in their forties and fifties. As the census groups households together, it is possible to use the year of arrival to determine whether or not older migrants moved on their own, as well as to judge, with a reasonable degree of certainty, how many moved to live with their adult children.30 There were sixty-four people (thirty-four men and thirty women) who were over the age of sixty and had migrated within the two years prior to the census. Most had clear connections either to someone already living in the village or to someone who had arrived at the same time. Thirty-one of the older migrants (48 per cent) had moved with a relative, most often a spouse but sometimes an adult child. Widowed older migrants could move to a village at the same time as one of their adult children married. Nicolas Nicolardot, for example, a crippled seventy-eight-year-old, arrived in Bressey-sur-Tille in the same year as did his son Jean (a day labourer), whose wife, Gabrielle Cluny, was a native of the village. Joseph Dalphin seems to have moved to the village with his granddaughter when she married, although the link is less certain there. In 1704 François Jacques explained his departure from Dijon to Saint-Apollinaire with his wife as follows: “his age of 80 years and the same age of his wife, that they can no longer work to earn their keep, that he has been forced to retire to the home of Pierre Jacquot his son, who will feed them for the rest of their days.”31 The experience of old-age migration was different in significant ways for men and for women. Sixty-six per cent of the over-sixty male migrants travelled with a spouse or a child, whereas this was only the case for 38 per cent of the women. Women were about 1.5 times more likely to be travelling alone than were men (45 and 29 per cent respectively). Similarly, in eastern Belgium in the nineteenth century, older women were more likely than older men to migrate alone, although there the difference was smaller.32 Older women were also more likely to end up alone than were men, as the proportion of these migrants apparently not living with a family member was about 38 per cent for women and 29 per cent

Annual Migration Rates   51 

for men.33 Part of this difference is explained by the higher life expectancy of women, which meant that there were always more older widows than there were older widowers. It was also far more common for women than men to move into their children’s home – only 15 per cent of male senior migrants moved to the village to live with an adult child, while 34 per cent of older female migrants did so. It may be that men found the dependence of old age harder to deal with than did women, because they were accustomed to wielding authority over their households. Men may therefore have tried to remain independent until later in life than women did, or perhaps their adult children were more reluctant to take them in for the same reason.34 There is no evidence of this in the data (the average age of arrival for seniors moving in with their children is the same for men and for women), but the numbers are very small when the data is subdivided to this extent. The greater tendency for widowers to remarry, as compared to widows, also plays a role.35 Mobility rates by age can be used to calculate a lifetime risk of migration, simply by multiplying the annual migration rates in table 2.3 by the number of years to which they apply. On average, a villager who survived to seventy years of age had moved 3.5 times (3.3 for women and 3.7 for men). This is a highly artificial statistic, given the ways that profession and marital status affected mobility and especially because of the exclusion of return migration, but it nevertheless can serve as a useful baseline. At fifty years of age, there were 2.9 moves per person on average (2.8 and 3.1 for women and men, respectively). By comparison, Pooley and Turnbull constructed migratory life histories for 16,091 people in England, among whom there was an average of 4.3 moves per person. These authors, however, include intracommunal moves (to another home within the same community), and no useful comparison is possible to northern Burgundy.36 Migration Rates versus Non-native Proportions Annual migration rates are no doubt the best way to measure the degree of overall mobility within a society, and they have the advantage of allowing for easy comparison across time and space. However, sources before the nineteenth century rarely allow the historian to do this sort of calculation, and in many cases researchers have been forced to rely on other ways of measuring this mobility. One of the most common, and the method mostly used in this book, has been to give the proportion of the non-native born population residing within a community.

52  Strangers and Neighbours

Recently Steve Hochstadt has expressed scepticism about the use of non-native proportions.37 He is correct to argue that the non-native proportion vastly underestimates the number of moves and exaggerates the permanence of migration. It is particularly unsuited for periods of rising mobility such as the late-nineteenth century. It seems reasonable, though, to assume that villages with relatively high annual mobility rates would also have a relatively high proportion of non-natives unless the population was rising or declining significantly through in- or out-migration. A few groups, like domestic servants, do not fit the pattern, because they had a mobility persistence pattern that was very distinct from other groups. The proportion of non-natives leads to a significant under-evaluation of the distinction between the persistence patterns of the married and those of the unmarried and to an overestimation of the differences between men and women. In general, however, occupational groups with high rates of annual migration also had high proportions of non-natives, and many of the same patterns of higher mobility and sedentariness are likely to be found both in migration rates and in the proportion of non-native inhabitants. There is a statistically significant correlation of 0.435 between annual migration rates and proportions of non-natives per village in the sample from the 1796 census, which rises to 0.495 with the elimination of four outliers that may have over-counted recent in-migrants. The non-native proportion is a useful proxy for actual mobility, as long as we account for the problems and challenges associated with it. The calculation of the migration rate for eighty-four villages in 1796 is very useful. It provides a better understanding of the total amount of migration that occurred each year and thereby makes comparison to other times and places possible. More important is the ability to address the issue of persistence and to determine which groups were most likely to remain in place once they had moved. Marital status was a vital factor, as married people of both sexes had a much higher chance of remaining once they had moved than did the unmarried. A few occupational groups, namely ploughmen and domestic servants, had distinct patterns of mobility, with very high or very low persistence rates. In addition, the role of exogamic marriage in migration and the tendency for the unmarried to keep moving repeatedly throughout life mean that short-term migrants were on average older than long-term migrants. But the most significant conclusion to be drawn from the analysis of migration rates is the similarity of the short- and the long-term migrant populations. Despite a few key differences between the mobility of men and women,

Annual Migration Rates   53 

their migration risks were similar throughout the life course, and they had close to the same chance of remaining in place once they had moved. Migration was not in any sense a marginal phenomenon in eighteenthcentury northern Burgundy, nor was it limited to one group or to a single stage in the life course. Virtually everyone in the province’s villages had a non-negligible risk of migrating at all stages of life. Tax Records, Parish Registers, and Witness Depositions Both the 1796 census and the witness depositions provide individuals’ mobility status at a single point in time, but “native inhabitants,” people who were living at their place of birth when they testified or in 1796, could still move away later in life. Document-linkage between parish registers and witness depositions for three villages (Villy-le-Moutier, Bligny-sur-Ouche, and Argilly) shows that neither native-born nor non-native inhabitants had settled into the community for life at the time they testified in court.38 About 40 per cent of the witnesses would die somewhere other than where they were living when they testified (see table 2.4), a number that is only slightly lower than the proportion of those who were already living outside their place of birth when they testified. Among non-native witnesses, half (49 per cent) moved away sometime after testifying. Unsurprisingly, those born in the village were less likely to move away and more likely to die in the village, as compared to non-native witnesses, but 31 per cent of native witnesses would move away before death. Another way to present the data is to note that only 32 per cent of all witnesses both lived in their place of birth when they testified and would subsequently die there; at least two-thirds of adult witnesses can unequivocally be shown to have moved to another community at least once, and 26 per cent can Table 2.4.  Place of death, native and non-native inhabitants, 1700–45 Witnesses

Villy-le-Moutier

Bligny-sur-Ouche

Argilly

Non-native total 49 Ones who died elsewhere 28 ( 58% of non-natives) Native total 34 Ones who died elsewhere 10 (29% of natives)

15 3 (20% of non-natives) 28 9 (32% of natives)

113 55 (49% of non-natives) 88 27 (31% of natives)

Total

43

201

83

54  Strangers and Neighbours

be shown to have moved at least twice.39 Among the 32 per cent who testified as natives and later died in the same village, there is certain to be a significant proportion that moved away and then returned. In late-seventeenth-century rural England about 15 per cent of male witnesses and 14 per cent of female witnesses were living in their place of birth but had nevertheless moved (at least twice, away from and back to their native village).40 There is no way of knowing whether the proportions were the same in northern Burgundy, but there is, as we will see, little reason to think that English villagers moved more than did French villagers, which means that as little as 15 per cent of adults may have remained in the same community for their entire life. A closer study of a single community through a variety of sources confirms many of the patterns of the larger samples. The village of Corgengoux was situated about 13 km to the east of the city of Beaune, and less than 10 km from both the Saône river and the present-day department of Saône-et-Loire. The parish of Corgengoux included the hamlets of Paruey, Mazerotte, and Grosbois, and together their population was evaluated at 406 in 1786. Corgengoux paid taxes separately from the other hamlets, and there were about thirty households that were listed in the tax records, which means that there were fewer than two hundred inhabitants in the hamlet of Corgengoux. The economy of Corgengoux involved some arable agriculture, combined with a considerable amount of viticulture, as over a third of the witnesses from Corgengoux gave their profession as vigneron. The community was connected to proto-industrial networks of production as well; there were a few weavers (two in 1760, among about thirty households). Corgengoux was similar to hundreds of other communities within the region. Out of the 196 witnesses testifying in the village court over the course of the eighteenth century, 104 were born in one of the hamlets of the parish (therefore, 47 per cent were non-native, about the same as in the larger sample of witnesses). Among the ninety-two non-natives, the average distance that was moved from place of birth was 26 km by road, or 19 km in a straight line. The median distances were 10 km and 8 km, respectively. These distances are shorter than those in the overall sample, where the average road distance was 38 km, and the median was 13. This is probably due to the importance of viticulture and small-scale artisanal production in this small community. The six villages contiguous to Corgengoux accounted for twenty-seven of the ninety-two nonnative inhabitants, which means that about a third of the inhabitants and more than two-thirds of non-natives had moved from more than

Annual Migration Rates   55 

one village away. The ninety-two non-natives had been born in no fewer than forty-five different villages that included virtually all communities in the immediate region. As with the overall sample, there was a substantial drop in the number of migrants at a distance of about 12 km. Document linkage between tax records and parish registers shows how likely tax-paying inhabitants were to have been born, to marry, and to die in the village.41 A major disadvantage of using tax records as a starting point is the exclusion of women. Both unmarried women and widows paid taxes, but their mobility patterns are very different from those of married women. Fortunately, however, the main sources used in this study, the depositions and the 1796 census, contain a great deal of information about women’s mobility. The linkage of tax records to parish registers for Corgengoux makes for a powerful analytical tool, providing the year of arrival for each male in-migrant taxpayer and the year of departure for each male out-migrant taxpayer. Male heads of households cannot be expected to have the same mobility patterns as the overall population, because of selection biases related to age and sex, but since tax-paying married men were the least mobile group within the community, their mobility patterns establish a minimum for the overall population mobility. The tax records for Corgengoux confirm much of what the depositions and census lists show. At any given time, about half of the taxpayers in Corgengoux were non-natives, virtually indistinguishable from the proportion of 47 per cent obtained for the same village using the witness depositions. Migrants were on average poorer than people who stayed put, but the differences were small: the average land-tax (taille) assessment of non-native taxpayers in Corgengoux was 17.3 livres, while that of natives was 18.1 livres.42 Those who paid taxes in the same village their entire life were slightly wealthier, paying 20.7 livres in taille. Most migrants did not stay for long. In the tax records for the seventy-three years covered by the records there were 356 different individuals who paid taxes a total of 2,318 times, which means that an average taxpayer was listed over about seven-and-a-half years. Slightly more than half of taxpayers stayed in Corgengoux for five years or less, while only about a quarter were still paying taxes ten years after they had started (see figure 2.1).43 Most taxpayers moved away. Only 78 of the 172 male taxpayers were buried in the parish, which means that among tax-paying male inhabitants (most of whom were married), the most stable population in the village, about 55 per cent would move away before their death.

56  Strangers and Neighbours Figure 2.1.  Duration of taxation in Corgengoux, 1700–89 0.45 0.4

Relative frequency

0.35 0.3 0.25 0.2 0.15 0.1 0.05 0

0

5

10

15

20

25 Years

30

35

40

45

50

Few taxpayers remained in Corgengoux for their entire life. Among those taxpayers who were born in the village, only 41 per cent would subsequently die there, which means that among natives who started paying taxes, three-fifths would eventually move away. It would be useful to know the proportion of adults who lived their entire life in the same community. This can be done through the linkage of birth and death records after eliminating those who died before reaching adulthood.44 Since the sample for Corgengoux starts with tax rolls rather than birth registers, however, it is not possible to perform this calculation. We can, though, determine how many taxpayers lived their entire life in the same community. About 17 per cent of all male taxpayers in Corgengoux were born, paid taxes, and died within the parish. And some of these people had doubtless left and then returned during their youth and before becoming taxpayers. They also paid taxes in Corgengoux for more years (thirteen) than average). This means that at any given time the tax rolls of Corgengoux contained about 29 per cent lifetime sedentary taxpayers. Among those who remained in the community during their entire life, wealthier farmers were the most numerous. Factors other than wealth and land ownership were also important. The average age at death for the small group of taxpayers who were born and died in the village was

Annual Migration Rates   57 

forty-four years. There were only seven lifetime sedentary taxpayers who survived past fifty years (27 per cent), and two who made it to sixty years (8 per cent). At the same time, ten died before the age of forty (25 per cent). Unfortunately it is not possible to analyse the mortality of out-migrants; because their place of death is unknown, they cannot be located in burial records. It is nevertheless clear that lifetime sedentary taxpayers died very young. The average age at which people started paying taxes was twenty-seven years in this group, which means that the lifetime sedentary taxpayers only lived an average of seventeen years after starting to pay taxes. According to Yves Blayo’s analysis of the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED) enquiry, average life expectancy at the age of twenty-five for French men varied from thirty-one to thirty-five years during the second half of the eighteenth century.45 Lifetime sedentariness is thus in part explained by early death; a substantial proportion of those who died in their parish of birth simply did not live long enough to move away.46 Those who lived longer necessarily had a greater lifetime risk of migrating simply because the annual risk was multiplied by more years. Those with chronic health problems and significant physical handicaps may also have been more tied to their parish of birth than were their neighbours. Corgengoux received about as much in-migration as did most other communities within the region. Between 1750 and 1789 an average of 1.25 new non-native male taxpayers arrived each year, and 1.81 male taxpayers migrated out of the village. The number of tax-paying households in Corgengoux was not declining,47 so the difference between in- and out-migration is probably the result of an excess of births over deaths. There was an average of thirty-two taxpayers listed in the records each year, which means that the annual risk of migrating out of the parish of Corgengoux was about 0.057, and the annual in-migration rate was 0.039, well within the range found in the census of Year IV, 0.04–0.06. In Corgengoux, as elsewhere in the region, exogamy only accounted for a small proportion of moves. Only 42 out of 105 male taxpayers who had married in the village subsequently died there.48 This excludes all exogamic couples who married in the village and then immediately settled in the other spouse’s village, since the sample includes only taxpayers. Fully 58 per cent of married couples who settled in Corgengoux at the time of their marriage subsequently moved away. Those who married in the village were no more likely to persist as residents of Corgengoux than was the general population of taxpayers. Married people were less likely to move than were the unmarried and the widowed,

58  Strangers and Neighbours

but the place of marriage had no discernible tendency to tie people down; married couples who migrated into Corgengoux were just as likely to persist as residents as were those who married locally. Several other historians have calculated household turnover rates by matching tax records to parish registers. D.M.G. Sutherland performed the operation for the two Breton villages of Argentré and Balazé, where there was an annual household in-migration rate of about 0.1.49 Hervé Lacrampe found similar annual turnover rates for four rural communities in the élection of Poitiers.50 James B. Collins has studied tax records extensively in order to analyse mobility patterns in the seventeenth century. He shows that on average about 6 per cent of taxpayers disappeared each year from most villages. It is not clear whether migrating households had the same number of individuals as did immobile households, especially since single people were more mobile than the married.51 Migrating ploughmen often brought a large household with them, including domestic servants. The interaction of these different elements probably explains the close convergence of the calculations for Corgengoux based on household data from tax records and those based on individual data from witness depositions and the census.52 The analysis of various types of documents from Corgengoux confirms virtually all of the results obtained by an analysis of the census of 1796 and the witness depositions. About half of adults lived in their village of birth at any given time, and in general the wealthy were less mobile than the poor. The matching of tax records to parish registers also allows us to push the analysis in new directions. The census and depositions only give the mobility status of individuals at a single point in their life, while we can track people over several demographic events, in some cases over an entire lifetime, by using tax records. On average a tax-paying male head of household remained in Corgengoux for only eight years. Fewer than one in five of those who paid taxes remained most of their life in the village, and in many cases this was simply because they died before they could move away. While the approach used here excludes or at least seriously under-represents women, this could be partly compensated by the comparison of burial and baptism records. The main advantage of the linkage of tax rolls and parish registers is its widespread applicability to other regions in France where court clerks may not have recorded witnesses’ place of birth and where the 1796 census cannot be located.53 While the transcription of a village’s tax records over a sufficiently long period, and the manual determination of first and last year of taxation for each individual, are time consuming and tedious operations, the

Annual Migration Rates   59 

availability of transcribed parish registers online and in paper versions makes the task both simple and straightforward. Some Comparative Elements Jean-Pierre Poussou has argued that most moves undertaken by ordinary villagers before the late-nineteenth century do not qualify as migrations or even as a form of mobility. Instead he characterizes the system as being micro-mobile.54 It is hard to find fault with his argument that most French villagers moved only short distances, but it may not be helpful to make this the central point of analysis for our understanding of rural communities. First of all, in the vast majority of human societies most migrants move over short distances, which Ravenstein acknowledged more than a century ago in what is surely the least controversial of his laws of migration. Second, the distances involved in northern Burgundy are not as small as some might think. An over-reliance on exogamy meant underestimating migratory distances by as much as 50 per cent, and the half of migrants who moved over 15 km left behind the social world they had known. Perhaps the most telling argument against the notion of micro-mobility is that it sets up an implicit comparison between villagers in France and those in neighbouring countries who were supposedly more likely to migrate. The notion of French exceptionalism in local migration finds its roots in Peter Laslett’s classic article on migration in Clayworth and Cogenhoe. He compared these English villages to two communities in Normandy, Haline and Longuenesse. The Norman villages were less mobile, notably because fewer whole households moved than in the English villages. While Laslett never explicitly argued that these four villages could stand in for their respective countries, the comparison seemed to support the vision of French villages that demographic historians were building, based on exogamy statistics.55 In 2002, Poussou noted that it was important not to exaggerate the degree of mobility of other European countries, but he nevertheless argued that “the differences between France and Italy underlined by Emmanuel Todd a quarter of a century ago really exist,” and “the English moved a great deal, and in my opinion significantly more than the French.”56 Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie makes a similar argument in comparing immobile French villages to rural communities in England and Italy.57 But were French villagers really less mobile than their English, Dutch, Italian, and German neighbours? Tables 2.5 to 2.7 present calculations of native and non-native proportions, migration rates, and distances travelled that are taken from various historical studies in

Table 2.5.  Non-native proportions in early modern Europe and northern Burgundy Author (pub. year) Place (date)

Source

Bourdieu et al. (2000) Pasleau (1995)

parish registers, reconstitution census

Poussou (2002) Perkyns (1999) Souden (1981) Gourdon and Trévisi (2000) Vassort (1995)

Clark (1979)

Schofield (1970) Kitch (1992)

Mitson (1993)

France (19th century)

Mobility

at marriage, about 50% were residing outside place of birth Belgium (1796) 20% of over 12 population were non-natives Baronnies, France (1795) census 12% of adults 6 Kentish parishes, census enumerator’s books just under 50% were natives England (1851–81) Southern England witness depositions, 35% of men and 40% of women (1660–1700) ecclesiastical courts were non-natives La Roche-Guyon, near census 51% of women and 46% of Paris (1798) men were residing outside birthplace Vendômois (1796) census 54% of women and 52% of men were residing outside birthplace Southern and Midland witness depositions, 75% of women and 70% of men England (late 17th ecclesiastical courts moved at least once century) Cardington, England comparison of successive 33% of household heads were (1782) census lists native born Yorkshire (1852) census 46% of farmers, 47% of tradesmen, and 30% of day labourers were non-native residents Nottinghamshire (17th parish registers fewer than 25% of people were century) born, married, and buried in the same parish

Equivalent calculation, northern Burgundy 48% of women and 47% of men (1796 census)

about 65% moved at least once (estimated) 49% of household heads were native born (Corgengoux) 38% of ploughmen, 52% of tradesmen, and 47% of cottagers were non-native residents 17% of taxpayers spent their entire life in Corgengoux

Annual Migration Rates   61  Table 2.6.  Distances moved by internal migrants in early modern Europe and northern Burgundy Author (pub. year)

Place (date)

Source

Bourdieu et al. (2000) McCants (1992)

France (19th century) Friesland, Netherlands (1847–9) England (1750–1880)

parish registers, 50 km reconstitution tax census 10 km (in rural-torural moves)

Pooley and genealogical Turnbull records (1998) Woledge East Yorkshire poor law and Smale (18th century) settlement (2003) removals Souden England witness (1981) (1660–1700) depositions, ecclesiastical courts Clark (1979) Southern and witness Midland depositions, England (late ecclesiastical 17th–early courts 18th century) Houston Scotland testimonials (1985) (1625–1822) (certificates of good behaviour) Poussou Grande Lande, census (1985) France (1872)

Lundh (1999) Sweden (1820)

catechism examination records

Average distance for migrants

Northern Burgundy 28 km crow’s flight, 38 km road distance

35 km

19 km

20 km for men, 22 km for women

median of 16 km for 13 km median all migrants, but (10 km crow’s rural inhabitants flight), almost moved shorter all rural distances inhabitants median of 5–12 km for single men, 3–16 km for single women moves over 20 km moves over 33 made up less km made up than 20% of 20% of moves moves 80% of all people 80% of all lived within 17 witnesses lived km of place of within 11 km birth (crow’s flight) of place of birth

western European countries. In each case I have performed similar calculations for northern Burgundy, based on the witness depositions, the 1796 census, or, in a few cases, the work on Corgengoux presented in this chapter. The results of the comparison are unequivocal: northern Burgundian villagers had mobility patterns that very closely resembled those of ordinary rural people everywhere in northwestern Europe.

62  Strangers and Neighbours Table 2.7.  Annual migration rates and other statistics in early modern Europe and northern Burgundy Author (pub. Year)

Place (date)

Source or methodology

Annual migration rate

Kitch (1992) Yorkshire (1851) Laslett (1977) Clayworth and Cogenhoe, UK (late 17th century) Lundh (1999) Sweden (19th century) Hochstadt Germany, (1999) lower Rhine (1824–65) Johansen Denmark, 8 (2002) rural parishes (1787–1801)

census 0.04 to 0.06 unofficial 0.05; only censuses kept 5%–11% of by local rector migration was for marriage population about 0.1 registers government 0.04 to 0.07 statistics

Pooley and Turnbull (1998)

England (1750–1880)

genealogical records

Schofield (1970)

Cardington, England (1782)

comparison of successive census lists

Collins (2006) France (17th century)

parish registers

tax records

Annual migration rate, northern Burgundy about 0.05; 15% of migration was for marriage

0.07 (my calculation based on Johansen’s table 4.21) marriage accounts 15% for 26% of all moves (including moves within the same community) 0.03 household 0.09 in turnover rate (inCorgengoux migration plus out-migration) 0.05–0.07 out0.057 in migration among Corgengoux taxpayers

The most common mobility indicator in historical studies is the non-native proportion. In most communities studied by historians (see table 2.5), between 35 and about 65 per cent of the inhabitants were born elsewhere. The lowest proportion is in the Baronnies in southern France (12 per cent).58 However, this was an area of “house”based inheritance with stem families and strict primogeniture that may have been quite closed to newcomers but that probably specialized in out-migration, what Fernand Braudel called a “factory producing men for the use of others.”59

Annual Migration Rates   63 

A few places were admittedly more mobile than northern Burgundy by this measure, such as Hillegersberg in Holland and Cardington in England,60 but it is risky to compare studies of a single village to a large sample, and there were many villages in northern Burgundy that had as many non-natives as had these two communities. The largest and most robust samples for comparison are those of Souden, Perkyns, Bourdieu et al., and Clark,61 and all of these studies give results that are comparable to those from northern Burgundy. The issue of distances moved by migrants is not always as simple as it might seem. Moves involving great distances were not necessarily more disruptive of patterns of living than were short-distance moves, and the perception of distances could vary depending on the topography, quality of roads, and frequency with which people travelled on a regular basis. Almost all historians of migration nevertheless invoke the notion of distance. As table 2.6 demonstrates, northern Burgundian villagers moved over distances that were comparable to those of ordinary people in England, Holland, Scotland, and Sweden. On the one hand, in Souden’s large sample for England from the late-seventeenth century, distances are slightly lower than those found for northern Burgundy.62 On the other hand, Pooley and Turnbull and Bourdieu et al. found distances that were greater than both those presented by Souden and those found in northern Burgundy, but these authors include migration to cities, whereas the Burgundian sample does not.63 Annual migration rates likewise show that people living in northern Burgundy had similar mobility patterns to those of ordinary people in the rest of northwestern Europe, such as those in mid-nineteenth century Yorkshire, late-seventeenth-century Clayworth and Cogenhoe, and the lower Rhineland. Indeed it is plausible, based on the data in table 2.7 that 4–6 per cent of people in most of northwestern Europe changed their community of residence in a given year, a range that is perfectly applicable to northern Burgundian villages. Colin Pooley recently compared migration patterns in England and Sweden in the nineteenth century and found that, although the two countries were different in terms of population density, geography, and level of urbanization, their migration patterns of all kinds were strikingly similar. He argues that the human processes shaping migration may have been stronger than historians generally recognize, overriding social, economic, and topographic differences.64 His argument is supported by the similarity of migration patterns in northern Burgundy to those found in other parts of western Europe, as well as by the considerable stability over time within the region.

64  Strangers and Neighbours

Conclusion Historians have sometimes argued about the way in which to label periods, societies, and groups. Such arguments can be productive, but they can also lead to the commission of what David Hackett Fischer calls the fallacy of semantical questions, becoming “sterile disputes about word usage and not about the past happenings to which the words are supposed to refer.” Fischer cites as an example the debate about whether the political structure of seventeenth-century America was democratic or aristocratic.65 Arguments about whether there was a lot of migration in early modern France and whether ordinary villagers were “mobile” or “micro-mobile” can easily slide into such territory. If all historians of mobility agree that there was in ancien régime France a considerable amount of internal migration and that most of it involved short distances, as elsewhere in Europe, it is relatively unhelpful to argue over whether we should describe the system as mobile or micro-mobile. Each year about 5 per cent of adults moved to a different community. Whether this is “a lot” or “a little” depends on one’s point of view, but what is most significant is that it is no less than the percentage that moved each year in the countries on France’s borders. On average, those who survived to age fifty had changed their community of residence about three times, not including moves back to their place of birth, although this includes both some who never moved and some who moved many times. It is important to distinguish between migration life histories and snapshot documents, and we must apply the labels “sedentary” and “mobile” with caution. Villagers who remained residents of a single community throughout their entire life were rare in northern Burgundy; the proportion was less than a fifth of taxpayers in the village of Corgengoux, although we need further studies linking tax and parish records for other communities. Most of these moves involved relatively short distances, with about half of all of those who had moved living within less than 15 km of their place of birth. But distances take on meanings that differ depending on the social, cultural, and technological context. Moves involving 10 km clearly took more time in the eighteenth century than they do today, and they likely also separated people to a greater extent from those whom they knew. The following chapter will bring some clarity to the interpretation of migratory distances by reconstructing the geography of everyday economic, social, and familial relations, which can then be compared to the geography of internal migration.

3  The Meaning of Distance: Migration and the Espace de vie

While it can be helpful to use the crow’s flight distance (10 km) of a round-trip walk in a day as an approximate guide to the area with which villagers were familiar, in order to demonstrate that ordinary people frequently moved to places to which they did not have familial, social, and economic connections, some analysis is required of the space in which they spent most of their time. Most historians who have reconstructed the geography of everyday life in early modern France, the espace de vie, use the distances separating grooms from brides in exogamic marriages.1 Useful as marital horizons are for this purpose, they provide information only concerning a single type of interaction –­ courtship and marriage – that occurred at a specific point in the life course. Other sources exist as well. Journals and diaries give information about people’s travels, while account books allow us to reconstruct networks of credit and debt.2 While such private writing and recordkeeping practices could spread down into the lower classes, however, the infinitesimally small proportion of ordinary people for whom historians have found personal writing is unlikely to be representative of all ordinary people. Notarial documents and the voluminous records of the stamp tax are also useful, but they include only economic transactions and exclude operations and transactions involving small sums of money.3 The following reconstruction of the geography of daily life is primarily based on the records of seigneurial courts. This source is admittedly more socially selective than that of marriage horizons because it under-represents the very poor and over-represents rural merchants and ploughmen. In comparison to other types of sources, however, the records show people travelling for a wide variety of reasons; courts heard disputes and regulated affairs that concerned diverse

66  Strangers and Neighbours

types of relationships, including familial, courtship, agricultural, and economic. Daily life in rural northern Burgundy was never limited to the village of residence, and all men and women were familiar with what went on in neighbouring communities. There was, however, a porous barrier at about 10 km, and villagers did not generally go further than that distance on a regular basis.4 Given that most people travelled by foot, it is perhaps not surprising that folks did most of their buying and selling within this distance and that village fêtes, public houses, and family assemblies rarely drew people from further away. Economic life and the need to make contact with regional and provincial administrative authorities nevertheless meant that some larger-distance travel was necessary. The espace de vie as revealed by judicial records is similar to the traditional view based on exogamy. It confirms that migration frequently occurred outside of the area with which villagers were closely familiar and challenges the notion that rural-to-rural migration did not require the formation of new networks of friendship and support. The Geography of Litigation Northern Burgundian villagers had economic, familial, and social contact with people from outside their village, as can be demonstrated from a sample of about 2,000 lawsuits heard in fourteen seigneurial courts in the province during the 1750s and 1780s.5 Only 39 per cent of cases in these courts pitted two people from the same village against each other.6 Of the cases heard in the 1750s, the average distance between litigants was 9 km (including cases where there was no distance), or 14 km in inter-community cases. By the 1780s the distances had risen considerably; on average there was 14 km between litigants in all cases, and 23 km in inter-community cases. Median distances were considerably shorter, at about 8 km for inter-community cases in the 1750s, and 9 km in the 1780s. Economic, familial, and social relationships were not limited to a person’s village of residence, but while the distances could sometimes be considerable, they were on average at least 30–40 per cent smaller than the distances over which people migrated. The data then provides preliminary confirmation of the argument that a significant proportion of villagers were ready to move outside of the geographic area in which they circulated daily. Some types of contact involved only neighbours, while others drew people from further away. Minor criminal disputes involved

The Meaning of Distance  67 

inhabitants of the same community; close to 85 per cent of defamation, assault, and theft cases were between two people from the same community. While some historians have argued that villages rarely invoked official judicial institutions against the crimes of their neighbours, such was not the case in northern Burgundy.7 It takes close relationships to produce strong feelings of dislike, jealousy, and contempt. Occasionally, however, violent conflicts over honour would erupt between the inhabitants of different villages, as was the case in about 16 per cent of physical fights and defamation cases. Some of these involved fighting between groups of young men from two villages, a type of collective violence that has been much studied by historians.8 In the cabaret of Montot, for example, four young men from the village met up with seven “boys” from nearby Trouhans. After an exchange of insults that revolved around which village had the best singers and readers, the owner threw them all out of his establishment. Once they were outside, it was not long before fists and stones were flying, but no one was seriously injured.9 While it is clear that ordinary people worried a great deal about the presence of unknown and unconnected strangers passing through the community, most thefts also took place between neighbours. Conflicts and disputes over agricultural issues most often arose between people of the same village. This was particularly true of problems surrounding the use of common land (80 per cent intra-communal). Virtually all lawsuits concerning usurpation of commons involved locals rather than people from away, and if disputes sometimes arose because inhabitants of neighbouring villages snuck into the forest to steal wood, this was less common than the problems involving locals.10 Other types of farming disputes, about wandering animals or overzealous harvesting on a neighbour’s land, could, however, involve people from further away. A large number of wealthy farmers owned or rented land in more than one village, although generally not over distances of more than about 5 km. Sylvain Vigneron used land-sale documents to reconstruct the economic connections of villagers in the Cambrésis. Only about half of land sales were made between two people living in the same community, but the vast majority of land sales (close to 80 per cent) united two people living less than 10 km away.11 There is some difficulty because the author does not distinguish between those who moved to the village where they bought the land, those who bought the land to rent it out to locals, and those who bought the land to work themselves but without changing village of residence.

68  Strangers and Neighbours

Vigneron nevertheless demonstrates that the villages were involved in exchange circuits and that information about land sale circulated freely within an area of about 10 km. Farming activities frequently involved moving between plots that were generally less than 5 km away from home, but villagers bought and sold over considerably larger distances. Lawsuits for the reimbursement of debts were the most common type of legal dispute in the seigneurial courts, as is the case in most judicial systems. The arrangements that people made for their routine credit transactions could vary from a verbal agreement to a formal contract drawn up by a notary. Verbal contracts tended to be rare when the two parties involved lived more than 10 km apart, as three-quarters of disputes over verbally contracted debts concerned people who lived less than 10 km apart. This probably reflects the espace de vie of ordinary people, which likely corresponded closely to both the area where they were likely to know their creditor or debtor and the area in which information about honour and reputation circulated most freely. Still, about 60 per cent of paper-generating debts involved people separated by less than 10 km who probably knew each other relatively well. Ordinary people had to travel to buy the objects and services required for their daily life. These included things as varied as shoes from a cobbler, veterinarian care of a horse from a blacksmith, and legal assistance from a rural solicitor. Only about one in five debt lawsuits involved two people from the same village, which argues strongly against the notion that villages were self-sufficient to any significant extent. However, in general, people did not have to travel great distances to buy goods and services; only about 17 per cent of these disputes involved distances of over 10 km in the 1780s, and only about 10 per cent in the 1750s. In the sample there are about fifty disputes regarding the payment of wages. Most of these involved domestic servants, but a few were for seasonal harvest or threshing work. Such cases are often very complicated because servants were paid in room and board as well as cash and clothes, and masters frequently either gave advances to servants or held their wages in trust until the end of the contract. For example, the widow Boulotte acknowledged that she owed Nicolas Guillemard for eight months of wages, but she insisted on subtracting the ten livres she had advanced to him and an unspecified amount for two days of vacation and six sick days as well as a few other days when he worked for pay for another villager during the grape and grain harvests.12

The Meaning of Distance  69 

About 40 per cent of the lawsuits about wages involved parties from the same village, and 17 per cent more involved people separated by less than 5 km. Most villages were able to find year-round domestic servants relatively close by. This is confirmed by the witness depositions, because the median distance separating place of birth and place of residence for domestic servants was 13 km by road and 10 km in a direct line. Most services used by country dwellers could be found within about 10 km around their village. In about 40 per cent of the lawsuits that involved artisans as plaintiffs suing customers, the client was from the same village as the artisan, and in only 15 per cent of the lawsuits were the artisan and his client separated by more than 10 km. Those practising an agricultural occupation rarely sued, or were sued by, people from more than 10 km away. In cases where a ploughman was the plaintiff, 89 per cent involved people separated by less than 10 km (this includes cases concerning people from the same village), while the comparable figure was 90 per cent for cottagers and 94 per cent for vignerons. There are, though, a few notable differences between these occupations. The most significant difference is that cottagers and ploughmen seldom sued people from outside their own village; 76 per cent of cottager-plaintiff and 70 per cent of ploughman-plaintiff lawsuits involved a defendant from the same village. Vignerons, however, sued outside of the village in over half (53 per cent) of the cases where they were involved as plaintiffs. They were involved in market transactions more often than were arable farmers, although they were no more likely to sue someone from over 10 km away than were either cottagers or ploughmen. In other words, vignerons may have had more economic contacts and relations outside the village, but the general maximum distance of about 10 km applied to them as well. Merchants moved in a slightly wider area than did farmers, with 78 per cent of the lawsuits they initiated involving defendants less than 10 km away. Overall, however, it is worth emphasizing that a man’s occupation had surprisingly little effect on the probability that he would sue someone who lived more than 10 km away. Village inhabitants appeared more often as plaintiffs than as defendants in cases involving distances greater than 10 km. Almost all occupational groups were more likely to be sued from someone from more than 10 km away than they were to sue such a person. When ploughmen were in court as defendants, 80 per cent of cases came from within 10 km (as compared to 89 per cent when they were plaintiffs). This pattern is indicative of the importance of links to nearby market towns and

70  Strangers and Neighbours

small cities and of the fact that most villagers made more purchases than sales outside the village.13 One interesting exception to this pattern is to be found in cottagers, who were less likely to be involved in longdistance (over 10 km) lawsuits as defendants than as plaintiffs. Among cottager defendants, fully 94 per cent of cases involved another party from less than 10 km away, the highest proportion of any occupational group. In general, however, relatively few cottagers were involved in lawsuits at all, either as plaintiff or defendant. The espace de vie did not remain constant over time. In the 1750s 46 per cent of cases involved two inhabitants of the same village, and by the 1780s the proportion had dropped to 39 per cent. Furthermore, cases involving distances of 5 km or less had dropped from about 66 per cent to about 54 per cent between the two decades. Anne Jollet found a similar change in the countryside around the small city of Amboise in western France. Among the land-sale transactions she analysed, in 1780 fully 90 per cent took place between buyers and sellers who resided either in the same village (50 per cent) or in two adjacent villages (40 per cent). By 1822, however, these two categories accounted for only 70 per cent of land transactions.14 The tendency towards greater economic connection to a broader area in northern Burgundy reflects improvements in the road network of the province, including both royal roads and small local roads. No doubt it also partly results from the consumer revolution of the eighteenth century.15 Distances involved in exogamous marriages show the same patterns as court cases. In the villages of Argilly, Bligny-sur-Ouche, and LadoixSerrigny over the course of the eighteenth century, 70 per cent of all marriages brought together two people from a distance of less than 10 km, and only 16 per cent of all marriages involved distances greater than 20 km. Marriage records also confirm that by the end of the eighteenth century ordinary people were circulating over greater distances than they were earlier in the century. The proportion of exogamous marriages rose from 52 to 57 per cent between the first and second half of the century, and those marriages involving more than 10 km increased from 29 to 33 per cent. If people were travelling about a bit more and buying things from further away, it is interesting to note, as we saw in chapter 1, that there was no increase in the non-native proportion in the province’s rural communities, nor was there a tendency for migrants to move over greater distances as the century progressed. There is little demonstrable connection between a person’s tendency to circulate within a relatively

The Meaning of Distance  71 

large distance from his home and that person’s chance of migrating away from that same home. Wealthy farmers and their families had significant economic connections outside of the village and moved about regularly within the micro-region, but they were among the least mobile of all villagers. The same applies to vignerons. They sold all the wine they produced, purchased almost all their food, and frequently travelled to work in the grain harvest. This made them as likely as any other villagers to be on the road but did not make them appreciably more mobile than subsistence-oriented farmers like cottagers. Travel in Court Records Witness depositions also contain information related to the daily circulation of ordinary people, especially in cases where travel was the focus of a lawsuit. Economic and work-related reasons were the most commonly invoked motivations for travel and included trips to attend a foire (fair) and more generally to buy, sell, or deliver goods. Economically motivated travels account for twenty-six of the thirty-three trips whose motivations are clearly described in the witness depositions. The others include six trips that were made for religious or sociability reasons. This leaves only a single person who travelled solely to visit family or friends; Anthide Lagrance, a cottager, travelled from his home in Beaune to his native village of Ivry (about 20 km) to “see his brothers, and he stayed several days.” Economic motivations clearly drove the majority of trips undertaken by ordinary people. Daniel Roche notes that an analysis of passports and other certificates required by people who were on the road, of registers from inns, and of other documents leads to the conclusion that most travel involved money and business.16 But the records mentioned by Roche, like the witness depositions discussed here, probably underestimate the amount of sociability related travel. Village festivals (fêtes) were important events where people, young and old, could meet and socialize. For the young, they were especially important as places to meet and court a potential mate. Judicial inquiries into fights that arose during village festivals provide a list of people who were present. Five such disputes involved the hearing of depositions from fifty witnesses who had travelled from another village for the festivities.17 Fêtes drew people from away, but generally only from the communities within the immediate region, and often only from one or two other communities. Twelve non-inhabitants testified after a dance had turned violent

72  Strangers and Neighbours

in Pouilly-sur-Saône, all of them from either the town of Seurre (4 km away) or Labèrgement le Duc (about the same distance). In Corgoloin in 1783 a dispute during the fête involved eighteen witnesses from away, but all of them were from Chaux, a distance of 6 km. Only two of the fifty people who travelled to attend a fête had travelled from more than 10 km, and one of these was a coffee seller (cafetier) who had probably attended to sell his wares rather than to participate in the festivities. Village fêtes drew people from only very short distances, which is a good indication that the social circle of most people was composed primarily of people from their own village and the immediate adjacent communities. Visits to friends and family members were no doubt rarer than the small-scale, economically motivated trips that people took on a regular basis, but they nevertheless occurred. Edme Rétif’s cousins travelled about 12 km to visit him.18 Pierre-Louis Nicolas Delahaye, the schoolmaster in Silly-en-Multien near Paris, kept a journal in which he recorded a great deal of information about his short-distance travels. He did not mention the many small trips that he must have taken to buy his goods, and instead focused on trips for weddings, funerals, and family visits; he includes travel that mattered to him and that he thought would interest his descendants. He sometimes travelled with his wife and daughter, but in other instances one of the parents stayed home while the other set out with their daughter. Each year Delahaye mentioned about three trips to visit family, generally his siblings or those of his wife, in addition to receiving several visits each year from them. Although these trips covered short distances, in most cases there was an overnight stay involved. A couple of times they left their daughter with family members for a few weeks, and once in 1772 “the mistress [his wife] and Isidore [his daughter] went to Droisel to our brother Adrien’s home, because he had gone to Paris with his wife,” apparently to guard the empty home. Every few years they attended a wedding outside of the village.19 Michel Vernus has analysed the personal writings of the ploughman Jean-Claude Mercier, who lived in the village of Mamirolle, near Besançon (16 km away). Mercier travelled frequently to both Besançon and the large town of Ornans to buy and sell. He also travelled around to different villages within about 20 km. While the buying and the selling account for the largest share of his travels, Mercier also travelled to visit family and to attend marriages.20 He seems to have covered greater distances than did others found in local records in Burgundy, probably

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because he used a horse as means of transportation. People would hitch rides on carts whenever possible, and wealthier villagers sometimes travelled by horse, but most travelling was done on foot. Witnesses in court were paid for their time, and they received greater compensation when their poor health required that they come on horseback or with a cart. Claude Finot, a twenty-six-year-old cobbler, was entitled to 35 sols for his testimony “because he is lame in one leg which hinders him from walking. He had to take a horse.”21 Similarly, Jean Gilet, a ploughman and vigneron at sixty-six years of age, received 3 livres “because of the cart he came in because of his infirmity.”22 Women travelled almost as often as did men, and for many of the same reasons. About a quarter of the witnesses who specifically testified to having been travelling when they saw or heard something were women. Since men were about three times more likely to testify than were women, this means that women witnesses were almost as likely to mention a trip they had taken as were men. There was nothing remarkable or surprising about seeing women travelling, even alone. In one case, a woman walking from Beaune to Bessey-la-Cour, a distance of about 25 km, was murdered on the road. Two witnesses testified to conversations that had sprung up around her as she passed through. A man pointed her out to another and commented on where she was from. A second man was overheard chatting to her in Bligny-sur-Ouche, noting that “she was passing through very late, to which she answered that ‘as long as I can get as far as Montceau to sleep [about 5 km further down the road] I’ll be satisfied, and as it has been a long time since I took this road, please tell me how to go.’”23 Other than commenting on the lateness of her travels, no one was at all surprised to see a woman travelling alone. Female witnesses speak of travel as though it was an everyday occurrence, even when it led to events that were far from ordinary. Denise Boisot testified that the day after Easter she was travelling to Saint-Jean-de-Losne “along the new road” when she was robbed of the considerable sum of 9 livres in cash and a snuffbox worth 3 livres.24 While women clearly preferred to travel with a companion rather than alone, this was true of men as well. Village taverns (cabarets) were a central institution of popular sociability in early modern Europe.25 Virtually all villages had at least one tavern where people could drink, socialize, engage in contests of skill, gamble, settle disputes, and finalize business transactions. Among the witness depositions already described, there were 160 witnesses who testified to being present in a tavern, often providing some explanation

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for their presence. While about a quarter (forty-three) were simply drinking in their home village, the rest had come from other places. Taverns were supposed to be limited to travellers from more than a league away, and it was illegal to drink in the cabaret in one’s own village. While this rule was not much respected in northern Burgundy, it is likely that judges conducting enquiries into events that took place in taverns found it much easier to track down witnesses from other villages who knew they ran no risk of being fined because of their presence in the cabaret.26 However, travellers from very far away were probably difficult to track down, which means that the depositions are probably biased towards short-distance travellers and under-represent both longer-distance travellers and locals. Most men drinking in taverns had travelled only a short distance, a median of 8 km. Sixty-one per cent were less than 10 km from home by road. But there were a few long-distance travellers who stopped into village pubs in northern Burgundy. The witness who was the furthest from home was Benoit Denosgent, from Mâcon, who had travelled almost 100 km when he found himself in Pagny-le-Château.27 As a river worker (voiturier sur Saône), however, Denosgent can hardly be considered to have had the same relationship to the space around him as had other villagers. All the witnesses who had travelled over 40 km were apparently travelling for work; among this group were a merchant, a butcher, a merchant glazier, and a cloth seller. Long-distance travellers excluded farmers almost entirely, but once the distances drop below 30 km, agricultural occupations start to appear. Over half of the witnesses who were 15–30 km from home were farmers, almost all of them ploughmen. The others at this distance were artisans. Those who had covered less than 10 km form a reasonably representative group of rural men, with ploughmen and vignerons being most numerous. Cottagers were under-represented at all distances, there being only eight among the 117 travellers. On average, those travellers who testified to drinking in a village tavern were in their thirties (the average age was thirty-four; the median was thirty-two). Travellers who frequented these establishments were mostly married men journeying alone, with other married men, or with a servant. Other types of sources make it clear that couples or entire families travelled, but they seem not to have stopped at taverns, perhaps generally choosing to carry their food with them. Travelling cabaret clients were relatively likely to be able to sign, as 59 per cent could do so, considerably higher than the average rate (41 per cent) for all male witnesses over

The Meaning of Distance  75 

the entire century. No doubt, the poorer travellers had less money to spend on alcohol. Taverns served drink, and food was sometimes available. One witness said that he had “seen several times different people both strangers and locals ... drink and eat bread and other things that Nicholas provided on an upright barrel.”28 In another case a witness testified that a stranger came through and was fed, adding that “he had to pay in advance,” a mark of distrust that provoked the dispute that brought the parties to court. Not all taverns sold food, however. Henry Vacherotte testified that whenever he passed through the village of Sainte-Marie-la-Blanche, he stopped to eat and drink in the Tiercin’s cabaret, but he provided the food himself (he mentioned chickens bought at the foire of Verdun-­ sur-Saône and some fish).29 Only a few village taverns seem to have functioned as informal inns, and only one witness to a cabaret dispute was clearly staying overnight. In a murder investigation Benoit Desnogent testified to having been woken up at about ten o’clock by screams, noting that he was asleep “in the room closest to the stable.”30 The espace de vie of ordinary Burgundians can also be addressed by examining the court proceedings in which guardians are nominated for minors after the death of a parent. The clerk recorded the name, profession, and residence of all those attending, generally between four and six people, and all men except for the surviving mother. This could include not only direct family members (uncles, great-uncles, and cousins of the orphans’ parents) but also men described as “a good friend” of the minor. As not all members of the parents’ families attended the assembly, it seems plausible that those present were family members and friends with whom the parents had regular contact and that their places of residence represent the area in which people circulated. In Corgengoux, the village whose migration patterns were analysed in some detail in chapter 2, there were 69 guardianship assemblies recorded over the course of the eighteenth century, at which 338 individuals were present (including the surviving parent when there was one).31 These documents confirm that daily life was never limited to a single village and that relatively few people maintained active connections to people more than about 10 km away. Only three of the 69 family assemblies were composed exclusively of inhabitants of Corgengoux or its hamlets, and almost two-thirds of the assemblies had at least two people from other communities. But they travelled short distances: 127 of the 338 participants lived in one of the six communities that were contiguous to Corgengoux. This leaves 71 individuals from villages

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more than a very short distance away, but most of this group lived relatively close by. Only 43 of the 338 participants came from more than 10 km away (including 19 who lived in Beaune), while only 8 (2 per cent) lived more than 20 km away. Attendance at estate auctions shows similar patterns of circulation and travel as does that at court cases, bar fights, and festivals. Even if some who had travelled to attend the auctions went away empty handed, the residences of the buyers provide a way to evaluate the distance that ordinary people were willing to travel to buy household goods, farm animals, and tools. Less than half of buyers were from the community in which the auction took place, but few people attended from very far away. In one auction the records listed the places where the auction had been advertised (after Mass). The auction took place in Diancey, in the bocage of the Morvan, and was announced in three nearby villages and hamlets (Censerey, Sussey, and Vianges), as well as in the nearest town, Saulieu, about 15 km distant. Those who attended came from eighteen different places, but none had travelled more than about 10 km. The same patterns exist at estate auctions in villages all over the province; the majority of buyers from outside were from villages contiguous to the place in which the auction was held. The pattern holds regardless of the value of the estate, as in the example already cited in Diancey, which was that of a wealthy blacksmith with a substantial farm whose movables sold for 1,209 livres; in another example, movables from the estate of the vigneron Daniel Monot from Corgengoux sold for the modest sum of 287 livres.32 Those who attended from further away were almost always professional buyers, often there for one expensive item. Merchants from Lyon bought loads of hay or hemp. Thus Joseph Legrand, a merchant from Lyon, purchased a heap of hay for 336 livres from the estate of a ploughman in 1760 in Esbarres in the Morvan, and a merchant named Blanchard from Lyon bought hay from a ploughman in 1781 in Charnay-lès-Chalon.33 The distribution of market towns shows similar patterns as do the places of residence of clients at estate auctions. In 1799 within the département of the Côte d’Or there were forty communities that had regular markets. This means that on average each market town served an area of about 220 sq. km, and the average maximum crow’s-flight distance that rural people had to travel to reach that town was 8 km.34 This situation is very close to what historians have found to be the case throughout France at the end of the eighteenth century.35 Ten kilometres was thus

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about the maximum distance that ordinary people travelled for regular economic transactions. One common form of travel that is entirely absent from the witness depositions was travel for dealings with judicial and administrative officials. Seigneurial judges in Burgundy generally held their hearings in the administrative seat of the bailliage, either at the courthouse or in their home.36 This means that almost all of the 12,000 witnesses discussed in this book had travelled on the very day of their deposition. The median distance travelled by witnesses was 10 km to the courts of Chalon-sur-Saône, Nuits-Saint-Georges, and Beaune, but it would have been greater in larger jurisdictions. Witnessing in court thus generally involved a full day’s travel to go and return. Litigants would have to make the same trip many times, given that most court cases required multiple sessions before the judge. Village communities nominated about ten village officials each year, including tax collectors and assessors, guards to patrol the fields, and estimators to evaluate damages to crops. Aldermen (syndics or échevins) spent a significant part of the year on the road, and these trips left traces through reimbursements that were approved by the seigneurial judge or the intendant. In 1728 in the community of Montagny-lès-Seurre the alderman made four trips to Seurre (about 15 km) and six trips to Auxonne (27 km) to pay the village’s taxes (taille and capitation). In general, the payment of taxes was the most common reason for aldermen to travel and required at least five trips to town. Communities were also frequently involved in lawsuits, which usually required a large number of trips. The alderman of Montagny for 1728 travelled frequently for court cases, including spending seven days in Dijon over two trips (42 km) and making eighteen day trips to Seurre (15 km). Aldermen travelled to consult a lawyer, to pick up and deliver papers, to pay the lawyer, or simply to see if a case was progressing. Most aldermen could count on having to make a few such trips for lawsuits during the course of the year. Every two years the alderman also had to accompany the young, single men for the drawing of straws for the provincial militia and then to take another trip to ensure that the unlucky militiaman showed up to start his training. In 1739, for example, the Montagny alderman spent two days accompanying the young men to Verdun (26 km) for the drawing of straws and three days to deliver the young man to Chalon-sur-Saône (46 km). Communities that had substantial forests needed to be in frequent contact with the intendant and the administration of waters and forests to see to their upkeep. The community

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of Cessey-sur-Tille is a good example, as the aldermen made trips to Dijon in most years for this reason. Special circumstances could require multiple trips. In 1746 the community of Montagny received a donation that seems to have been earmarked for the hiring of a new priest. This required trips to Djion and Seurre to invest the money in an annuity (and receive the intendant’s permission to do so), as well as travel to Besançon to speak to the archbishop. In 1724 the alderman of Bousselange travelled to Dole (28 km) to check on the fabrication of a crucifix that had been ordered by the village, and in 1773 the alderman of Cessey-sur-Tille travelled to Auxonne (18 km) to have the village clock repaired. While I have not performed rigorous calculations to demonstrate it, most village aldermen could expect to take a trip per month and to travel to at least three different towns or cities. Given that most settled, wealthy male inhabitants of villages would be aldermen during the course of their lifetime, it seems safe to assume that a significant proportion of the province’s ploughmen had been to Dijon at least once, in addition to their regular trips to the nearest towns and small city. Over the course of the year 1786 the échevin of La Perrière-surSaône spent eleven days in Dijon (40 km each way) during four trips, two days in Dole (13 km), two days in Auxonne (11 km), and two days in Saint-Jean-de-Losne (8 km, in two different trips).37 Conclusion Charles Tilly, on the one hand, has argued that real migration must involve relatively great distances, be relatively definitive, and involve a break with one’s area of origins. He does not see local migration – occurring within 5 to 10 miles and originating and finishing within the same labour market – as true migration, because people did not leave their “familiar world.”38 Pooley and Turnbull, on the other hand, caution against assuming that short-distance moves had little impact on people’s lives. Most of the moves in their sample that resulted from major personal crises only involved short distances. They are no doubt correct to argue that “perceptions of relative distance and the disruptive effects of mobility are almost impossible to determine precisely,”39 but it nevertheless seems probable that, on average, moves involving greater distances took more time to plan and made it more difficult to keep in touch with family and friends. Paul-André Rosental advises historians of internal migration to stop using a simple notion of residence, defined as the commune in which people lived, replacing this instead with an

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analysis of the areas in which people “develop their links, exchange and circulate constantly.”40 Doing so for northern Burgundy shows that many ordinary villagers were willing to follow economic opportunity and move outside of the area with which they were familiar. Internal migration frequently took migrants outside of the area in which they regularly circulated. While few people travelled more than 10 km on a regular basis, over half of migrants had moved further than this. Distances travelled by internal migrants were about 1.5 times greater than the distances involved in exogamic marriages. Litigation, lists of bar patrons, and the names of those attending village fêtes all point to the same conclusion. The lists of those attending family assemblies are particularly significant. Most minors and orphans would have had uncles and other relatives who lived further away, but virtually no one travelled more than 10 km to attend an assembly because beyond that distance they were no longer actively involved in the lives of their relatives. While it is true that migrating 20 km or further to another agricultural community within the same region was less uprooting than moving hundreds of kilometres to a large city, a substantial proportion of those moving from one rural community to another maintained little or no contact with their previous place of residence. While most migrants remained within an area whose legal system, dialect, and agricultural practices were familiar to them, all changes of village of residence caused some uprooting, and about half of the moves required insertion into entirely new social and economic networks.41

4  Temporary and Seasonal Migration

Village communities in northern Burgundy were composed of people with a wide diversity of mobility backgrounds and experiences. There were a few who lived in their place of birth for their entire life, some who moved once at marriage, and some who stayed in the same village only for the duration of an agricultural lease. These people had one thing in common, however: they were all residents of the village in question, in that they belonged to a household that paid taxes each year. But a large number of people moved into and out of the villages of northern Burgundy on a less permanent basis. These types of migrants are difficult to track and impossible to count accurately. They nonetheless crop up in various sorts of records frequently enough for us to catch sight of them. Temporary migrants came from both nearby and far away. They were always very numerous, and, although they were excluded from local political affairs and usage rights, those who returned year after year became acquainted with the locals; a few chose to settle down, generally through marriage to an inhabitant. Perhaps most important, their interactions with the settled villagers meant that, as Alain Croix has argued, no villages were really closed to the “outside world.”1 Seasonal, work-related migration was common in early modern Europe. In France each year thousands of young men left their home to find work for part of the year, often departing from the mountains to practise various trades in the plains. There is a great deal of research on the subject for France, in part because that country possesses a rich source in the form of the inquiry into the phenomenon that was ordered by Napoleon and carried out between 1808 and 1813.2 Recent study has focussed on several specific groups of seasonal migrants,

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including stonemasons from the Creuze, pedlars from the Alps, and cauldron makers from Auvergne. These studies and others go a long way to revealing the nature and importance of long-distance temporary migration between the mountains and the plains of France. Historians, however, have either focused their energy on the functioning of the mountain communities that saw as much as a quarter of their adult male population disappear for the winter, or studied them away from home in places where they were very numerous, generally Paris.3 Seasonal workers show up as witnesses in seigneurial courts surprisingly often, and some clues as to their experiences and role in village communities in Burgundy can therefore be teased out. These can then be augmented by the documents for the Côte-d’Or from the Napoleonic inquiry.4 Long-Distance Seasonal Migration from the Mountains While a few other seasonal migrants appear in the records, by far the largest groups coming into northern Burgundy seasonally or temporarily from far away were masons and pit sawyers (scieurs de long). Most groups of workers who left the mountains were away during the cold winter months and spent the summer at home, working a small plot of land. Masons, however, left in the early spring and returned home late in the fall because their mortar did not work in freezing temperatures.5 Yet, not all masons returned home each year.6 The testimony of migrant masons is spread throughout the entire year, with about a third of the depositions occurring in the months between December and March. The sample is too small (fifty-one masons and stone cutters from the Haute-Marche) to draw strong conclusions about the seasonality of migration, and masons who remained in a region for a longer period were more likely to be called as witnesses. But stone-cutting could continue throughout the winter in the quarries along the escarpment that runs south from Dijon, which may have made for different seasonal patterns than those of the Parisian construction trades.7 The number of masons who came into Burgundian villages each year was substantial. In the Napoleonic inquiry the prefect estimated that 850 arrived in the department in 1810. This is far greater than any other category of long-distance seasonal migrants arriving in the department. In 1764 administrators from the Haute-Marche had estimated that some twelve thousand masons migrated seasonally out of the region, and by the Revolution there may have been as many as twenty thousand

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who left each year.8 If these estimates are accurate, the Côte-d’Or, a department that in 1806 accounted for only 1.2 per cent of the French population, may have received as much as 5 per cent of the masons who migrated seasonally.9 Such calculations are highly uncertain but nevertheless underline the fact that the region’s quarries and construction needs drew masons in substantial numbers. The highest number of masons was to be found in the southern part of the department, in and around the cities of Dijon, Beaune, Nuits, and Seurre. The status of these masons from the mountains could be ambiguous. In some cases they clearly stayed for long periods. On the one hand, Claude Bon Jeannot, who was born in “Leonet paroisse de la Rochette de la Haute Marche,” had been living in the village of Chambolle, “chez Claude Theveneau” for the past six years, although no indication is given that he ever returned to Leonet.10 On the other hand, the testimony of Antoine Pailleret in an assault case is suggestive of a more temporary state of affairs, as he spoke of having “fixed his residence” in a village cabaret.11 Testifying at the age of sixty-three, Jean Givry noted that he was born in Saint-Georges de la Haute-Marche, and “for about 22 years he has been living in the village of Ladoix.”12 The masons themselves may sometimes have had trouble identifying their place of residence, as some listed their temporary abode as their place of residence, while others listed their home in the Haute-Marche. Few of them seem to have been truly itinerant during their stay in the province, because the majority of those who were working in the village in which they testified listed another village as their temporary residence.13 This means that most probably established themselves in one village or town for the entire length of their stay and took jobs in the surrounding area until it was time to return home, rather than simply travelling from job to job. Several of them stayed for the season in the small city of Nuits-Saint-Georges, surrounded as it was by quarries. They may have returned frequently to the same area. Gabriel Boulot, from Compas, a common departure area for masons coming to Burgundy, testified in two different courts. In 1761 he was staying in Nuits-Saint-Georges, and in 1770 he gave his residence as Antilly while he was working in Premeaux. Both Premeaux and Antilly are no more than a few kilometres from Nuits. Travelling masons in Burgundy came from a small number of places in the Haute-Marche. Fully thirty-eight out of the fifty-one testifying came from a village or town that sent at least one other mason. They came from only twenty-one different places, and on average a village

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that sent more than one mason had about six witnesses during the century. The most common departure area was in the present-day department of the Creuse, along a line drawn from Guéret to Aubusson, in an area about 40 km long and at least 600 square km.14 Masons from the Haute-Marche who travelled to Paris for work frequently found themselves surrounded by friends and acquaintances.15 In rural communities the number of mobile masons was much smaller, and the need to interact with locals was correspondingly greater, but even in these cases mobile masons could remain in touch with people they knew from home.16 Most were from villages in the Haute-Marche, although a few came from small towns. According to the Napoleonic inquiry, most itinerant masons hailed from the department of the Creuse, except for those who worked within the city of Dijon, who apparently came from the Cantal. Travelling masons were relatively young. Their average age was thirty-three years old, and only three were under twenty. Other sources show the same age patterns: about three-quarters of the 340 sick and injured masons from the Haute-Marche who were admitted to the Dijon hospital were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three.17 Still, a few apparently kept working and moving until into their early fifties, as in the case of Antoine Leblanc, from Saint-Georges-la-Rouge, who was still moving and working at the age of fifty-four. Usually they worked in teams. For example, Pierre Bailly, Philibert Couturier, and François Petit (who all came from the same village in the Creuse) were working in the village of Arcenant on a piece of property whose ownership was contested in an inheritance dispute; the brothers-in-law of the man who had hired the masons threatened to harm them if they continued the work, and then cut the ropes holding up their staging, causing it to collapse.18 Pit sawyers worked at sawing logs into planks, using long twohanded saws to rip along logs attached to a platform. Unlike that of masons, this profession was almost exclusively reserved for people from away; there were many masons who were born in the province, but very few pit sawyers.19 Only one of thirty pit sawyers who testified was living in his village of birth, one was from a neighbouring village and one came from 30 km away, while the rest all came from much further away. Migrant sawyers were less numerous than migrant masons, as shown in both the depositions and in the Napoleonic inquiry. A few sawyers came from the mountains of the Jura, but most came from Auvergne. As with the masons, many apparently travelled with people

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from their home village; about two-thirds came from a village that supplied at least one other witness.20 The seasonal migration pattern of pit sawyers involved their leaving the high country in the fall and returning in the spring.21 The Napoleonic inquiry has them arriving in the department in October or November and leaving between March and June. As with masons, however, there is some divergence from this seasonal pattern in the depositions: most mobile sawyers (twenty-five out of twenty-nine) witnessed from March to August. The seasonality is not necessarily representative of all pit sawyers, because the sample is small, and nine of the sawyers testified in a single dispute that took place in April. Nonetheless, sawyers sometimes left the mountains for several years at a time in order to save more money.22 Even more than stonework, sawing was work for young men; 70 per cent of the sawyers witnessing were younger than thirtyfive years old, and only three were more than forty (the sixty-sevenyear-old sawyer living in Curley, while from Auvergne, was probably a permanent resident). There were a few other Auvergnats living in or passing through the villages of northern Burgundy, including some related woodworking professions, like clog-makers (about a dozen), and a handful of ditch diggers (pionniers). While sawyers and masons were the most common long-distance seasonal migrants among the witnesses, a few other professions appear, including several itinerant pedlars.23 In 1772 a “Comptois who was selling cheese” set up a stand in Vandenesse-en-Auxois, and a dispute erupted when a local maliciously told him to sell the worst piece of cheese to the priest.24 A few others, simply described as merchants (as opposed to marchands forains or colporteurs), were born in Savoy and Picardy, but it is unclear whether these were ambulant pedlars or stationary merchants. Savoyard merchants generally began their careers as pedlars, but the most successful often remained in one place for a long period, supplying and directing the activities of the seasonal workers who came down from the mountains each fall.25 In 1739 one of the commissioners (commissaires alcades) reported to the Estates of Burgundy “that there is an infinity of people from different pays spread throughout the kingdom who have no fixed domicile and pay no public charges, who carry their merchandise from place to place, which serves as a pretext for them to infiltrate into people’s homes.”26 Merchants were numerous among verylong-distance migrants, doubtless often brought into the community by their buying and selling activities. Most often there is simply no indication given of the types of merchandise they were buying and selling.

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There were also various types of performers passing through the province’s villages who are difficult to spot because of the short duration of their visits. In 1780 the local seigneurial court accused the men of Corgengoux of refusing to attend a village assembly that had been called by the alderman. Their explanation, which persuaded the judge, since he did not assign the fines requested by the prosecutor, was that the alderman had failed to follow the past practice of informing each head of household that a meeting was to be held, and instead he had taken to using a drum to summon them. The problem was that he also used the drum for other purposes; once, when the community had assembled at the sound of the drum, he had told them that he had played it “to amuse his wife and children, and that he had nothing to propose.” Also, they added that “frequently strangers come through the village, conductors of bears, monkeys and other animals, and [the alderman] ... has decided to use the drum he has bought so that children gather around him.”27 In the Napoleonic inquiry the prefect of the department of the Rhône listed as migrants “an indeterminate number that is impossible to evaluate of men, women and children playing the organ and hurdy-gurdy and demonstrating magic lanterns,”28 which probably also applied in northern Burgundy, although most mobile musicians travelled shorter distances to play at marriages and village festivals. One of the most fascinating groups of temporary migrants in eighteenth-century France was teachers. A few Alpine villages specialized in this type of work, and the men would stream down into the plains each winter and take work teaching the children for half of the year, which was paid by the village or the parish. However, no itinerant schoolmasters are recorded as being witnesses in seigneurial courts. Very few teachers were native inhabitants (only one out of thirty-one in the 1796 census sample), but they had resided on average for eleven years (the median is six years), and only 19 per cent had arrived less than two years prior to the census. Seasonal migrants often returned year after year to the same places and knew some of the locals quite well. In 1782, Étienne Saulnier, thirty-three years old and a “travelling merchant moving about the kingdom [marchand forain roulant par le royaume],” born in la Garde in the Dauphiné, was witness to a dispute over wages that were owed by the innkeeper to a servant in the village of Chassagne. He noted specifically that he recognized “the girl Gandillot that he the deposed remembers very well having seen as domestic in this house.” He was accompanied by Louis Favre, twenty-two years old and born in Daudin

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in the Dauphiné. Both noted that the owner of the cabaret did not have the cash on hand to pay, and so “a comrade who was with them loaned this amount to Girardin.”29 The identity of their friend is not given, and he may or may not have been a travelling salesman. They were familiar with the innkeeper, his servant, and friends of another client of the pub; they clearly had more than a passing familiarity with local affairs in Chassagne and had made friends with people living along their route. Sometimes seasonal and temporary migrants had strained relations with locals who practised the same trade. Jeanne Royal, fourteen years old and the daughter of a ploughman who apparently sold tobacco, testified that Joseph Defait, a master carpenter from Beaune, had arrived to stay at her father’s home “as he had done two or three times before.” When three “stranger-carpenters” who were working in the nearby village of Argilly arrived to buy some tobacco, they got into a fight with Defait that left him injured enough that the girl’s father wanted to take him to Beaune to see a surgeon, but the other carpenters threatened to hurt the girl’s father if he did so.30 The Napoleonic inquiry lists several other types of long-distance seasonal migrants, although they only include those who crossed departmental borders and, therefore, are a poor guide to understanding the true extent of labour migration. Other than harvest workers, a total of 1,302 seasonal migrants came into the Côte-d’Or in 1810 (see table 4.1). Almost two-thirds of these were masons, and, with pit sawyers added to their numbers, they account for four-fifths of the migrant workers. Chimney sweep was the only other category with significant numbers, but sweeps went to cities rather than to the countryside, with thirty-five in Beaune, twenty in Auxonne, and eighty in Dijon. Only twenty went to a rural canton, which would explain why no migrant sweeps appeared as witnesses.31 Table 4.1.  Seasonal migrant workers crossing departmental borders into the Côte-d’Or, 1810 Cauldron makers Cobblers Tree pruners Hay cutters Masons Harvest workers Hemp carders

33 18 9 150 850 200 40

Chimney sweeps Pit sawyers Diggers (terrassiers) Basket weavers Grape harvesters Glaziers TOTAL

155 180 6 9 200 2 1,852

Note: These numbers were reported as migrating seasonally into the province in the Napoleonic inquiry (Archives nationales, F20/434, Côte-d’Or; also Statistiques de la Côte-d’Or, ADCO 1F/38/1, pp. 451–3).

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Journeymen in Rural Communities Artisans had other mobility patterns than seasonal migration from the mountains into the plains. A significant number of artisans spent a few years of their youth moving frequently from master to master and from place to place, a period during which they were described as compagnons (journeymen). In recent decades the migration patterns of journeymen within and to cities have been the subject of considerable research, but we still know very little about what they did in the smaller communities that did not have the structures of compagnonnages with the registers of entries, exits, and job placements that urban historians have used so tellingly. During the period between the end of apprenticeship and the beginning of married life, artisans worked as journeymen, hiring themselves to master artisans for periods ranging from a few weeks to a year or more before moving on to another job and master. This period in the life course of artisans lasted only a few years and ended when they acquired a mastership, settled in a suburban area, village, or small town that was free of guild control, or abandoned the trade. In one French sample 61 per cent of journeymen were younger than twenty-five years old, and only a tenth were over thirty-five.32 Some artisans apparently remained in the same city for much of their journeymen years, but a significant number moved from place to place. A few followed the stops on the well-known Tour de France that took them south and east from Paris through Troyes into Burgundy, before moving on to Lyon and Marseilles, and from there working their way north along the Atlantic coast. The glazier Ménétra did two such tours, which included passage through Burgundy, with stops in Dijon, Mâcon, and Auxerre, although he found no work in any of these cities and moved on after a short stay.33 Upon arrival in a city, an artisan would proceed to the tavern associated with his trade, where he would pay a small sum of money to the brotherhood (compagnonnage) in order to have access to employment opportunities in the city.34 Historians have documented the amazing scale of tramping artisans’ mobility. In virtually all trades in all cities, migrants (non-natives) made up about 80 per cent of journeymen artisans, which is much higher than the 50 per cent of masters who were working outside of their place of birth.35 Most journeymen, while mobile, did not generally travel throughout the entire country. Michael Sonenscher estimates that about 30 per cent of journeymen in French cities were truly itinerant

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workers.36 Many of them moved over relatively short distances: among non-native journeymen tailors working in Rouen in 1778, about 35 per cent had been born within the present-day department of the SeineMaritime and the two adjoining departments.37 Journeymen moved an astounding number of times, to the point that any analysis of migration that excludes them necessarily underestimates mobility. This has been shown for German lands, but Josef Ehmer points out that German and French “tramping artisans” were about equally mobile.38 He argues that journeymen may have made up as much as 2 per cent of the total population in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that they may have changed place of residence on average as many as four times per year.39 In Vienna there were ten times more journeymen looking for work than there were jobs available, which explains why most did not find work once they arrived in the city and therefore departed after only a short stay.40 Ehmer calculates that German cities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would have annual in-migration rates of between 0.28 and 0.56 with only the mobility of tramping artisans taken into account. This is “far greater than all other known migration streams” anywhere in the early modern period or the nineteenth century,41 and it reinforces the argument of this chapter that measuring mobility through documents that only include permanent residents means missing a great deal of semi-permanent mobility of many different kinds. Historians have analysed the mobility of journeymen almost exclusively as an urban phenomenon. Alain Belmont notes that few sources contain information about the travels and experiences of rural journeymen, at least before the nineteenth-century “golden age” of the Tour de France. He argues that most journeymen looked locally for stable work, whenever possible in the workshop or village in which they had done their apprenticeship.42 Journeymen were young, single, and mobile. And while those who stayed for longer periods in a community would pay taxes, those who passed through to work for a few weeks or months were not listed on tax rolls. This makes them very hard to track in communities without guilds and compagnonnages; however, it is clear that there were mobile journeymen in French villages. Unfortunately the census of 1796 is of no use here because most journeymen did not acquire resident status during their short stay and so were no more likely to be counted in the census than were other temporary and seasonal residents like threshers, hemp carders, and itinerant masons.

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Journeymen did, however, appear as witnesses in seigneurial courts. Fifty artisans are specifically called journeymen (compagnons), but there are a total of 162 probable cases in the sample.43 Their mobility patterns are strikingly similar to those of urban journeymen and very different from those of master artisans. Fully 69 per cent of these rural journeymen were living outside of their place of birth when they testified, which is considerably higher than the 50 per cent of masters who lived outside of their place of birth, and only slightly lower than the proportion of urban journeymen as estimated by Michael Sonenscher (80 per cent). Furthermore, the average distance separating place of birth and place of “residence” (that is, where they were working when they testified) was 96 km, and the median was 32 km, at least twice as far as the average and median distances for master artisans (see chapter 1). Most of the journeymen were born within the province of Burgundy or neighbouring Franche-Comté, but there are witnesses among the journeymen who came from Languedoc, Angoulème, Anjou, and Switzerland. Journeymen made up a smaller part of the total population in villages than they did in cities, although it is impossible to say the size of the difference. The numbers provided for cities are generally counts of the journeymen who registered upon arrival in the city over a given period rather than census-style counts at a single point in time. The prefect of Seine-et-Marne commented on the migration of journeymen in his report on labour migration: “their continual migrations [revirements continuels] defy all calculations.”44 About 1 per cent of all witnesses in the sample, or close to 2 per cent of the men, were journeymen, but this is nothing like an accurate count of their number. We also do not know the frequency with which rural journeymen changed masters or communities. Alain Belmont found journeymen’s work contracts in notarial archives, and he notes that most journeymen in the countryside hired themselves out for short periods of less than a year, often only for a few months.45 His sample, however, probably overestimates the length of time that journeymen stayed with the same master, as very-short-term work contracts were probably less likely to be formalized by a notary. While accurate numbers are not available, it is nevertheless clear that the inclusion of journeymen would raise the overall annual migration rate by a substantial amount if it were possible to count them. Their migration is either not counted at all or badly undercounted in virtually every type of source used by historians of mobility in early modern villages.

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Short-Distance Temporary Migration Not all temporary migrants crossed departmental borders. A vast number of workers moved in and out of Burgundian villages at various times of the year. Domestic service was about the most mobile occupation of all in terms of non-native proportion and migration rates, but servants rarely stayed for long in the same place.46 Among the witnesses, 27 per cent of servants were living in their village of birth at the moment they appeared before the court to testify. In the age group of twelve to twenty years, servants were almost three times more likely to be living outside their place of birth than were others of the same age (about three-quarters of both male and female non-servant witnesses in this young age group lived in the village where they were born, compared to about a quarter of servants). The annual migration rate for male servants was 0.28, while that for female servants was slightly higher at 0.31, but the real rate would be substantially higher because the calculation does not take into consideration those who moved more than once in a year, a consideration that is particularly acute when dealing with servants. Most servants migrated over short distances. The average distance separating village of birth and village of residence for those servants who had moved was 33 km, and the median was 13 km, virtually the same as among non-natives in general in the same villages. Servants were much more mobile than were non-servants, but they followed the same routes, paths, and roads as did the rest of the population. The migration patterns of domestics of both sexes were broadly similar. Among the witnesses the non-native proportion of women servants was 78 per cent, while that of men domestics was 76 per cent. The distances travelled were also quite close: mobile women servants moved an average of 30 km and a median of 16 km, and mobile men moved an average of 34 km and a median of 13 km (road distances, as below). The short distances that servants travelled demonstrate that micro-regions of only a dozen or so villages were able to supply their own needs in terms of servants. This was apparently the case elsewhere too. In England local hiring fairs set boundaries on servant mobility, and few rural servants moved further than about 10 km.47 In Sweden in the first half of the nineteenth century, 31 per cent of servants were living in their parish of birth, and over 80 per cent of moves by servants were made within a 15 km radius.48 There were also short-term agricultural workers moving in and out of the province’s villages, as was the case everywhere in Europe during

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the same period. They included two types of workers: harvesters coming from nearby for short periods, and agricultural workers coming from further away who stayed longer, among whom threshers were the most numerous. Neither harvesting nor threshing was a full-time occupation but rather involved temporary activities during specific times of the year. All of the threshers identified in the witness depositions were men.49 Most were young: the median age was twenty-six, and only four out of twenty-four were over thirty-five years old. They were generally poor farmers; most gave their profession as cottager or as the unmarried son of one. Although they travelled for work, two-thirds listed their permanent residence as the same place in which they had been born. Leaving home for several weeks over the course of the winter to work as a thresher was a way to avoid emigrating from a village that could not provide enough work for the year. Threshers travelled mid-range distances for work; the median distance was 34 km. They arrived in pairs or small groups and worked in the village for a period of a couple of days to a few weeks. Three young threshers from neighbouring villages in the Morvan, for example, testified in Broin in 1750 (about 80 km away), and teams of three threshers from the Auxois had also passed through several villages. Threshing work took place after the harvest, generally from December to early March, although a few workers started quite soon after the harvest – by early September. There was also among the witnesses one hemp carder (peigneur de chanvre) from the Bugey, a region that specialized in this migrant profession.50 The prefect of the Haute-Marne noted that his department sent about three hundred young men into the Aube and the Côte-d’Or to card hemp and to thresh grain each November. Migrant harvesters made up a much broader cross section of society than did threshers. About a third of those witnesses identified as migrant harvesters were women. Since women were under-represented among witnesses, there were probably slightly more female than male migrant harvesters.51 They were older on average than the threshers, with a median age of thirty years. No mobile harvester among the fifty-four identified was under the age of eighteen. The oldest was sixty, but in general they stopped coming at around fifty. The old and young probably stayed home to glean.52 Vignerons, their wives, and their children account for half of all mobile harvest workers, presumably because the grapes could be left for a week or two in mid-summer. There were, however, few other agricultural professions among harvesters because most poor farmers and their families would be busy bringing in their

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own crops. The remaining migrant harvest workers were mostly artisans, including some who lived in small cities like Beaune and Nuits. With a non-native proportion of 50 per cent (that is, half of them lived permanently in their village of birth), harvest workers were about as mobile as the overall sample of ordinary country dwellers, although they moved substantially shorter distances (the median distance was about 8 km, as opposed to 12–15 km in the general sample). They travelled very short distances from their place of residence to the village where they worked in the harvest; the average distance was 7 km, and the median was 5 km. When it came to bringing in the harvest, the immediate area around most villages could supply enough labour, as long as there was a town or small city nearby. Harvesters could be hired in several different ways. It was rare for an individual to travel alone looking for work, and small groups were common. Sometimes farmers hired a foreman to do the harvest, and he would then put together and pay for a crew. In one lawsuit the judge had to decide whether the harvesters had been hired directly by the farmer or by a contractor; the testimony of a thirty-five-year-old vigneron recorded that “he made no specific agreement with Meline [the farmer], he who speaks having always rented himself to the bosses or entrepreneurs of the harvest ... and in 1786 he made this agreement with the Janniard brothers.”53 Family members often travelled together to harvest. Jeanne Simon, the wife of a vigneron, testified that while she and her father-in-law stayed home to harvest their barley in Concoeur, her husband, brother-in-law, and two sisters-in-law went to Barges (about 15 km away) to work in the harvest.54 It was not unusual for harvest workers to return to the same farms several times; a fifty-fiveyear-old vigneron from Arcenant testified in a land dispute case that thirty-five years previously he had harvested over a five-year period in the village of Détain (7 km).55 Nevertheless, there was a great deal of change in the composition of a farmer’s harvesting crew from year to year; in 1761, Bénigne Marlin, a sixty-one-year-old vigneron, was called to testify about land use in the village of Chaux, and he could only speak to what he saw in 1758, the only year he worked there.56 While many farmers clearly found their own harvesters, there were hiring fairs in some villages and towns. These fairs are rarely mentioned in the records, but they come into view occasionally when there were difficulties. There are no harvesters’ strikes in the sample, but there was one assault case that took place in 1787 in Bligny-sur-Ouche during the “harvester’s fair” (foire des moissonneurs). This village was bursting with

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workers: the victim’s friend took him to two different pubs to get help, where he was refused entry because “of the quantity of harvesters.”57 There is little information in the depositions concerning the organization of the grape harvest, which must have mobilized a substantial number of people both from towns and from nearby arable farming villages. Only six witnesses testified to having been paid workers in the wine harvest. The workers travelled distances that were comparable to those of the harvest workers, and they were a mix of the urban working poor, agricultural day labourers, and the children of ploughmen. In 1831, official documents for the department indicate that grape harvesters came to wine-producing villages from the Morvan and the Auxois, travelling distances of up to 50 km or more, as well as from the flat lands closer to Dijon. They included people of “all sexes and ages” who generally worked in several villages over a period of about a week before making their way home.58 Of all types of agricultural work, the hay harvest seems to have required the least importation of workers from large distances away. The sample is small: ten witnesses testified to having come to the village to hay, but only three among these had travelled more than 8 km. One saddle maker worked about 30 km from his place of residence, and there were two “hayers” from the mountains of Franche-Comté. All were men, but this does not necessarily mean that haying was dominated by men. It could be that haying was done by local women plus a few men from outside. Witness depositions reveal much more about the temporary migrants who passed through the villages studied than about those who left the villages for temporary or seasonal work. It seems clear, however, that northern Burgundy received more long-distance seasonal and temporary migrants than the number who left. As seasonal long-distance migrants often were from mountain regions, it is worth pointing out that the highest elevation in the province is 723 metres and that it is relatively close to the Alps and the Massif Central. The best way to determine the areas with temporary seasonal out-migration would be to analyse the seasonality of conceptions, which would be possible for the eighteenth century by using parish registers and for the nineteenth century by using ten-year tables.59 Doing so for a significant number of villages is beyond the scope of this study, but it seems that there were at least a few villages in the north of the province that were involved in this type of migration. In an inquiry conducted in 1786 by the provincial intendant, the priest of the village of Saint-Rémy, near Montbard, noted in a column reserved for general comments that “nearly half of

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parishioners are forced to leave around this time of the year, to go work around Paris, and they only return in September.”60 Conditions in the Morvan, in the southwestern part of the Côted’Or, would seem perfect for seasonal migration. This was an area of bocage, with few wealthy farmers who were able to provide employment locally. Specialization in cattle raising meant that a large number of small farmers owned a few animals and a bit of land, not enough to keep themselves or their children busy during the year. According to Francine Rolley, however, there was little seasonal migration out of the region until well into the nineteenth century because the forest industry provided enough work to keep the men busy near their home, and the women specialized in wet-nursing.61 It was only in the nineteenth century, as Parisians turned away from wood as a source of heat, that Morvandiaux started migrating seasonally. This lasted only about three generations, and by the 1880s they had begun to move away for good.62 The Morvan was not a region of massive seasonal outmigration throughout the ancien régime,63 but even in the eighteenth century there were Morvandiaux wood carters in other parts of the province for extended periods. The Morvan is situated at the intersection of four departments, and in the Napoleonic inquiry the prefect of the Nièvre specifically mentioned that carters carrying wood to Paris and throughout much of eastern France left the department for six to eight months of the year. The prefect of the Côte-d’Or did not mention the seasonal migration of carters, but they appear occasionally in other sources. In 1759 the Parlement of Dijon decided a case against a certain Genaudet, a wood merchant from Dijon, who had bought the right to harvest the large trees in the communal forest of Avoz. Rather than hire locals to cart the wood into Dijon, “he had about 100 carters with 200 oxen brought from the deepest part of the Morvan.” Four seigneurs in the region, no doubt solicited by villagers, brought suit against Genaudet for the damages done to commons and private fields by these two hundred oxen, and the court acquiesced, adding that, if he preferred, Genaudet could “fire all those strangers and instead use carters from the pays.”64 The Napoleonic inquiry confirms that the Côte-d’Or was a region of arrivals rather than departures. Only 1,220 people left the department in 1810, about two-thirds of the number that arrived. What is more, of those leaving the department, 910 were agricultural workers, and 310 were hemp carders, who brought home an estimated 56,688 livres, far less than the estimated 176,990 livres in wages that left the department.

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Those leaving for work remained relatively close to home, in neighbouring departments, and travelled for only a few weeks. There were few seasonal or temporary out-migrants listed at all other than for shortdistance harvest migration. From Laignes forty women went to Paris for the months of April to June to “remove thistles and work in vines and gardens.” From the canton of Grancey a hundred people went to Haute-Marne, Haute-Saône, and Saône-et-Loire to work as threshers and wood cutters. The canton of Flavigny was about the only place that specialized in hemp carding, sending out a hundred and twenty workers in 1810. Those who left the department were generally not away for long, given that they travelled for the harvest (July to August in most cases), but those who left Grancey were away from September to January, and the hemp carders from Flavigny were absent from October to February. From Montbard (see above, concerning Saint-Rémy) and Semur-en-Auxois there were a total of ninety agricultural workers who left for the whole summer, from May to September. Only two departments mentioned receiving in-migrants from the Côte-d’Or in the Napoleonic inquiry. The department of Seine-et-Marne annually received some forty-seven hundred “people of both sexes and all ages” to work in the rye and wheat harvests, from seven different departments that included the Côte-d’Or. Similarly about four hundred people went each year from the Côte-d’Or and the Meuse into the department of the Aube to bring in the rye harvest. There were no doubt small migration streams out of the department that prefects failed to mention. It seems, for example, that many prefects did not count labour mobility from the nearest departments; the department of Saône-et-Loire mentions no migration from the Côte-d’Or at all, whereas the prefect of the Côte-d’Or lists some seven hundred residents crossing over to the Saône-et-Loire each year.65 But relatively few inhabitants of the Côted’Or engaged in long-distance annual labour migration. Forest Workers: Temporary Migrants or Settled Inhabitants? Recently Sébastien Jahan and Emmanuel Dion have analysed the lives of forest workers involved in the production of charcoal for forges, including lumberjacks, wood splitters, colliers (charbonniers), and carters. They generally lived in small huts in the forest, often without formal title, and moved in and out of different communities frequently. Their marginality makes them difficult to study, but Jahan and Dion managed to do a great deal using parish registers. The authors argue that

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those living and working in the forests had little contact with other villagers. Forest workers married into other forest-worker families about 80 per cent of the time, for example. However, Jahan and Dion see that by the eighteenth century there was a steady sedentarization and integration of the forest workers, who gradually abandoned their log huts for stone houses within the agglomeration of the villages and married their children to the sons and daughters of farmers.66 In northern Burgundy those working in forests were both highly mobile and relatively marginalized from village life. As in Jahan and Dion’s sample, about 81 per cent of the eighty-eight forest workers testifying in court were non-natives.67 An incident from the village of Bonnencontre in 1720 illustrates the tension that could exist between those living in the village proper and those working in nearby forests. During the village festival the inn was full of people drinking, including four forest workers described as both woodcutters and colliers. All the witnesses noted that they were drinking among themselves (“he was drinking at a table with three other colliers his camarades”), though they were seated at the same long table as other villagers. During a dispute over payment the innkeeper angrily shouted that “all colliers are knaves and thieves,” or, as rendered by another witness, “I’m not surprised that you don’t want to pay me – there are as many knaves as there are colliers.”68 Four officers of the tobacco monopoly, no strangers to violence, happened to be eating in an adjoining room, and they intervened to pull the forest workers off the innkeeper and threw them out. One of the employees told a collier, “You and your camarades are all thieves who came here to rob us. We should tie you up and take you with us and tie you to a horse’s tail.” Although there were certainly tensions surrounding forest workers, they may have been less marginalized in Burgundy than they were in northwestern France. There is also indication that the process of sedentarization occurred within the province, as the native proportion increased from 13 per cent to 23 per cent between the first and second half of the century, and by 1796 about a third of forest workers were natives. They travelled relatively greater distances than did other migrants; the median distance from place of birth was 35 km, over twice as far as in the overall sample. Still, about 40 per cent of migrant forest workers had travelled less than 20 km from their place of birth. Arlette Brosselin shows that colliers often came from Auvergne to work in the forests of Burgundy,69 but I found none among the sixty-seven colliers that appeared as witnesses. There were a handful who had migrated

Temporary and Seasonal Migration  97 

from the Nièvre, out of the forests of the Morvan, but the vast majority were born within the province of Burgundy. Moreover, it may be a mistake to think of forest workers as being perpetually mobile, packing up their tools and other belongings frequently to move to another forest. In the 1796 census the average length of stay for non-native forest workers was fourteen years (both for men only and for all adults living in these households), exactly the same as the overall migrant population in the sample. Within the large sample of parish registers transcribed by the Cercle généalogique de Côte-d’Or (CGCO) the occupation of the fathers of brides and grooms are given for ninety-eight collier and sixty-eight lumberjack marriages (that is, where the father of either the bride or the groom was listed as charbonnier or coupeur au bois).70 The sons and daughters of colliers in this sample married into other forest-worker families about 42 per cent of the time, while those of lumberjacks did so in 56 per cent of marriages. Both groups therefore managed to marry their children to settled agricultural families living in the agglomeration of the village about half of the time. Most common were marriages to sons and daughters of cottagers, but close to a quarter of these socially exogamic marriages involved a forest worker and a ploughman’s son or daughter. There are also a few marriages to artisan families, almost always weavers. Occasionally the CGCO website lists wedding witnesses, and these confirm that there was some mingling between forest and village inhabitants. In 1716, for example, Jean Barthelemot, son of a lumberjack who lived in the Demigny forest, married Jeanne Monnot, the daughter of a ploughman. Representing the groom’s side was Barthelemot’s cousin, a vigneron from Demigny. On the bride’s side was her brother and brother-in-law, both vignerons. There were also two lumberjacks listed who worked in a different forest, and two village notables (a ploughman and the schoolmaster).71 Most forest workers had moved at least once, but this does not mean they were nomads. Their physical separation from the village agglomeration does not necessarily mean that they were entirely on the margins of village life. There were also vagrants and migrating beggars moving through Burgundian villages, but they rarely appear in the witness depositions and never in the 1796 census. Historians have, however, devoted a fair amount of energy to their study, mostly through the analysis of the records of the maréchaussée officers and prevotal courts. Village communities everywhere regularly saw beggars come through, stay for a few days, and then move on. Vagrants were not entirely marginalized

98  Strangers and Neighbours

from society. Records survive for only one of the prevotal courts in northern Burgundy, that of Semur-en-Auxois, and a recent analysis concludes that more settled inhabitants were generally tolerant towards vagrants and homeless beggars, especially those who were known or came from the surrounding area. Only 18 per cent of those arrested for vagrancy were born within the bailliage of Semur, and 58 per cent came from outside the province, which means that beggars who remained within their own bailliage were much less at risk of being arrested than those from away.72 Most of those arrested (70 per cent) rejected the label of beggar or vagrant, claiming to be on the road searching for work, a pattern that fits well with studies of other regions.73 A lot of vagrants could remain in place for several months or longer when they found work, and many had regular begging routes that they followed with the tacit acceptance of the communities through which they moved.74 Among those living in a village, an unknown and unknowable proportion of settled inhabitants may have spent at least some time on the road looking for work and begging for bread until their luck changed. Conclusion In 1786 the provincial estates conducted two separate inquiries into alleged wide-scale fraud in the preparation of tax rolls in the communities of Grenant and Blancey. The officers who were sent to investigate interviewed all those listed on the rolls. The answers given by the inhabitants to the officers demonstrate how many residents spent a substantial amount of time absent from the village in order to work. In Grenant the roofer Jean Vallot, for example, was “outside the village due to his occupation [par son état],” while another roofer, Pierre Vallée, was present but explained that “due to his occupation he is often required to work away from home, so he does not mix himself in the affairs of the community.” Jacques Brigand, stone cutter, was also present but noted that he “almost never resided in the community” because of his occupation, while Jacques Brigand, another stone cutter, could not be interrogated because he was staying in Vandenesse (about 12 km away). Pierre Fabry, a cottager in Blancey, knew nothing about the fraud “and never mixes himself with the affairs of the community, being almost always absent to find work.” The day labourer Meuriot was away during the inquiry; “he finds no work in the pays, so he is obliged to go find it elsewhere.” Similarly Claude Bullier, cottager, informed the officers that he was “absent during three-quarters

Temporary and Seasonal Migration  99 

of the year to work elsewhere.”75 This small sample provides a good indication of the kinds of workers who spent much of the year away from their home village, working and searching for work: agricultural day labourers, artisans in the construction trades, and poor cottagers. While the analysis presented here is different from most other research on temporary migrants in that it studies them in the context of a rural region of arrival, in some ways there are few surprises. Historians have long acknowledged the existence of temporary and seasonal migration, often arguing that the phenomenon was born out of economic necessity and that temporary mountain migrants, like sailors,76 remained as attached to their home parish and plot of land as did every other peasant. As Biagio Salvemini argues, however, this view of seasonal migration misses a great deal of the variety in the multiple forms and logics of seasonal and temporary migration in early modern Europe.77 Long-distance seasonal workers were probably integrated better here than they were in Paris, for example, simply because their numbers forced them to mingle with locals to a greater extent. Masons who were based for the season in Nuits-Saint-Georges spent much of their visit in teams of two or three, working in small villages. Pit sawyers were more marginal in terms of their acceptance by locals, partly because of the fear and opprobrium that was attached to forest workers, but relations between forest workers and other villagers were steadily improving throughout the eighteenth century, and migrant sawyers may also have developed close relationships sometimes with locals working in the woods. Pedlars mostly just passed through but, in the course of repeating the same route year after year, got to know some villagers. Jan Lucassen has developed the concept of a system of labour migration in early modern Europe. His definition requires an annual volume of twenty thousand migrant workers coming into a region from outside, and he argues there were a total of seven such systems in early modern Europe: the North Sea (to which he devotes most of his book); eastern England; the Paris Basin; Castille; the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia, Languedoc, and Provence; the Po Valley; and central Italy.78 Northern Burgundy clearly did not meet this criterion as a receiving region and only contributed a modest number of people to the Paris Basin system. But comparing northern Burgundy to areas of breadbasket grain farming and large-scale dairying does not tell the whole story. Northern Burgundian villages were teeming with short-term residents who had arrived from near and far. Among them, young domestic servants were always the most numerous, with non-native servants making

100  Strangers and Neighbours

up approximately 7 per cent of the rural population. They travelled short distances but moved often. The second most important group was tramping artisans. A very large number must have passed through most villages, of whom a small proportion found work with a local master, staying for a few weeks or months before leaving for another place. Several times throughout the agricultural year, an army of strangers arrived in the village for seasonal work, staying for a few days to a few weeks. Furthermore, a substantial number of villagers would leave to participate in the hay, wine, and grain harvests in surrounding villages. Most harvesters came from nearby, but threshing drew people from further away – young men who would spend the winter moving from place to place before heading back home with their earnings. While it is impossible to provide accurate or even approximate numbers, most villagers other than wealthy ploughmen likely participated in seasonal and temporary labour migration at some point in their lives.

5  Migrants’ Reasons for Moving

In addition to having access to data collected by government bureaucracies at all levels, social scientists working on contemporary migration have the luxury of being able to ask their subjects about their motivations and experiences.1 Historians of early modern Europe have to make do with considerably less because few migrants to villages left behind records that described their reasons for moving. Historians have nevertheless addressed the question of what drove people to migrate, generally emphasizing economic motivations. This chapter and the next address the motivations and experiences of internal migrants. There is some presentation of sources in which ordinary people actually explained themselves, but most of the evidence is indirect and involves seeking to understand the types of people who moved over different distances and the kinds of communities that tended to attract migrants. Most moves were probably motivated by economic considerations, although it is not possible to establish the exact proportions. There is a relatively clear division between two types of migrants: those wealthy villagers who tended to move over fairly substantial distances, and the poor who moved more often but over shorter distances. The migrant poor could nevertheless seek betterment through migration as much as the wealthy could, and they apparently actively sought places with favourable economic conditions (lower taxes, policies favouring access to commons, fewer seigneurial dues, and the availability of work) with as much intelligence and acuity as did the wealthy. Perhaps most important, rural geographic mobility was not simple random movement.2 Those who decided to take to the road put a great deal of thought into their choice of destination.

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Mobility, Literacy, and Wealth Analysing mobility by occupational category demonstrates that the wealthy were generally less mobile than were the poor, as we have seen. However, occupational categories were often vague and ambiguous, they fluctuated over the life course, and they varied over space and time.3 They are also of little use in analysing the mobility of women and young people. Fortunately there are other methods for approaching the problem: comparing the name-signing rates of natives and non-natives and using tax records to track those on the move. These documents confirm that internal migrants were generally poorer than people who stayed put, but they show also that the difference was small. On average, migrants paid slightly less in taxes than did native inhabitants, as is demonstrated by the document matching of witness depositions and tax records for all communities within the bailliage of Nuits-Saint-Georges for the years 1759–62.4 The resulting sample excludes women and represents the biases of witnessing, compounded by those of tax records, but is nevertheless useful. Those living in their place of birth were wealthier than those who had moved, but the difference was relatively small. Non-native inhabitants paid an average of 19.3 livres in taille (the median was 16.6 livres), while those living in their village of birth paid 21.9 livres (the median was 18.9 livres), about 10–15 per cent more.5 It is important to emphasize here that this only accounts for the mobility of those paying taxes and therefore excludes movement by domestic servants (mostly children of poorer parents) and under-represents the movement of the very poor. The ability to sign one’s name can serve as a useful proxy for wealth level. In this small sample of 535 witnesses matched to tax records, name signers paid about 15 per cent more taxes than did non-signers. For both ploughmen and vignerons the relationship is particularly strong because, for these two groups, being able to sign meant paying 20 per cent more taxes. The only group for whom literacy did not relate to wealth was day labourers. While farmers might gain financially from the ability to do some simple book-keeping, day labourers would find it harder to use their literacy to increase their wealth. Men who could sign were wealthier than those who could not, whether because literacy led to greater financial opportunity, because those who were more entrepreneurial worked harder at school, or because wealthier parents invested further in their children’s education. The situation for women is more complicated. Tax records do not

Migrants’ Reasons for Moving  103 

allow matching to witness depositions for other than a few women, so no empirical verification of the relationship between signing and wealth is possible. Rural parents placed greater emphasis on the education of their boys than they did on that of their girls, and overall namesigning rates for female witnesses were abysmally low, at about 12 per cent in the entire witness sample. It may be that the number of women signing their names in rural Burgundy was so small that, other than for the daughters of liberal professionals and the wives of some artisans, it primarily reflects religious piety or something as idiosyncratic as an individual love of learning rather than wealth and status. There are some clues within the witness depositions concerning the women who acquired basic literacy skills and their reasons for doing so. Women whose husband practised an agricultural profession were less literate than the overall average, as was also the case for their husbands. About 8 per cent of wives and widows of ploughmen could sign, but only 2 per cent of wives and widows of cottagers could. Unmarried women were much more literate than those who were married: a third of women witnesses who identified either as “fille majeure” or by an occupation (such as spinster or washing woman) could sign. However, unmarried servant girls, in a life-course occupation for the daughters of poorer villagers and who eventually married and quit their jobs, were massively illiterate, with about 4 per cent being able to sign. There was a relationship between wealth and literacy for women, although it may have been weaker than it was for men. In any case, the low namesigning proportion for women means that the results on the relation between mobility and literacy are likely to be less robust for women than they are for men. The overall sample of witnesses conforms to what other studies of literacy in the ancien régime have found.6 The general name-signing proportion among all witnesses was 34 per cent, but that reflects data on many more men than women. Adjusted overall literacy would be about 27 per cent because 12 per cent of women and 41 per cent of men could sign. But the eighteenth century was a period of rising literacy, and it makes little sense to give an average proportion for the entire century. There was significant progress made in the villages of northern Burgundy, and the percentage of male witnesses signing rose from 34 to 48 per cent between the first half and the second half of the century. By the 1780s a slim majority of male witnesses could sign, as the proportion had risen to 51 per cent. For women the progress was even more rapid, in part because the starting point was so low. Only 9 per cent of women

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testifying before 1750 could sign, a rate that had almost doubled by the second half of the eighteenth century to 16 per cent. By the 1780s, 19 per cent of women witnesses could sign, about three times higher than in the first decade of the century. As Pierre Lévêque has argued, northern Burgundy was a region that experienced its literacy revolution in the course of the eighteenth century (by contrast, the south of the province, now the department of the Saône-et-Loire, had stagnating literacy rates throughout the eighteenth century and started to take off only during the French Revolution).7 Signatures confirm that those residing in their parish of birth were on average wealthier than those who had moved away. Among witnesses, the name-signing proportion of natives was 37 per cent, while that of non-natives was substantially lower, at 31 per cent. However, this over-represents men and fails to take into account the very different levels of name signing between the sexes. Literacy and sedentariness did not overlap for women, among whom signing rates were indistinguishable between the natives and non-natives (at about 12 per cent for both groups).8 The relationship is strong for men; the proportion signing among those who had moved was 37 per cent, while the figure among those who lived in their village of birth was 44 per cent. For men the relationship between signing and mobility was constant throughout the eighteenth century; both before and after 1750, 6 to 7 per cent more native than non-native inhabitants could sign. The relationship between wealth and mobility was not the same for all villagers. It was particularly strong for ploughmen and vignerons, but very weak for cottagers. Mobile ploughmen had a signing proportion of only 30 per cent, while 44 per cent of those living in their village of birth could sign. For vignerons the comparable proportions were 25 and 38 per cent. Among poorer agricultural day labourers and small tenant farmers, however, 18 per cent of the mobile signed, whereas only slightly more, 20 per cent, of the sedentary did so.9 Day labourers, who usually rented their home and any small bits of land they might have, could easily move from one village to another. Given that they picked up work in several communities, most could move a short distance without making it harder for them to find work and thereby negatively affecting their economic opportunities. With regard to cottagers, the highest literacy rates are to be found among those moving less than 15 km, which is the case for no other profession. Day labourers and poor farmers therefore paid little economic penalty for moving as long as they stayed within the region they knew. Among ploughmen and

Migrants’ Reasons for Moving  105 

vignerons, those who were poorer and less literate were more mobile, because those who were in a position to move probably owned less land than those who found it advantageous to stay put. Interestingly, the mobile ploughmen who had the highest name-signing proportion were those who moved very large distances (over 50 km), whereas the vignerons who moved comparable distances were highly illiterate. Most ploughmen lived where they were born, or moved short distances, but there was a small group of ploughmen and fermiers who rented their land and could often move large distances, seeking favourable leasing conditions. The wealthiest vignerons were those with intimate knowledge of their terroir, and the further that vignerons went from home, the poorer and less literate they were, on average. The effects of wealth and occupation on mobility varied according to distance. Table 5.1 presents name-signing proportions by distance from place of birth, using Rosental’s thresholds.10 For both men and women, literacy and wealth levels increased with the distance travelled: very-long-distance migrants were the most literate, followed by longdistance migrants, with short-distance migrants far behind. There is one important difference between men and women: no group of mobile men was as literate as men living in their parish of birth, and, among women, both long- and very-long-distance migrants were more literate than those who were native born. Women paid a smaller economic penalty for moving than did men and indeed saw substantial economic rewards for moving outside of the area with which they were familiar. The increasing wealth of those who were mobile over greater distances is not the whole story, as we see when applying finer distance gradations to name-signing proportions (see table 5.2). For both men and women there was a ring situated between 15 and 30 km that provided wealthier and more literate migrants. The situation for women is especially striking, as those moving 15–30 km were more literate than the immobile, as well as more literate than those moving less than 15 km or more than 30 km. This brings nuance to the notion that migrants were less literate and poorer than the immobile. Short-distance migrants Table 5.1.  Literacy by distance travelled, witnesses aged 20 years and over (% signing)

Men Women

Immobile

0–25 km

25–100 km

100+ km

44% 12%

34% 11%

41% 16%

42% 18%

106  Strangers and Neighbours Table 5.2.  Literacy by distance travelled, finer distance gradations (% of witnesses signing)

Men Women

Immobile

0–15 km

15–30 km

30–50 km

50+ km

44% 12%

33% 9%

42% 20%

39% 14%

43% 17%

were appreciably poorer than the sedentary, as this group was primarily made up of poor day labourers and cottagers who moved relatively frequently from one village to the next within a small area. By contrast, few poor farmers moved beyond this virtual frontier, and relatively wealthy villagers did so often.11 The kinds of economic opportunity that drew poorer migrants, such as employment and small parcels of land for lease, could apparently be filled by people from the immediate area. Large leases, demands for the services of surgeons or notaries, and opportunities for master artisans created an attraction that drew migrants from further away, in part simply because the basin of potential migrants was smaller. Beyond a distance of about 30 km, however, there may have been migrants who simply took to the road without having a destination or concrete opportunity in mind and who stopped moving once they found work. Those who owned land were less mobile than those who did not. The effects of landowning cannot be analysed through either the 1796 census or the witness depositions, but tax records generally distinguish between tenant and landowning peasants. The extant taille rolls for all communities in the bailliage of Nuits for 1759 to 1762 include 14,712 entries. In some villages they made a note of new inhabitants and of inhabitants who had left, either in the margin or by placing them in separate categories at the end. Unfortunately there are only 137 unequivocal cases.12 This may seem to be a very small sample, but it probably accounts for close to a fifth of all the taxpayers who changed residence in these years, and maybe more because an annual migration rate of 0.05 would mean that 735 taxpayers moved in the region during the period in question. Landowning was a powerful inhibitor to the mobility of ploughmen but played little role in the mobility of vignerons. There were thirteen ploughmen among the 137 households identified as movers, of whom eleven are clearly identified as tenant farmers. The other two are simply identified as ploughmen, which means that they were probably also tenants. In addition, there were five wealthy tenant farmers (fermiers) who moved.13 Ploughmen were far from being

Migrants’ Reasons for Moving  107 

sedentary, but it is clear that only tenant farmers moved once they had been established within the village. For vignerons the situation was different. There were thirty-one vignerons pour autrui (this designation described both tenants and those hired to work the vines) who moved, and six landowning vignerons. As there were about eight times more tenant-worker than landowner vignerons within the bailliage of Nuits, those owning land may even have been slightly more mobile than the others. Vignerons could make a living from much less land and fewer plots than could ploughmen. For a landowning ploughman to sell dozens of small parcels in the fields around the village and arrange for purchases in another village was an undertaking so major that only those in dire financial circumstances would do so, whereas a vigneron could much more easily sell a few ouvrées of vines in one village and buy a few in another village nearby.14 A study of patronyms in Savoyard villages from the eighteenth to the twentieth century noted that while landowning slightly reduced the chance that a patronym would disappear over time, it did not guarantee sedentariness.15 The Link between Geographic and Social Mobility While migrants were on average slightly poorer than those who stayed put, some were actively seeking better economic circumstances. Within the sample of taxpayers in the bailliage of Nuits it is possible to follow ninety-five migrants from one village to the next and compare their stated occupations and tax assessments before and after moving.16 About 44 per cent of these migrants (fifty-three out of ninety-five) changed occupation at the same time as they changed villages. There was about an equal number of people who had clearly moved up socially as of those who had moved down. Most of these eighteen moves involved transition between cottager and ploughman or between day labourer and cottager. There was also movement between arable agriculture and vines, with eleven cottagers moving to become vignerons and seven changing in the other direction. Finally, there were five people who abandoned farming to take up another occupation, including two who became artisans (a wheelwright and a smith), a court sergeant, and a cabaretier. Overall, nearly half of those who migrated experienced an occupational change at the time of their move. On average, migrants paid less taxes after they had moved than they had paid before; the average taille assessment declined from 16.1 to 14.1 livres over the

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move, or from 83 per cent of their village average before moving to 75 per cent thereafter. Interestingly, the fifty-three who kept the same occupation saw a much greater drop in their assessments than did those who switched jobs; those who kept their job description declined from 87 per cent of average assessments to 71 per cent, while those who changed occupation when they moved saw only a very small change, from 80 to 78 per cent of village averages. Most moves were likely taken by people who were facing economic difficulties, but by actively seeking out economic opportunities in other sectors of the economy they could largely mitigate the problems. James Collins has found that in seventeenth-century Normandy most of those who registered their move through a translation de domicile paid more taxes and more rent in their new place of residence.17 Translations de domicile over-represent moves made by wealthy tenant farmers, however, who were more likely than most villagers to be able to save and earn additional money with each successive lease. The relationship between changes in revenue and migration varied according to occupation (see table 5.3). Moves by artisans and vignerons apparently were frequently motivated by poverty, as most migrants in these categories paid less tax in their new place of arrival. However, with regard to arable farmers, the fact that half of the moves were accompanied by a change in occupation complicates matters, making it necessary to distinguish between in- and out-migration. Ploughmen who decided to leave their village saw a sharp decrease in their tax assessment, which suggests that their moves were generally motivated by poverty. Among those listed as ploughmen on arrival, however, there was almost no decline in assessment, because the list includes cottagers who became ploughmen at the moment of their move; some of them had presumably inherited land or saved enough money in their previous village to be able to rent a small collection of fields and buy a plough team. This same pattern explains the relatively significant rise in the assessment of cottagers when they out-migrated (some had inherited or were using their savings to become a ploughman). The pattern for day labourers is perhaps the most interesting of all, as they were taxed more in their new place of residence when they had outmigrated. This reflects the relative frequency of upward mobility into the class of cottagers that day workers could experience at the time of a move, again making use of their savings to rent a small amount of land or inheriting a few plots back in their village of birth. Nevertheless, those who were classified as day labourers in their place of arrival were

Migrants’ Reasons for Moving  109  Table 5.3.  Change in tax assessment after moving, by occupation

Artisan Day labourer Ploughman Cottager Vigneron

Out-migrants

In-migrants

−0.27 0.10 −0.28 0.13 −0.21

−0.23 −0.12 −0.03 0.01 −0.17

Note: These figures are calculated by dividing the taille assessment of each migrant before and after their move by the average amount paid in his village. The resulting proportion is then averaged for each occupational category, and the percentage change is calculated. Out-migrant artisans include all those migrants who were artisans before moving (including those who continued working as artisans and those who changed to another occupation), while in-migrant artisans include those who were listed as artisans in their village of arrival. In both cases a negative sign means that people paid less after the move than they did before.

generally becoming more impoverished. Some of them had not made it as cottagers and had moved in search of wage labour. Historians of migration often divide their subjects into subsistence and betterment migrants, but the situation was further nuanced, as the poor moved in search of betterment while wealthy farmers were sometimes forced to move by their economic situation. Jan and Leo Lucassen have warned against drawing too strict a distinction.18 They argue that there is no reason to assume that the poor necessarily set their sights on simple survival while the better-off aimed instead for upward social mobility. Similarly Laurence Fontaine has argued that seasonal migration from the mountains into the plains is to be understood not primarily as a response to poverty caused by excess population but rather as the consequence of a conscious choice.19 In northern Burgundy geographic mobility was frequently accompanied by a change in social status or occupation. Close to half of these tax-paying villagers changed their occupation in the year they moved, including moves both from agriculture to artisanal work and from farming to grape and wine production. Two elements stand out most strongly. Migration often corresponded to downward economic pressures, but there was migration-related, upward social mobility at all levels of society. Day labourers and cottagers were more likely than ploughmen to be paying additional money in their new residence and to move upward to a better occupation. Artisans and vignerons seem to have the worst situation of all occupational groups. The process of establishing a clientele in a new village could explain the

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situation for artisans, who may well have migrated for betterment but taken longer to reach their goals than did farmers. Vignerons may have paid a price for their specialization; it is easy to imagine that employers preferred to hire vine workers whom they knew. The data here only takes into account people’s economic circumstances in the year preceding and following a move and does not answer the question of whether those who migrated became better off than they would have been if they had stayed put. Perhaps migrants sacrificed in the short term in order to have greater gains in the long term. An analysis of nineteenth-century demographic data demonstrates that short-distance migrants were wealthier at the end of their lives than their parents.20 Migrants were, on average, poorer than those who remained in their parish of birth in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy. This is borne out by a wide variety of sources, including occupations in the 1796 census and witness depositions, as well as tax records matched to depositions and the ability to sign. Men living in their parish of birth paid about 10–15 per cent more tax than did those who had moved, and even within the same occupational group those staying paid slightly more taxes than those moving. Literacy rates were considerably higher for both male and female stayers than it was for movers, in some cases by a factor of as much as 1.5. This does not mean that wealthy villagers all stayed put, and poor villagers all moved. There were different types of migrants depending on the distance travelled. Poor migrants were typically most numerous over short distances, while literacy rates indicate that those moving over greater distances were not appreciably poorer than those who remained at home. Although there was no doubt a stable core of wealthy, more sedentary inhabitants in most villages, it is simply not accurate to portray northern Burgundy’s rural communities as composed of two distinct groups: one that was wealthy, landowning, and prosperous and stayed in the village of birth, and another that was poor, landless, and footloose. In the eighteenth century the mobile made up a significant proportion of every social group within the village, and mobility was too much a part of daily life for it to be exclusive to a single social class.21 Migrants’ Voices Explanations of Those Leaving Dijon The socio-economic profiles of movers and stayers provide clues to the reasons that people took to the road in eighteenth-century northern

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Burgundy, but in ways that remain indirect and inferential. No documents allow unmediated access to the thoughts and feelings of historical subjects, but it is possible, with a little creativity, to hear a few ordinary people explain their reasons for moving.22 This section examines two types of sources in which ordinary people spoke about their migrations. The first is a kind of exit interview conducted by the Dijon municipal government for several decades early in the eighteenth century, and the second is depositions of witnesses in court cases involving village communities as litigants. While the types of mobility described in the two sources are very different – older migrants are over-represented in one, younger migrants in the other, for example – there are several common elements, such as the non-permanence of most migration and the significant changes to everyday life brought about by many moves. I quote at some length from these sources because they reflect what ordinary people actually said about why they moved. These people testified in specific contexts that should not be forgotten. Although their statements may not always reflect the real reason for the move, they thought that their statements would be credible to the official listening to and recording their words. Sources used by historians to study internal migration generally catch migrants as they arrived in their new place of residence because communities were much more concerned with learning the past of new residents than they were in keeping track of those who left. The city of Dijon, however, required that those leaving report their departure.23 The resulting registers only cover the first three decades of the eighteenth century, and they represent a minute proportion of those leaving the city; there were only 238 departures registered over three decades in this city that had about 22,000 inhabitants in 1786.24 Only those already paying taxes in the city would have any incentive to register their move, which eliminates thousands of poor migrants, including female domestic servants who arrived from the countryside to work for a few years before returning to their native village or nearby. The sample of out-migrants who renounced their habitation was biased towards the wealthy. Most of those registering their departure from Dijon went to the countryside rather than to another city. Among the 238 people who left Dijon in the decades covered by the renonciations, only twenty-six listed a city outside of the province as their destination. Four went to Besançon (a banker, a haberdasher, a cooper, and a widow), four to Lyon (two lawyers, a merchant, and a spinster), one to Aix-en-Provence, and one

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to Caen. Paris drew fifteen migrants from Dijon, mostly master artisans, lawyers, and bourgeois or rentiers. There were also forty people who left Dijon for smaller cities within the province, mostly the administrative seat of a bailliage. Nuits, the nearest such town to Dijon, drew the most with six, and Beaune attracted five. At least one or two went to each of the bailliage seats of the province, as well as comparable cities just outside the provincial frontiers (Dole, Gray, Bourg-en-Bresse). These people were almost all artisans and their widows. About 70 per cent of the out-migrants from Dijon moved to a village or small town.25 The sample badly under-represents the mobility of the poor and the young, however, so the real number of urban-to-rural moves among Dijonnais out-migrants was probably higher. Most of those going to villages were artisans, merchants, a few liberal professionals, and their wives and widows. A few agricultural occupations appear within this group, with about a half-dozen each of ploughmen and vignerons. The distances travelled by these urban-to-rural migrants were often quite small: the average distance in this category was 35 km, and the median was 24 km, a median that is about twice as large as the distances involved in most rural-to-rural migrations among the witnesses. A significant number moved to villages just outside Dijon, as 16 per cent of those moving to a village went less than 10 km. These villages include Talant, Ahuy, Plombières, Quetigny, and other communities that are suburbs of Dijon today. Still, those leaving often specifically referred to these places as being in the countryside. Honoré Grégoire, a master tailor, noted that “he is retired and lives in the country with his son in Ahuy,” whereas the widow Bénigne Sage moved to her son’s home in Ouges, “having retired to the country.” The witness depositions confirm that urban-to-rural migration was not rare. There were 373 witnesses who were born in a city and were living in a village when they testified. Since most of the seigneurial courts were situated within the bailliages of Nuits and Beaune, a large number of the urban-to-rural migrants were from these two cities (84 from Beaune and 107 from Nuits). Most of the other bailliage administrative seats were represented with a few migrants, and there were a handful from nearby larger cities like Lyon, Besançon, Dole, Gray, and even Troyes. A further six Parisian-born were living in these villages and were called as witnesses, including three wives or widows of surgeons, who probably met their husbands during their medical training in the capital. As was the case for those migrating out of Dijon, artisans and liberal professionals were over-represented among urban-to-rural

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migrants, and agricultural occupations accounted for less than 20 per cent of this group. Slightly over half could sign their names (51 per cent), which is considerably higher than the overall rate for migrants of 31 per cent, but this high rate primarily reflects the under-representation of agricultural occupations. The explanations provided by emigrants from Dijon provide information of a sort that historians of migration before the twentieth century have only rarely had, although only forty-six out-migrants provided explanations. The most common reason for leaving the city, by far, was retirement accompanied by a move to the countryside to live with adult children or another family member (see table 5.4). Edme Barbemoiret moved to Francheville because with the loss of his wife he no longer had the “means of making a household,” and another man noted that at eighty years old he “can no longer earn his living.” Most of these people were older and were moving in with their children, but others had different kinds of family links to people in the countryside. Jean Gally, a tile layer, explained that “because of an accident he became blind and can no longer practise his trade and earn his living and in the past six months he has consumed the small amount of goods he had, which requires him to retire to the home of his parents, who by charity will take him in.”26 A few were moving in with a sibling, like the bourgeois Toussaint Thomas who was moving “to transfer his domicile to that of his brother in Bessey.” Other older people, often recently widowed, were leaving Dijon to take up domestic service. This was the case for Jacques Garnier, who noted that his wife had recently died and that he had found work as a servant in the village of Magny. A few others were moving into convents or monasteries, like the spinster Marie Forestier, and Thomas Chanchot, a widowed and retired cooper, “old and weak,” had apparently found someone to take him as a boarder in the village of Gevrey. Along with old age, family responsibilities counted for a significant number of moves. Three people had moved to Dijon for health reasons or those of their family and were leaving after improving. Nicolas Goussard had moved to Dijon from swampy Arc-sur-Tille “only to have his daughter healed of a chest sickness that was oppressing her,” and now that she was healed, he “returned to Arc-sur-Tille.” Another migrant (Bunet) had been in Dijon for the previous eight months “only because of two sicknesses ... to be able to be treated more easily by doctors and surgeons.” Another (Guienot) reported that “his health does not allow him to live in this city.”27

114  Strangers and Neighbours Table 5.4.  Reasons for leaving Dijon, 1700–39 Old age, moving in with their children in the countryside For business Financial difficulties Unreasonable taxation in Dijon Returning to place of birth Entering domestic service or a religious house Other

16 5 5 4 6 6 4

Economic factors motivated many of the departures from Dijon. The moves related to old age sometimes mentioned poverty as an explanation, as was the case for the widow of a tanner who blamed her poverty on the “establishing of her children.” In addition to these moves, five out-migrants simply reported that their “affairs” took them out of the city, while an equal number had apparently experienced economic problems severe enough that they could no longer afford to stay in the city. Nicolas Goussard “is forced to go make his residence in the village of Arc-sur-Tille for reasons of business,” and Marie Saget, an unmarried seamstress, “can no longer subsist in Dijon by means of her profession.” Another unmarried woman, Jacquette Gautier, apparently suffered some economic reversal and moved to the Ursuline convent in Montbard “because of the misery of the times and because of the loss of goods that she has suffered.”28 Taxes are invoked four times as an explanation for the departure from the city. One out-migrant was bitter and angry at being forced out by high taxes. Antoine Finet, who left Dijon in 1717 for the village of Collonges, took advantage of the presence of municipal officials to “remonstrate with you, sirs, that you have overloaded him with taille and soldiers. It was impossible for him to bear this load, which is why he is renouncing his habitation and before this hour is over he will have left the city.” Nicolas Massenot explained that “having complained several time to the magistrates of the city that he could not bear the imposition of tailles and lodging of soldiers that he was given as huissier even though he is but a poor sergeant ... he now finds himself forced to abandon all of his goods and his creditors, and to leave the city. In addition, while he was vexed in all these ways, there are several people who should lodge soldiers and don’t, which causes many people to complain.” Most who left Dijon because of taxes retired to the countryside, perhaps in actuality establishing fictive residence and keeping a place

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in Dijon. One went to another city, but as a pastry chef Nicolas Clere would have been unable to practise his trade in most villages. He left Dijon for Beaune, “being unable to bear the burdens imposed on him in the city of Dijon, for tailles, lodging of soldiers, poll tax, and rent.”29 Many, and perhaps most, of those leaving Dijon for the countryside were returning to a place in which they had formerly lived. This was probably the case for some of those seniors moving in with their children, but it is explicitly stated in at least 20 per cent of the moves that were explained. One young widow was moving in with her father in the country “to give him the services she owes him during his obsolescence.” When his father, a notary, died, the lawyer Pierre Darcy felt “obliged to make his residence in the bourg of Rouvray.” A few outmigrants simply reported that they were returning to their place of birth, and some explained that they were moving back to where they had lived previously, without mentioning whether they were born there. One ploughman apparently regretted having left his village to come to Dijon; a certain Delgrone explained that “he had returned to his residence from whence he was pulled by solicitations and suggestions, and he intends to reside there as he has in the past.”30 This sample of people leaving Dijon to move to the countryside is small and cannot claim to be representative of all migrants. It does demonstrate, however, that there was a counter-stream of migrants leaving the city alongside the larger stream of migrants making their way there from the countryside. Many of those departing from Dijon or from the small cities of the province were not making their way to another city but rather moving to villages and small towns, often to the place they had left behind to come to the city. Like migrants in most places and times, those moving to Dijon often left again. More important, these records emphasize that migration to the city did not necessarily entail a permanent transformation from a country bumpkin to an urban sophisticate.31 Much more research is necessary on the question of migratory counter-streams and especially on urban-to-rural migration.32 Witness Depositions Rural communities did not keep registers of residency renunciations, but the witness depositions in seigneurial courts contain useful information. The vast majority of those testifying offered no explanation for the reason that they resided outside of their village of birth, and no more migration details than places of birth and residence. In some

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land disputes, however, witnesses’ residential histories came into play. Inquiries into land usage were common in seigneurial courts, but the witnesses tended to be natives or at least long-term residents of the village in question, since they were the inhabitants most likely able to testify to the way in which the land had been used over a long period. Land disputes that pitted one community against another, the community against an inhabitant, or the lord against the community were different, however, because witnesses were forbidden from testifying in cases involving their own interests. This means that plaintiffs and defendants sought ex-residents to testify. Some had been born in the village and had emigrated, while others had moved in and then passed on to another place. Their testimony provides precious information about people’s reasons for moving, the issue of persistence, and the connections that people maintained to the communities they left behind. This sample is relatively small, a hundred and twenty witnesses testifying in twenty court cases. It is not a random sample of migrants; proving the existence of immemorial usage rights meant choosing witnesses who had lived in the village more than twenty-nine years ago, so there was a strong tendency to seek witnesses who had lived in the village during their youth.33 Perhaps most important, plaintiffs and defendants could only summon those they could still track down thirty or more years later, which means that there are no long-distance migrants in the sample. In May 1777 the priest of Saussey sued the inhabitants of the hamlet of Écutigny to collect the right of passion, also called gerberie, an annual due of five sheaves of wheat and four sheaves of oats from each ploughman, half as much from those with half a plough team, and 5 sols each from cottagers and widows.34 Since the inhabitants of Écutigny were defendants in the case, no locals could be called to testify. The priest summoned eleven current inhabitants of Saussey and twenty-four exinhabitants of Écutigny. Their testimonies include explanations of what brought them to the village, how long they stayed, why they left, and where they went. When he testified, Jean Ropiteau was a ploughman in Semarey (25 km from Écutigny). He explained that he had lived in Écutigny for eight years while he was miller of the Vernois flour mill and had left the village twelve years prior to his testimony. Since he was fifty-two years old when he testified, this means he arrived in Écutigny at the age of thirty-two. He was born nearby, in Foissy, about 8 km from Écutigny. While mobile, Marie Bareau, sixty-seven years old, the widow of a ploughman, seemingly remained within the region, having arrived in Écutigny at the age of thirty-one, where she stayed for five

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years. Jean Blondeau, a retired ploughman at seventy-five years old, testified that he had occupied a métairie (a large farm rented through sharecropping) for eighteen years (three six-year or two nine-year leases), until leaving the village thirteen years before testifying. It is unclear where he arrived from or went to, but he was born about 8 km away in Cussy-la-Colonne, where he was once again living when he was called to testify. Marriage motivated a number of the moves described in these testimonies, but rarely was it the only move described by witnesses. Philibert Renard, a cottager at fifty years of age and a resident of Lusigny (5 km from Écutigny), provided an account of multiple moves made within the region: “Until the age of fourteen, he lived in his father’s home in Écutigny, where his father as day labourer paid the priest of Saussey five sols annually for his right of passion ... and having left his father’s domicile he worked in service in Vignoles [27 km away], and then came as servant to Sir Guillemot of Bligny [6 km], and from there returned to Grandmont [6 km] where he got married.” Pierrette Poullet, the wife of a ploughman and a resident of Nantoux (16 km), stayed with her parents “until about eighteen years ago when she got married to Moingeon of Montceau [7 km] where they went to live.” Similarly Jacquette Devault, the widow of a ploughman living in Montceau (7 km), testified that forty-two years ago (at the age of twenty-six) she had married Jean Poullet and moved to Écutigny to live with Poullet’s father, where she stayed for about seventeen years, at which point she and her husband left for Mandelot (7 km) and from there went on to Montceau. A significant number of moves by young single people are recorded within this inquiry, mostly for them to work as domestic servants or to stay a few years with a family member. Clément Moingeon, a ploughman, noted that eighteen or nineteen years ago he had lived with his brother-in-law (he was twenty-five years old at the time), while Jean Cornette, also a ploughman, testified that he lived in the village for nine or ten years “with both Philibert Gassot, blacksmith in the said place, and his uncle, and with several other ploughmen in the place,” until leaving the village forty-six years ago at the age of nineteen. Jean Pailliottel stayed in Écutigny, his village of birth, for forty-four years, first with his father, then “with Bénigne Virely as a domestic and for other ploughmen of the said Écutigny,” until leaving the village thirteen years before testifying. Antoinette Gavignet was born in Bonnencontre but moved to Broin very young, “having been raised in Broin from her tender youth.”35

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Another inquiry, this one concerning the right of way through a field in the village of Avincey, was different from the one in Écutigny in that locals could testify because it involved two individuals rather than a community, but, nevertheless, eleven of the nineteen witnesses were living elsewhere; they were probably called because the parties sought witnesses who were not current users of the passage. Economic opportunity was clearly one of the main driving forces behind the moves. François Mineur, a baker then living in the village, resided there from the age of six to thirteen, at which point he “left the pays,” perhaps as an apprentice. He was away for ten years, returned to the village for twelve years (from twenty-three to thirty-five years of age), left for another two years, and had been there ever since (he was fifty-eight when he testified). François Monnier, fifty years old and a poor cottager, had stayed for four years in the village (about twenty years prior) during which time he worked as a cobbler. Jean Bouilliotte had spent three years in the village in his late twenties, probably having been hired to exercise his trade as a gardener. Of the five remaining witnesses who testified to having lived in Avincey, four had been servants, all of them arriving in their late teens or early twenties. One other, a cottager who was sixty years old, testified that he was born in Avincey and that “he lived here until the age of 36,” but gave no indication of his reason for leaving.36 These two inquiries are relatively representative of the testimony given in other similar cases, in that domestic service and marriage are the common reasons given for moving. Anne Fromont, for example, the wife of a carpenter, was born in Argilly and was living there when she testified at the age of thirty-six that she had left Gerland nine years prior (at twenty-seven years old, possibly for marriage) after a stay of eighteen years; she therefore left her village of birth at the age of nine.37 Similarly Pierre Bourgogne testified at the age of forty that “he has lived for about 25 years in Sainte-Marie, which he left two or three years ago.” When he testified he was, like Fromont, once again living in his place of birth, after (at least) two moves, one at the age of fifteen and another in his late thirties.38 François LeFlaive, a vigneron aged sixtythree, had moved into and out of Cissey when he was young: “about 50 years ago his father having come to establish himself in Cissey, where he lived for four years.”39 These testimonies do not provide residential histories of the kind to be found in ecclesiastical court depositions or Poor Law inquiries in England.40 Witnesses described their arrival and departure from the village in question to establish when they had

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witnessed the practices to which they testified, but many doubtless moved more times than their testimony describes. Some historians assume that those who moved short distances did not experience much change in their daily life, as they were already intimately familiar with their new place of residence.41 But Pooley and Turnbull argue that short-distance moves could uproot; they cite the example of an apprentice in nineteenth-century England whose mother missed him even though he was only 6 km away.42 Similarly Paul-André Rosental argues against the “passive role and lack of consequences attributed to internal, short-distance migration in the countryside.”43 While there was doubtless more cutting of connections as the distance increased, it is worth noting that many villagers seem to cut most of their ties when they left a village. This becomes clear in testimony given in land-usage cases. Antoine Rouhette, cabaretier (publican), started his testimony by saying that “for the last 34 years he has been an inhabitant of Beaune [22 km from Écutigny], but that while he lived in Écutigny, he saw the fee being collected.” Denis Salomon, a domestic servant who, like Rouhette, was born in Écutigny but lived in Beaune, explained that he knew little about the case, “having been out of the pays for almost 25 years.” Sometimes even people who lived relatively close by invoked their move, as in the case of a forty-two-year-old ploughman living in Charmois (7 km), who did not know much, “having lived in Saussy only during three years while in service.” Benoît Atard was living less than 5 km away from Lanthes when he claimed to know nothing about the case, and added that “he is seeing Legoux, the plaintiff, for the first time, having left Lanthes 5 years ago.”44 Jean Pillot, a ploughman, had also only moved about 5 km when he testified that “he knows nothing about the facts in question, having left the village of Saigey over 24 years ago.”45 Jean Laplanche emphasized that before moving to Argilly twenty-six years ago he “did not frequent this place and did not know the plaintiff and defendant.”46 In 1748 in Sennecey the cabaretier Jean Monin was accused of selling wine to locals in violation of laws that reserved these facilities for travellers. Despite the fact that Monin was born in the community, his explanation was that “being a new inhabitant of Sennecy he thought he was excusable because he was following the examples of others in the village.” After moving away from his place of birth, he apparently lost touch with local practices, or at least thought the judge would think this was believable.47 Other documents show that ordinary people were not necessarily intimately familiar with their new village when they arrived. Pierrette

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Bressan, the forty-year-old wife of a ploughman, testified in a case in which a man was accused of fraudulently auctioning his sister’s estate without informing the court. Bressan had seen women gathered around the home for the auction, but she could not “tell us the names of the women who were thus assembled, because she has not been living for long in the village.” While Bressan may have been lying to protect the identity of people she knew, she saw her claim of ignorance as plausible, and the judge seems to have believed her.48 Pierrette Dumont testified that she spent several sleepless nights watching over her new home in Charney when rumours were circulating about arsonists, because her husband was away and she “did not yet know the people in the pays very well.”49 Even when witnesses did not explicitly claim ignorance based on time away from the village, everyone assumed that only those who lived in the village could testify to the usage of a piece of land, where and how much taxes someone had paid, who had cleared a piece of land, or whether a right of way existed. Sometimes people remained in contact and were familiar with the situation in villages they had left, but this was never assumed to be the case. When non-residents testified about practices or events in the village, their knowledge was often related to an occupation. This was the case for a surgeon who testified that he had moved to Auvillars in 1723, and then to Broin in 1726, where he stayed six years, and that though he now resided in Esbarres, he was familiar with the path traced by the road under dispute, “passing and re-passing through Broin to attend to the activities of surgery.”50 Claude Mordandet, a sixty-two-year-old day labourer from Pagny-la-Ville, testified in a case against a resident of Labergement-le-Duc, but he only knew about the mess of manure in front of Maléchard’s house because he went to Labergement each year to work in the grape harvest.51 Many of the moves described by witnesses were related to life-course events. On average, migrants were twenty-eight years old when they moved, which is close to the average age of arrival that was calculated from the census of 1796. About 20 per cent were younger than twenty years of age, and about the same proportion was over thirty, which means that over half had left the village in their twenties. In twenty-six cases it is possible to establish with relative certainty the reason behind the move. The vast majority (twenty-three) moved for work-related reasons, mostly as domestic servants (fifteen), although seven who were not domestics also moved for work. This includes a vigneron who

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lived for nine years, presumably the length of his lease, in a flour mill, as well as a forest guard who left to patrol other forests. A vigneron testified that he left Blagny in 1769 “to go live in Gamay and that while in Blagny he cultivated the vines of the farm of Blagny and that since then he cultivates the vines of Charles Matouillet from Puligny.” While this small sample accurately underlines the importance of economic motivations for moving, there is little doubt that it exaggerates the importance of domestic service, because the litigants sought witnesses who had moved into and out of the village a long time ago (in order to prove long-term usage rights) and had spent a lot of time working in the fields. Only three witnesses stated unequivocally that marriage had brought them to the village (both were women), but such was almost certainly the case for others. Jean Pillot, a ploughman, was twenty-six years old when he left the village of Seigny, quite possibly to marry a woman from Aubigny, where he was living when he testified twentyfour years later. Love, familial devotion, and friendship could also motivate migration, although these are not as explicit in the depositions as they were in the departures from Dijon discussed above. An example can be found in the account book of the lawyer Charles Lemulier. In 1697 or 1698 he left Dijon. He was “well established” in Dijon and wished to stay, but his father strongly wanted him to move to the small city of Semur-enAuxois, where he could acquire a royal judgeship in the bailliage court. Citing “the obligations of a son towards his father who gave over half of his goods to permit my marriage in addition to the expenses of my education and my studies,” and seeking to give his father “the marks of my submission and gratitude,” he and his wife moved from Dijon to Semur, where they spent the rest of their days.52 People sometimes returned home simply because they missed their family and friends. An example can be found outside of Burgundy in the journal of Pierre-Louis Nicolas Delahaye, schoolmaster of Silly-en-Multien. Several times he commented on the hiring of other teachers in villages around Silly. In 1786 he mentioned that a young man from Silly was hired in Yévillers, in the diocese of Beauvais, but his move turned out to be very temporary, as he “returned the next Sunday, because he missed his pays too much [il s’ennuyait trop de son pays].”53 The widow Etiennette Dessemble testified that she and her husband left the village of Esbarrres to move to Longecourt (about 13 km away), but that “since they could not adjust [ne s’accoutumant pas], they returned to Esbarres.”54 Short-distance migrants had hopes

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and expectations linked to their moves, and small rural communities could sometimes be difficult places in which to make friends and forge relationships. There could also be migration with individual, idiosyncratic motivations like a sense of adventure. One young inhabitant of the village of Auvillars, son of a ploughman, had left his parish to seek his fortune in the Caribbean and was involved in defending himself against defamation “not only on his honour but also on that of his family.” A judge from Dijon came to the village to assemble the principal inhabitants, who gave a very strong endorsement of the son Jacques and his parents, Louis Ménétrier and Claudine Bernard. They noted that he did not leave the village to escape criminal prosecution but departed “on the solicitation of different people with the intent of bringing honour to his affairs.”55 Others joined the army in order to be able to travel. There are surely people in Burgundy who were similar to Louis Simon, a weaver and jack of all trades from the Haut-Maine. At the age of twenty he almost enlisted in the army but instead decided to organize his own Tour de France. He travelled to Paris to look up an old acquaintance and find work but left after three months because he found the noise of the city oppressive. Three months of travel followed before he returned to his village, never to move away again.56 Migration could also be motivated by the desire to escape from criminal proceedings. A common insult among villagers was to state that a migrant had moved in order to escape prosecution, had left behind a poor reputation, or had been banished from his or her pays. In 1770, after attacking and injuring another inhabitant in his village of Tichey, Jacques Rousselin, a fifty-year-old ploughman, sold all his goods and left the village. When he was found about a year later living across the provincial border in Saint-Aubin in Franche-Comté, the local seigneurial court brought him back to stand trial. The judge accused him of fleeing to save his neck. He maintained, however, that he had left for religious reasons: “It was not out of fear – that before his dispute with Brey that motivated him to sell his belonging ... he had decided to make a trip to Rome, and that consequently he travelled to Besançon and from there to the Dombes, and that it was there he was robbed and beaten, at which point he returned to Saint-Aubin.”57 While the judge’s interpretation of his flight from the village seems more plausible, it is not unthinkable that Rousselin had been considering a pilgrimage for some time. Brey did not die from his injuries, and Rousselin was

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sentenced to only 36 livres in damages, a relatively small amount that on its own was unlikely to have motivated such a complete change of residence and lifestyle. Conclusion The motivations of ordinary people who took to the road in the eighteenth century were no doubt as varied as those of people moving today. In the eighteenth century one author provided a list of the factors that induced mobility for non-landowning villagers. The first cause was the availability of work and better wages, but he also added that “marriage elsewhere, succession, a family member who becomes a servant for a rich inhabitant, a crime with possible serious consequences, finally a hundred other causes, make up the many opportunities to move, for people who own nothing where they live: to the point that among renters, it is common to have lived in three different parishes over a three-year period.” He added that tenant farmers were only slightly less mobile than day labourers, moving often at the end of a lease, “whether because they seek a cheaper, larger, smaller or different farm, or because they have been chased away from their previous lease.”58 The list includes most of the elements emphasized in this chapter. Two main conclusions stand out concerning the decisions by ordinary people to move from one community to another. The first is the importance of the life course, as has been confirmed repeatedly by many historians. Three periods stand out in the life course of ordinary people as concerns mobility: adolescence, marriage, and old age. Other life-course and family events (such as the death of a parent, an inheritance, or sickness) could play an important role as well. The second element is the importance of financial considerations in ordinary people’s migratory decisions. Young adolescents leaving home to become servants did so primarily because their parents could not afford to support them and keep them busy, and their most important goal was to save enough money to marry. Until old age, most moves were work related in some way, whether this involved leasing land or being hired in another village as a forest guard or a village herder. A substantial number of internal migrants were driven by poverty to move, and, just as in other periods and places, the mobile were on average poorer than the sedentary. While most migrants were probably hopeful that migration would solve some of their economic problems, a substantial number of migrants were forced to move by

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poverty or at least by declining economic fortune. Internal migration in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy was socially selective, with poorer villagers generally moving over relatively short distances and wealthier inhabitants moving further. Still, internal migration was not limited to the village poor, and it is important to note that native inhabitants paid only 10–15 per cent more in taxes than did non-natives, and that non-native villagers were economically average. Rather than representing the dregs of village society, internal migrants were average people who sought, and sometimes found, marginally better economic circumstances in nearby communities.

6  What Attracted Migrants? The Geography of Internal Migration

Moving involves not only deciding to leave one’s home but also determining which community will be the new place of residence. These decisions are often intimately linked, for example when a job offer or a leasing opportunity is the motivating factor behind the move. Understanding the factors that made a community “attractive” to potential migrants will go some way to understanding the motivations of those who took to the road. Scholars have proposed several models to account for migrants’ choice of destination. Perhaps the most intuitive is the gravity model, which posits that each community exerts on all other communities an attractive force that is proportional to its size and inversely proportional to the distance separating the two communities. Cities thus draw more migrants than do villages and from further away, but on average the system remains in equilibrium because the pull exerted on a given community’s inhabitants by all other communities is equal to the pull exerted by that community on all others.1 Distance helps to explain the attraction exerted by one community on another in northern Burgundy, but other factors obviously determined the villages that attracted migrants. Economic reasons motivated many moves, so it would be surprising if places with certain kinds of economic conditions did not draw more migrants, because they offered more possibilities of finding work. A classic approach among geographers, accordingly, argues that the number of migrants from one place to another is proportional to the opportunities in the receiving community and inversely proportional to the number of intervening opportunities along the way.2 This chapter will not confirm or refute social science models of internal migration but rather seeks to explain migrants’ preferences for certain types of communities and certain paths when they moved.

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Rural communities that attracted the most migrants were those that provided economic opportunities, especially by offering employment for agricultural workers and domestic servants. Migration patterns also demonstrate the importance of topographical elements, with hills, valleys, and rivers exerting a significant influence on the paths that people followed. Migrants, however, were not automatons pulled and pushed by geography and economic opportunity, and this chapter demonstrates the extent to which tax policies, local decisions involving land usage, and the strength of the seigneurial regime influenced ordinary people’s migratory strategies and decisions. Topography Villages in all regions of the province drew internal migrants, as is demonstrated by a cartographic representation of the sample from the 1796 census (see map 6.1).3 There was a circle around Dijon where the villages had the most non-native inhabitants, but, slightly further away from the city, non-native proportions fall to closer to the average. There was less variability in the north of the region, and the plaine dijonnaise open field to the east of Dijon had a high degree of variability among villages. Although one would need to have a denser coverage among the province’s villages to draw robust conclusions, it is clear that regions characterized either by greatly higher or by greatly lower numbers of migrants or non-natives did not exist. Just as the gravity model predicts, population size influenced mobility. The relationship is quite complicated, however, because of the ways in which various other factors intervened. In communities in which at least fifty witnesses testified (there are forty-nine such communities,4 including three cities), there is a statistically significant correlation of 0.245 between the non-native element over the course of the eighteenth century and the population size in 1786. There is also a strong and statistically significant correlation of 0.356 between the population size and the average distance travelled by in-migrants. This means that larger communities tended to attract more people, and from further away. However, there was little discernible tendency within the witness data for people to move from smaller to larger communities, as about 53 per cent of mobile witnesses were living in a community that was smaller than their place of birth.5 Literacy rates were the same for those moving to larger and those going to smaller communities, which means that wealthy migrants were no more likely to move to larger

Map 6.1.  Variation in the non-native proportion by commune

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places than were poor migrants. The size of a community mattered, but even very small communities could be attractive to migrants. There was a great deal of variety in terms of the size of the area from which villages drew their population. Among the sixty-six villages with over twenty non-native witnesses, Comblanchien drew migrants from the shortest distance away, with an average distance from place of birth of 10 km by road; ten villages drew from an average of over 50 km away, and three villages drew from an average of over 75 km away. Part of the difference is merely related to the small number of witnesses testifying in each community, but there are some interesting patterns. The first is the role played by the wine-growing escarpment that runs south of Dijon. While viticulture villages on the eastern side of the hills could draw migrants from greater distances (for example, although MoreySaint-Denis drew migrants from shorter distances than average, Chambolle-Musigny drew them from considerably further away), the villages to the west of the escarpment were seemingly cut off by their geography. The other pattern, and one that is stronger than the influence of the high hills, is the isolation of the villages to the east of the escarpment, past the area of prosperous viticulture. Indeed, there are ten “bottom-half” and only five “top-half” villages in this area. So while these villages were not necessarily more mobile than those along the escarpment, in general they drew their mobile inhabitants over shorter distances. The topography of the province influenced the directions and distances that migrants travelled. Maps 6.2 to 6.5 present the birthplace of witnesses in several rural communities.6 The escarpment that runs south from Dijon split the small region into two separate recruitment basins for internal migration. Villages situated to the east of the hills in the flatter land east and northeast of Beaune recruited very few migrants from the other side of the hills. Even villages situated immediately below the escarpment saw no more than a few dozen people cross the hills to get there. The same pattern applies to villages to the west of the hills or along the top of the escarpment; they had almost no inhabitants who were native of communities from the other side (see the example of Ternant in map 6.2). Those born in Argilly rarely crossed over the hills, while those born on the other side of the hills rarely moved to Argilly (see maps 6.3 and 6.4). Waterways could be almost as effective a barrier as were the hills.7 The Saône river notably served to limit the migration of ordinary people from one side to the other. This is clear in the case of Argilly, but even the town of Nuits drew few internal migrants from across the Sâone. Corgengoux is perhaps most instructive in this respect; this village was situated only 8 km from the river

What Attracted Migrants?  129 

Map 6.2. Ternant, birthplaces of its non-native inhabitants

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Map 6.3. Argilly, birthplaces of its non-native inhabitants

What Attracted Migrants?  131 

Map 6.4. Argilly, places of residence of its natives who had emigrated

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Map 6.5.  Corgengoux, birthplaces of its non-native inhabitants

What Attracted Migrants?  133 

Map 6.6.  Corgengoux, places of residence of its natives who had emigrated

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(see map 6.5) but had virtually no inhabitants who had been born on the other side. Those born in Corgengoux also almost never found themselves living on the other side of the river (map 6.6). Migrants within the region tended to travel towards the west much more than towards the east. Along the east-west axis, about 63 per cent of migrants went west, and only 37 per cent went east, which confirms that the escarpment running south from Dijon served as a barrier to short-distance migration. There are a few other tendencies, however. Almost exactly the same number of migrants had moved primarily in the north-south axis as those who had moved east or west (about 2,800 in both instances). There was no change in geographic patterns over the course of the eighteenth century because at the start and end of the century many more people moved west than they did east, and the number of north-south migrants about equalled that of east-west migrants. Perhaps most surprisingly, there was no preference for moves towards the north rather than the south. We might expect that the city of Dijon would have attracted a disproportionate number of people from its immediate hinterland, leaving space to be filled in those villages by people from slightly further away. Since the three bailliages studied here through the witness depositions are situated to the south of the city, there should therefore be a slight, tendency to move northward. But perhaps the smaller cities of Chalon-sur-Saône and Mâcon and the much larger city of Lyon exerted a pull towards the south that cancelled out the attraction of Dijon. While topography influenced migration patterns, internal administrative boundaries apparently did not. Corgengoux, presented in map 6.5, was situated within the appeal jurisdiction of the bailliage of Nuits but was contiguous to two communities within the bailliage of Beaune (to the west) and was nearly so to a village in the bailliage of Chalonsur-Saône, and migrants to Corgengoux came from all three baillliages. Argilly (map 6.3) was situated no more than a single village from the bailliages of Beaune, Saint-Jean-de-Losne, and Chalon-sur-Saône and attracted migrants from these bailliages as much as it did from that of Nuits. This is similar to the situation in southwestern France, where exogamous marriage did not respect the frontiers of pays or jurisdictions.8 While the hills and rivers directed migration,9 a few migrants passed over these barriers. Many more long-distance migrants to the villages in the sample of depositions had travelled east and south than north and west. An explanation for this is not clear. The existence of a frontier between Burgundy and Franche-Comté until late in the seventeenth

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century may have set up patterns of mobility that changed only slowly once the border had disappeared. Indeed it would be interesting to know whether there was much migration along the boundary between Burgundy and Franche-Comté, within what was a borderland in the seventeenth century but was part of the kingdom of France in the eighteenth century. The tendency for long-distance migrants to travel east and south could reflect a tendency for people born south of Chalon-surSaône to be drawn into the migratory network of Lyon rather than that of Dijon. Whatever the reasons, the majority of the long-distance migrants who came to the villages that were studied through the witness deposition were born within a triangle having its peaks at Montbard, Dijon, and Beaune. An analysis of guild documents for the city of Dijon finds a strikingly similar recruitment basin for migrants, with a large number coming from the area to the west and northwest of the city, through the upper valley of the Ouche river to as far north as Montbard.10 Migratory Networks Historical studies of migration have sometimes emphasized the importance of migratory networks. French Canadian migrants to New­ England in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, for example, frequently chose their destination based on the existence of a migrant group, often following people from their home community.11 Immigrants to the New World also tended to move to places where they knew someone who had preceded them.12 However, it is not clear that networks always played a significant role in internal migration. An analysis of the migration of Germans to two Dutch cities found that networks were much more important for those migrating to Utrecht than for those moving to Rotterdam, as measured by their tendency to live with and near their compatriots.13 Leslie Page Moch argues that Bretons moving to Paris often socialized with and married other Bretons but that the connections made after arrival through “weak ties” were often of crucial importance.14 These works are focused on cities, but an important study of rural migration found that the presence of a family member did not measurably influence the choice of destination for migrants.15 The migrants who arrived in Burgundian villages came from a large number of places. Among villages that had at least one hundred witnesses, there were 3,414 non-natives who together represented a total of 1,616 different birth and residence combinations. In any given village

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each place of birth supplied an average of only 2.1 migrants, and twothirds of the combinations of place of birth and residence appear only once in the entire sample of witnesses. Fully 31 per cent of non-native villagers were living in a community in which there was not a single other witness who had migrated from their same village of birth. Twothirds of migrants were in places with five or fewer migrants who came from the same place of birth. On average each of the thirty-two villages in this sample drew migrants from 50.5 different places. This is not based on a census taken at a single point in time and so does not exactly represent the total number of places from which a village’s population was made up, but it is likely a good approximation of the migratory basin for each community. Most mobile villagers did not necessarily follow the footsteps of others from their birthplace. The main exception was temporary and seasonal migrants, who generally migrated in groups with people they knew from their home community and region. Other than temporary migrants, most people who moved may have had little in the way of immediate family in their new place of residence. A definitive analysis of this question would require conducting family reconstruction on a large scale, but a preliminary and provisional approach to the issue is possible by analysing patronyms in the census of 1796.16 In a six-village sample, over half (52 per cent) of non-natives were the only adult residents in their village with their patronym, while only 13 per cent of native-born inhabitants had a unique last name. The fact that married women did not share the patronym of their children complicates matters, but male migrants were no more likely than female migrants to share a patronym with another resident: 47 per cent of non-native men had unique patronyms, but only 9 per cent of the native-born did. Dividing people into native and non-native inhabitants also tends to exaggerate the level of connectedness to village society because it includes long-term migrants who after several decades of residence were likely to have descendants in the community. By including only those who had migrated between 1794 and 1796, we have a better picture of the family status of migrants at the moment of their arrival. Among the 129 people migrating into the six villages in question, 88 had unique patronyms. Ten of the 41 others were migrating with a person who shared the name; 76 per cent of the migrants arrived in villages where no one shared their last name. Many migrants likely had little in the way of family connections in their new community at the time of arrival, although the research presented here does not provide exact proportions. A substantial number of internal migrants may

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have known few people other than their employer or spouse in their new place of residence, and ordinary villagers were often willing to uproot themselves from their networks of family and friends in order to follow economic opportunities. Economic Opportunity Economic opportunities of various kinds drew migrants. My approach to determining their importance is to calculate Pearson correlations between the non-native proportion of eighty-four communities from the transcribed census sample and various socio-economic indicators, which is presented in table 6.1. The results are generally as expected, in that communities with economic opportunities, especially in terms of a need for agricultural labour, usually drew migrants. The number of domestic servants is one of the strongest predictors of a community’s level of mobility.17 With annual migration rates in 1796 of 0.28 for men and 0.31 for women, domestic servants were three to four times more likely to have moved over the past year than were other villagers in the same age group. But servants had masters, and masters were less mobile than non-masters, which should partly compensate for the high mobility of servants. Ploughmen, who made up a substantial majority of masters, comprised the occupational group that Table 6.1.  Factors influencing the mobility of a village’s population

Ploughmen Cottagers Agricultural workers Artisans Cloth artisans Male servants Female servants Aged 12–25 years Women with declared profession Total population (over 12 years old)

Non-native proportion

Annual migration rate

−0.23* 0.09 −0.03 −0.14 −0.12 0.25* 0.32* 0.26* 0.27* −0.14

−0.10 0.08 0 −0.06 0.03 0.24* 0.34* 0.03 0.18 (significant at 90%) −0.09

Note: These correlations are calculated between the proportion of inhabitants of a village who were ploughmen, cottagers, female servants (et cetera) and the same village’s non-native proportion and annual migration rate. All data are from the nominal lists of the 1796 census. *Significance at a 95 per cent confidence level.

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was the least likely to move. In the Breton town of Vannes taxpayers with servants were between 10 and 20 per cent more likely to persist as residents than were those without servants.18 Most rural servants were farmhands, however, and the areas that needed more servants tended to be areas of large-scale, open-field grain farming. In these villages the land was generally concentrated in fewer hands, and the community was composed of a small number of very wealthy fermiers and ploughmen, on the one hand, and a large number of day workers and poor cottagers on the other. Villages with a large number of domestics therefore likely had more day workers and poor farmers than did other villages, and rural communities with servants were more mobile because the presence of servants overlapped with that of other mobile groups owing to the social hierarchy and agricultural system in place. The presence of female servants correlated more strongly than did that of male servants to both the non-native proportion and the migration rate. Most male servants worked as farmhands hired by ploughmen, while at least a third of female domestics worked as servants for nonfarmers: merchants, liberal professionals, and bourgeois. The number of female servants is thus partially a proxy for the presence of wealthy non-agricultural occupations in a community, a group that was highly mobile. Proto-industrial activity made communities less mobile because it provided a small economic cushion in combination with agricultural activities.19 On average, villages without weavers in the 1796 census had fewer non-native inhabitants (46 per cent, compared to 42 per cent when there were weavers present), although the difference is not statistically significant. There is a negative correlation between the number of cloth artisans in a community and the non-native proportion, although it is also not statistically significant. Unfortunately the presence of female spinners is not indicated in the census and so cannot be taken into account, although there was probably overlap in terms of the presence of spinners and weavers. Economically independent women were likely to migrate, and they tended to go to villages that had a high proportion of non-native inhabitants. The number of single and widowed women with a stated occupation correlated very strongly to both the non-native proportion and the annual migration rate. A vibrant local economy drew in more migrants and helped retain them. In November 1847 the French postal service conducted an inquiry into the postal patterns of the nation’s communes. Among other information the inquiry lists the number of local and long-distance letters

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both received and sent, as well as the number of newspapers and the amount of printed matter received by each commune, which can be correlated to migration data from the 1796 census.20 Each community’s migration and postal data are separated by half a century, but villages that were the most mobile in 1796 generally remained so in 1872 (see chapter 1). While the results of the analysis cannot be anything other than suggestive, the exercise is worth attempting. At a 90 per cent confidence level there are few significant correlations, but all correlations are positive. The annual migration rate in 1796 correlates to the number of letters (0.219) and periodicals (0.244) received in 1847. Villages that received more letters tended to attract more migrants in a given year. It could also be that the places receiving letters were attractive to migrants; perhaps a high number of letters received was a sign of economic activity, and it was not the migrants who received the letters at all. The correlation to periodicals received indicates that this may well be the case, because the number of newspapers mailed into the commune is likely a good proxy for the wealth level of the community and its degree of connection to the outside world.21 Farmers were on average less mobile than were non-farmers, but their presence did not significantly correlate to mobility. This reflects the presence of farmers in all of the villages studied. In addition, the main groups of farmers – ploughmen, cottagers, and vignerons – had distinct migration patterns and non-native proportions that may simply cancel each other out. The presence of ploughmen correlated negatively and significantly to the non-native proportion because they were less mobile than almost any other socio-occupational group.22 However, their wives were considerably more likely to be born outside the village than they were, which should mitigate part of the effect. In addition, at less than a tenth of the overall population, ploughmen were not numerous enough that their simple presence could account for almost a quarter of variation in the non-native proportion. Other factors are thus at work. One possibility is that villages with more ploughmen may have put in place various policies that were unfavourable to in-migration.23Agricultural practices affected migration patterns, as shown by comparing native proportions to the number of animals in each village.24 Communities with more animals tended to attract more migrants (see table 6.2). This was especially true of oxen, whose presence is a good proxy for arable farming and the level of demand for domestic servants and agricultural labour. Cows, however, did not tend to draw migrants in significant numbers, because pastoral farming was less labour intensive than was

140  Strangers and Neighbours Table 6.2.  Number of animals, correlation to non-native proportion by village, n = 175 Variables

Mobility

Stallions and geldings Mares All horses Bulls and steers Cows Heifers All cattle Sheep and lambs Goats Pigs

−0.07 0.05 −0.03 0.23* 0.07 0.09 0.19* 0.16* 0.14* 0.23*

Note: The correlations are calculated between the ratio of animals to people (that is, the number of animals per inhabitant) and the non-native proportion, from the 1796 census. The sample includes both the villages transcribed and those counted, with outliers excluded. *Significance at a 90 per cent confidence level.

arable farming. Communities with more horses did not tend to draw more migrants. This may reflect the effects of requisitions of horses carried out for the war effort or the fact that the records do not distinguish between draft, driving, and riding horses. Sheep, goats, and pigs were the animals favoured by cottagers and agricultural labourers who were more mobile than the wealthier owners of horses and cows. Draft animals thus drew migrants seeking employment, and these migrants were likely either to bring sheep, goats, and pigs with them or to acquire them once they had arrived. Taxes and Other Incentives or Disincentives for Migration Poor villagers with sheep, goats, and pigs needed to find pasture and feed for them. Common land could theoretically enable even the landless to raise a few small animals. We might therefore expect that villages with a greater amount of land held in common could draw a larger number of migrants. However, the wealthier inhabitants of communities often worked hard to limit the use of the commons by the poor and the landless, which in turn could discourage migrants from moving in. Villages with more common land generally had fewer non-natives than did villages without commons. During the French Revolution communities filled in forms, listing their common land held in forests, arable, meadows, pasture, and scrubland, which can be matched to non-native

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proportions per village from the 1796 census.25 The sample likely overestimates the presence of commons, since only two of the seventy-eight communities reported having none at all. It is also a bit artificial to try to measure the area held in commons, since the status of some land was always uncertain. Correlations between the non-native proportion and the per capita area held in commons are all negative (whether calculated for total commons or only for forests, meadows, et cetera), but they are relatively weak and do not attain significance at a 90 per cent confidence level. But exclusion of the outliers (villages with non-native proportions outside a range from 0.2 to 0.6) does yield significant correlations to the area of forests held in common (at −0.229). Places that had more communal forest had fewer non-natives. Simple t-tests show the same relationship. The least mobile half of villages had an average of 1.81 arpents (about 0.4 hectares) per inhabitant over twelve years of age, while the more mobile half of villages had an average of 1.58 arpents per inhabitant over twelve years of age, a difference of about 15 per cent. Many migrants were landless day labourers or small tenant farmers whose survival might depend on the ability to raise a cow or a few sheep on the commons and on the availability of free firewood for the winter. Why then did villages with more common land draw fewer inmigrants? The answer most likely lies in the ways that villages controlled access to commons. Many communities put in place policies that gave wealthier inhabitants more use of commons, especially in the form of pasture. In some other parts of France, rules explicitly reserved access to commons to those who were locally born, or even required that access to commons be inherited.26 Bernard Derouet has argued that in regions in which communities had more common land, villages generally imposed stricter limitations on in-migration and the acquisition of the status of resident of the community.27 In northern Burgundy all taxpayers theoretically enjoyed access rights,28 but, as virtually everywhere in France, landowners frequently made it difficult for the landless to use commons, although the effectiveness of the rules put in place could vary a great deal from village to village. By limiting the number of animals that inhabitants could put on the commons to those they could overwinter, by outlawing the pasturing of goats and geese, and by strictly limiting the number of sheep allowed, ploughmen in many communities effectively ensured that their cows, oxen, and horses were well fed.29 Places with common land may also have retained more of their own inhabitants, leaving less space for people to in-migrate from communities with less common land.30

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Rural people in the eighteenth century frequently commented on the links between migration and common land, and abuse of commons by recently arrived inhabitants provoked anger among longer-term residents. In 1776 the community of Saint-Seine-en-Bâche decided to pursue a lawsuit against villagers who were using commons to pasture large herds of sheep. They noted that not only did the sheep not belong to those pasturing them (they belonged to wealthy inhabitants of the city of Dole, who were paying the shepherds) but also the culprits were “certain people who have resided for only a short time in Saint-Seine.” The actions of Jean Godard were particularly galling: “the inhabitants are much angered by the fact that the said Godard is so brazen, given that he is the last one to settle in the parish.” There were in the community “good and ancient inhabitants” who could not use the commons as much as was their right.31 We will see in chapter 7 that communities requesting permission from the Parlement of Dijon for the right to require certificates from new inhabitants often invoked the devastation of their commons; villages with substantial commons were perhaps more alert than were other communities to the “problems” of the mobile poor and may have been more likely both to apply to Parlement for permission to regulate in-migration and to apply the rules. In England at the same period some villages explicitly limited the number of cottages that could be built as a way to discourage the in-migration of the poor.32 Nowhere in northern Burgundy was there anything as formal as this distinction between “open” and “closed” communities, but villages with commons apparently did manage to limit slightly the number of people who had access to their precious resources. People in the eighteenth century also worried a great deal about the effects of tax policy on mobility.33 When villages wrote to the provincial estates to complain that they were overtaxed, they frequently invoked out-migration, especially that of the wealthiest farmers, as proof that they were paying more taxes than were the neighbouring villages. In 1740, for example, the seigneur, the priest, and the judge of the village of Minot, likely at the request of the community, sent a petition to the élus of the Estates to “recommend the interest of the inhabitants of Minot, whose number is daily diminished because of the tailles that they are more burdened with than other villages: you will recognize ... from the certificate produced by our clerk that five inhabitants left the village in 1739, and I am informed that two others, quite wealthy, are about to leave, to the extent that it is possible that the village may become entirely depopulated.”34 A petition from the hamlets of Perrigny

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and Montot requested a revision of their tax rolls, complaining that the inhabitants of Guillot, together with whom they paid taxes in a single roll, forced them to pay more than their share, and therefore “several people had left Montot and Perrigny to go establish their residences in other nearby communities.”35 In 1788 the sub-delegate for Beaune reported on the situation in the village of Aignay where two inhabitants were taxed at 100 livres each, noting that “they wish to renounce the incolat,” which meant they planned to move.36 Did people really move away because of high taxes? As long as information circulated about relative tax rates in surrounding communities, some people may have followed these incentives. Testing this is not a simple task, however, owing to the difficulties involved in evaluating how much each village deserved to pay relative to other communities. Dividing communities into those that were undertaxed and those that were overtaxed would require intimate knowledge of the quality of the soil, the types of crops grown, and the forms of non-agricultural wealth in each community. There is, though, a way to calculate a very approximate index of undertaxation. This involves dividing the total tax burden for a community in 1824 by that paid by the same community in 1777.37 The villages that saw the greatest increase between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century are assumed to have been undertaxed in the eighteenth century. This presumes that nineteenth-century, village-wide tax assessments were more equitable than those in the eighteenth century. Given that cadastres had been all drawn up by that date and that the new postcadastre assessments were based on detailed “expertises communales” that involved working from leases and land-sale records, the assumption is at least plausible. The method also assumes that a village’s share of the provincial population remained constant and that no substantial economic changes occurred to disrupt the relative wealth rankings of villages. The major economic and demographic changes of the nineteenth century (industrialization, the agricultural revolution, shrinking rural communities) were still mostly in the future in 1824, and there is little reason to think that the demographic or economic structures of the Bourbon Restoration were substantially different from those of the late ancien régime. Unequal tax assessment encouraged movement towards undertaxed communities. There is a strong statistical relationship between mobility and relative taxation. In undertaxed villages (those that increased by more than the median amount between the two periods) on average

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42 per cent of the inhabitants were non-natives, whereas in overtaxed communities the average proportion was only 37 per cent of inhabitants.38 The same relationship can be shown by calculating the coefficient of correlation between the non-native proportion and the ratio of 1824 taxes to 1777 taxes. Fully a third (0.35) of the variability in the proportion of non-natives among villages can thus be explained by the fairness or unfairness of the tax burden. There are no doubt other factors at work here. The size of a community correlated both to the non-native proportion of a village and its undertaxation, although not strongly enough to explain the entire effect. As so many suspected in the eighteenth century, relative taxation was a factor that influenced ordinary people’s decision to move or, at the very least, helped to determine their choice of village once they had decided to move. The non-native proportion is not the only way to measure mobility, and it underestimates the real number of people who were moving at any given time. Village annual mobility rates display the same relationship with undertaxation as do non-native proportions, although at 0.098 the correlation is weaker. A great deal of migration involved young, unmarried men and women who paid no taxes and had no intention of staying for more than a year or two. Taxation would therefore play little role in influencing their decision making. It may also be that respective tax rates were not a primary consideration in deciding where to move but that new inhabitants, upon receiving their first tax bill, realized that they were paying more than expected and were more likely to move on. Lower taxes may not have drawn migrants from nearby villages but might have motivated migrants to stay a little longer. Seigneurial dues and rights varied even more from one community to the next than did tax rates, and it is possible that migrants were drawn to places in which the seigneurial regime was lighter.39 Unfortunately the number and diversity of rights and dues make it impossible to calculate the total amount paid per village. It is possible, however, to consider the influence of one of the most important and onerous seigneurial rights, mainmorte, on mobility patterns. Within the province of Burgundy, villagers who were subject to this right could only inherit from their parents if they lived throughout their life in their parents’ home (“at the same pot and hearth” according to customary law in the province).40 Mainmorte did not exactly tie people to their place of birth, but it did force them to choose between mobility and inheritance. Historians have written extensively about mainmorte. On the one hand, Jean Bart sees it as a strong inhibitor of prosperity and economic modernization

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in a province where about a third of the villages were subject to it.41 On the other hand, James Collins has found that, in villages that contained both mainmortables and free peasants, the serfs were generally the wealthiest inhabitants. In the multi-hamlet village of Alligny-en-­ Morvan the inhabitants of serf hamlets were much less mobile than those living in free hamlets, because those who moved away forfeited their inheritance. Also, free peasants who moved to villages with general mainmorte automatically became serfs, which obviously discouraged in-migration other than from other serf communities.42 In the eighteenth century people who were subject to mainmorte were persuaded that this seigneurial right acted as a powerful brake on in-migration. In 1716 the inhabitants of Beneuvre purchased their freedom from mainmorte. Being mainmortable, they argued, was “a hard and onerous condition, both because it hinders their children from establishing themselves in nearby free communities and because no inhabitants from these communities come to establish themselves in this place because of this servitude.”43 Requests for the ecclesiastical dispensations that were required in order to marry someone who was too closely related sometimes mentioned the reluctance of free peasants to move into serf communities. In 1774 when Étienne Andriot was interviewed by the parish priest of Chatellenot about why he wanted to marry Louise Bouravan, Andriot pointed out that as “he has land in a mainmortable district, it would have been futile for him to seek a wife of free condition, because free villagers are revolted at the simple word ‘serf.’” His fiancée was even clearer: “If she had refused this alliance, it would have been difficult to repair the damages, especially since being born in a serf village, she cannot flatter herself to think that she was sought out by free people. The conservation of family goods depends in serf villages on paying close attention to alliances in order to avoid being disinherited.”44 Serf villages drew fewer migrants than did free villages.45 Free villages in the sample had a non-native proportion of 37 per cent, while in the serf villages only 28 per cent of the inhabitants over twelve years of age had been born elsewhere. This is a large difference, and it confirms the argument of the young, engaged couple above that free peasants were very reluctant to settle in mainmortable villages. Of course, this does not tell the whole story, as it accounts only for in-migration. There is good reason to think that a number of daughters and nonfirstborn sons may have left the village, perhaps with a cash dowry to offset their lost inheritance. Certainly further studies of inheritance

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and marriage strategies in serf villages are needed.46 Serf communities were not immobile. Indeed, the annual in-migration rate in 1796, after the abolition of mainmorte, was appreciably higher in ex-serf villages (0.054) than in ex-free villages (0.037). This could mean that serf villages saw more new inhabitants move into the village in a given year than free villages did, but that migrants to serf communities did not stay, choosing to move on. Or it could be that the abolition of the right of mainmorte in 1789 created short-term demand for migration into these communities. While further research is necessary to have a complete picture of the way in which the serf communities worked in terms of small-scale migration, it seems plausible that, to a greater extent than in free communities, villages of mainmortables were divided between a very sedentary, inheriting, firstborn group and a mass of highly mobile inhabitants who, since they owned no land and could not hope to inherit, moved frequently from village to village. This would make serf villages similar to communities in regions of house-based inheritance, at least with respect to the relationship between migration, birth order, and succession patterns. Conclusion Migration studies are a relatively recent academic field, born in the late-nineteenth century.47 But people in the past noticed the migration and mobility that they saw around them and had theories to explain migration patterns. In eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, ordinary villagers, local officials, and provincial administrators were cognizant of the factors that drew migrants to some communities and discouraged them from going to others. They understood that tax policies could create inequalities that pushed people from some villages and pulled them towards others, and they noticed that migrants from free communities steered clear of mainmortable villages. People also understood the types of economic opportunity that drew migrants and the way that the lack of opportunity could cause people to out-migrate. While some elements of the migration system in northern Burgundian villages no doubt escaped people’s notice, and others were probably so evident to them that they rarely commented on them, this chapter has shown that ordinary people’s intuitions concerning push-and-pull factors were surprisingly accurate. Ordinary people put a great deal of thought into the question of where they should reside. Internal migration in northern Burgundy was not

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simply random movement made by a small number of people without attachment to any place, but rather it reflects countless conscious decisions taken by ordinary people who weighed a multitude of factors before deciding whether to move and where to go. Of course, they did not choose among all communities within the province. They tended to go to places nearby and to be attracted by places that had more economic opportunities. When they moved, they followed the contours of the land, with rivers and hills acting as natural barriers. Two characteristics of internal migration stand out. First, economic conditions were of primary importance. Migrants were drawn to villages that provided economic opportunities. This applied especially to female migrants and the young, most likely because they were the least tied to the land and the community and could more easily organize a move. Migrants sought out places where the seigneurie was less oppressive and steered clear of places that were overtaxed. Second, local, regional, and provincial policies influenced the mobility of ordinary villagers. The unfairness of tax distribution, the existence of onerous seigneurial rights, and even policies governing the use of common land and rights all had a real and significant impact on the decisions of people to stay home or to move, and to persist as residents of their new village.

7  Regulating Migration: The Integration of New Inhabitants into the Rural Community

In Burgundian rural society where the majority of people spent at least some years living outside their place of birth and where all communities had a substantial number of non-native inhabitants with varying degrees of connection to other residents, virtually all levels of the police, justice, and administrative framework in the province were regularly confronted with issues related to migration and movement. Recent work has analysed regulations related to citizenship and the integration of foreigners in France, and historians have also studied the policies of large cities with respect to internal migration, especially that of the poor, but the ways in which smaller, rural communities dealt with migration has been less studied.1 In Burgundy the intendant, the Parlement, and the provincial estates all confronted the effects of internal mobility and experimented with various forms of regulation to control it. Village communities faced these issues on a regular, almost daily basis and put in place both formal and unstated rules. Part of the impetus to control and regulate mobility sprung from a fear of violence and crime, as historians of vagrancy have repeatedly pointed out. However, there were also rules and policies that dealt with the migration of more settled residents, because migration affected the sharing of village communal resources and the distribution of the tax burden.2 There were two main layers of regulations that affected the mobility of people who were neither vagrants nor beggars, which were put in place by village communities and the provincial estates. The EstatesGeneral of Burgundy put a great deal of effort into regulating mobility, out of a motivation that was primarily fiscal. The main principles held that all eligible taxpayers should be assessed somewhere each year, including the year of a move, and that residency rules should not be

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abused in order to reduce tax payments. Locally, the village community put in place mobility regulations and enforced them with the assistance of the relevant seigneurial courts. Here too fiscal issues were front and centre, especially the worry that many migrants did not bear their fair share of taxes, and the protection of village resources mattered a great deal. Migration and the Fiscal Definition of Residence Throughout the eighteenth century the provincial Estates-General of Burgundy were much concerned with regulating mobility. They worried both that people were using local migration to defraud the tax system and that the mobility of some wealthy inhabitants placed an undue burden on those they left behind. The procedure that was designed to ensure that those moving paid their share of taxes was called the renonciation à l’incolat or sometimes the renonciation au droit d’habitantage. The process involved two steps: a public announcement by the priest and an official notification made to the local aldermen, who drew up a certificate attesting to the renunciation.3 The migrant would use this certificate to avoid being taxed in his new home for the first year, because he had to pay in his previous home for the “following year” (année de suite). Those failing to complete the process would have to pay taxes in both villages for the year. This is nothing like the acquisition of bourgeois status in a city, as the right of habitantage was automatically conferred by the act of moving. The procedure existed solely to publicize the change of domicile in order to ensure that taxes were paid somewhere. Despite abundant testimony in administrative records, almost no certificates of renunciation survive in the archives.4 It is nevertheless clear that the procedure was followed in most villages, although the wealthier were undoubtedly more likely to do so than were the poor. Sometimes in the local tax records the assessors noted details in reference to the procedure, such as in 1761 in Vosne, when Marcelle Gille, a vigneron, was taxed 18 livres 5 sols for the taille; he was “presently inhabitant of the village of Comblanchien, having renounced the incolat d’habitantage ... we taxed him for the droit de suite.”5 Very occasionally references to the procedure appear in judicial documents, as in a dispute between the villages of la Borde-au-Château and le Poil. One witness testified that “he saw the renunciation of Guillaume Leflaive published in the church of Montagny in the month of September 1725,

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and has not seen him make his habitual residence in le Poil since.”6 Communities could enforce the procedures of the renunciation because inhabitants generally knew whence people had arrived and where they had gone. There was a strong incentive to do so because the community would be responsible for the taxes it could not collect. In addition, there was incentive for migrants to follow the procedure; failure to do so could mean being taxed in two places during the year of the move. A comparable procedure, called the translation de domicile, existed in pays d’élection, those regions of France that were more directly administered by the Crown. A significant difference, however, was that people were required to travel to the seat of the élection to report their move, whereas in Burgundy no travel was required. In addition, there may have been fees involved with translations, whereas the renunciation was free. James Collins estimates that in the seventeenth century fewer than half of the taxpayers who moved went to the trouble of registering their translation, and by the eighteenth century the proportion of nonobservance was much greater, possibly as high as 80 per cent.7 Renunciations in Burgundy were not copied or collected, so it is not possible to measure compliance with certainty, but the procedure was simple and free, involved no extra travel, and was probably applied in a high proportion of moves. The question of domicile for taxation purposes was particularly acute in Burgundy because of the peculiarities of its tax system. People were listed on the tax rolls of a single community for all the land they leased or owned everywhere in the province.8 More than half of France was directly administered in the élections, and in these regions people paid taxes in each community where they had land, at least after 1728. An initial reform in 1723 that had applied only to the province of Normandy was then extended to all pays d’élection, mandating that the default rule would be that people would pay taxes wherever they had property.9 They could, however, choose to pay taxes only in their place of residence by performing a procedure known as a réunion de cotes.10 But this remained different from the situation in Burgundy because it was based on a choice and involved a formal declaration of all property owned by the taxpayer, with formal procedures whereby the communities could challenge the assessments, and the total assessments of each community would be adjusted.11 In northern Burgundy, by contrast, villages simply lost the tax contribution associated with a piece of land when it was sold to a non-resident, and everyone’s assessment

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increased accordingly. Outside of the pays d’élection, in all regions where tax exemptions depended on the noble or common status of the land rather than on the status of its owners (pays de taille réelle), people paid taxes in multiple communities, wherever they had land.12 There is thus good reason to think that local communities and administrative bodies within Burgundy spent more time talking and debating about mobility-related issues than did those in other regions – not because Burgundians were more mobile than others but because communities stood to lose or gain tax revenue depending on where people declared their residence. The regulations associated with the renunciation worked effectively to ensure that few inhabitants, other than the poor, could escape paying taxes when they moved, but other aspects of the Estates’ regulation of migration were less effective, leading to various experiments and reforms. One problem was that many wealthy farmers and merchants circulated within multiple communities and could choose to establish residency where the tax rates were the lowest, a problem that the Estates addressed in their discussions and rulings on “fictive residence” (domicile fictif). Fictive residence worked in one of two different ways. The first involved people who maintained residences in both the countryside and the city; for example, a wealthy urban merchant could remain economically active in the city as long as he rented a room in a village, thereby avoiding one of the most onerous of urban burdens, the lodging of soldiers. Officials in the Estates even complained that wealthier inhabitants shopped around in rural communities to see which one would offer them the lowest taxes. Less common, but nevertheless of concern, was the situation in which “the wealthiest inhabitants of villages rent houses in cities to subtract themselves from their considerable assessments that they bear in their community, and then sue the community to be withdrawn from the rolls.”13 The second type of tax fraud that concerned the Estates involved wealthy peasants who moved from village to village. Prosperous farmers who owned or rented land in multiple communities established their residence where they had the least land, but often continued to live elsewhere. These subterfuges should not have worked, but in practice it was difficult for local assessors to know about all the economic activities outside the village. Some villages paid considerably more per capita in taxes, either because they were wealthier or because of the unfairness of the system (the provincial estates talked of people moving to “privileged or moderately burdened places”). Communities were happy to see wealthy people

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establish residence in their village because this could lower the average tax assessment; for this reason, assessors were willing to negotiate lower tax rates to have prosperous farmers become fictive residents. Over the course of the eighteenth century the provincial estates discussed the question of fictive residences at least a dozen times. Their discussions and debates demonstrate how complicated the question of residence could be in a society that saw so much internal migration. This uncertainty led the author of an eighteenth-century manuscript concerning taxes in the province to note that “it is to be wished that there were fixed rules to determine what the true residence is.”14 Early in the eighteenth century the Estates requested several times that the Crown address the problems of fictive residences, and in the 1720s proposed substantial changes, namely to extend the period during which migrants continued to pay taxes to their previous place of residence (the année de suite) from one to three years, and to allow two separate communities to collect taxes in the cases of fictive residences.15 Initially the garde des sceaux who received the Estates’ proposal urged the province to wait, promising a general, kingdom-wide solution that would define residence for taxation purposes. While a law was indeed passed in 1728 that resolved some of the issues, it involved only pays d’élection and therefore was not applicable in Burgundy.16 The provincial intendant De La Briffe and the Parlement of Dijon responded in 1722 and 1729 to the Estates’ proposal. Both strongly underlined two basic principles that could not be compromised. The first was that “each supports the taxes of the place where he resides, according to his faculties,” which meant that they could not support the proposal extending the année de suite to three years, because people would end up using communal forests in one community and paying their taxes in another. The other inviolable principle was the “liberty of the king’s subjects … to establish … themselves in the place that they judge appropriate … for the good of their affairs, of their commerce or of their industry.” Any proposed reforms, in other words, could not make internal migration onerous or penalize those who wished to move. The Parlement of Dijon proposed simply to enforce existing rules more strictly, and in the face of this disagreement the Estates abandoned their proposal by the early 1730s. After the failure of this attempt to persuade the royal government to bring about substantial reform, the Estates continued to discuss the issue internally. On the force of their own authority they put in place several modest changes. Initially they decided that people should

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be taxed in the place where they passed the greatest part of the year, “without attention to the fictive residence practised and used by any of these people at Easter.”17 But shortly thereafter the Estates reversed this decision, deciding that it was preferable for people to be taxed “in the place where their assessment is highest,” which was basically the policy they continued to pursue throughout the century.18 In 1755 the Estates published instructions requiring that a list of all departing inhabitants be included with the tax rolls each year. They also mandated that anyone whose tax assessment dropped following a move would automatically be charged the higher of the two assessments unless he could demonstrate a valid reason for any reduction. This solved the problem discussed by the intendant De La Briffe whereby people would pay taxes in one place and use services and resources in another, because the provincial estates could impose tax assessments on individuals through the use of cotes d’office. However, it is unlikely that officials in the Estates actually invested the time and work needed to track down individual taxpayers in two separate tax rolls, and administrators probably applied the rule only when locals reported fraud. Indeed, as we saw in chapter 5, most migrants paid less taxes in their new place of residence without having to justify themselves to provincial officials. For a few years in the middle of the century many villages did include lists of those leaving and arriving, although by the early 1760s most had stopped doing so. In 1766 the Estates reiterated this rule and also mandated that those changing village of residence would automatically be taxed in their new place of residence for six years at the highest of the pre- and post-move assessments; however, this decision was criticized internally in 1772 as having failed to bring the problem under control (by this point they proposed an in-depth inquiry into the situation in each village).19 During the last two decades of the ancien régime the élus of the Estates began conducting a significant number of tax inquiries, rewriting village tax rolls from scratch to eliminate inequalities, and this probably helped to root out some of the fictive residences because they included all of the land that each inhabitant owned in all villages.20 Since most villages still had not been reassessed in 1789, however, the fiscal challenges posed by the small-scale, short-distance, temporary movement of the province’s wealthier inhabitants remained a problem. The failure of the Estates to bring this situation under control occurred despite a significant amount of popular support for the reforms, as rural communities repeatedly complained about the low assessments of the wealthiest inhabitants.21 Procedures put in place to

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stop them from taking advantage of their landownership and connections in many different villages were never very effective. Nevertheless, limited though the success was, these measures worked far better than did those attempts that were put in place to control the migration of the poor. The Regulation of Mobility at the Community Level The fraudulent mobility of the wealthy was primarily a problem in that it increased the taxes owed by the other members of the community. Indeed, according to the complaints from officials at the Estates, much of the problem had its roots in the willingness of communities to accept new taxpayers to reduce average assessments, even if it meant offering overly favourable terms to a wealthy farmer or merchant. The perceived problem with the mobility of the wealthy was thus not that there was too much of it but that false moves hid tax fraud. The mobility of the poor created difficulties too, but we need to turn to other types of sources to see how the more settled inhabitants perceived and defined the mobile poor as a social problem in need of a solution. Used to such telling effect by some historians,22 the archives of the maréchaussée and prevotal courts that had jurisdiction over the crimes of the homeless have almost all disappeared in northern Burgundy. The inquiries into poverty and begging in the 1770s contain some useful information on poverty, but these documents do not deal much with questions of mobility.23 The national inquiry into temporary and seasonal migration conducted under Napoleon is very useful in understanding short-term labour migration over large distances but provides no information on other poor migrants. The problem of poor migrants, while related to that of poverty generally, was distinct; they were basically regulated by local institutions, with rules that were voted by the community itself and then enforced by the local seigneurial or municipal court. The community would put together a deliberation determining the rules that would apply to the acceptance of new inhabitants. They would then send the deliberation to the Parlement of Dijon for approval. I have located about fifty of these local police rulings scattered throughout various collections of Parlement arrêts. Most of them deal exclusively with the problem of poor migrants who were burdensome to the community, but some are part of general police regulations for cities, towns, and villages that cover a wide variety of subjects, such as the grain market, sanitary regulations

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for latrines, and the disposal of blood from butcher shops. Since most contain both a long preamble describing the problems that the migration of the poor entailed for the community and a list of regulations governing their admission to the community, they are an excellent source for analysing popular attitudes towards the poor, migration, and the nature of community bonds.24 The question of tax collection was very significant among the perceived problems, as it was with the wealthy, but access to communal resources (primarily poor relief and common land) also played an important role. There was a tone of moral outrage accompanying the comments on the unsettled mobility of the poor, which fits well with early modern attitudes towards poverty and the able-bodied poor, a tone that was entirely absent from the discussions of the mobility of wealthy merchants and farmers. Taxation problems are the difficulties most frequently cited in the requests by communities to the Parlement of Dijon for the right to control in-migrants; the subject is mentioned in virtually every preamble. The small city of Verdun (21 January 1757), for example, complained that “these sorts of inhabitants, who are almost all beggars, rarely participate in the charges and taxes.” In Bourbon-Lancy (13 June 1768) they noted that these poor migrants “pay no taxes and occupy houses that cannot be used to lodge soldiers.” Local assessors included the new inhabitants on the tax rolls. When the migrants could not pay or moved away in the middle of the year, the community had to find the money quickly or risk debtor’s prison for a few of the wealthiest inhabitants through the principle of collective responsibility for taxes (contrainte solidaire).25 While the inconvenience caused by the uncertain status of many recently arrived migrants, who were often unlikely to stay for long, was real, it is difficult to accept that the problem was as serious as the requests made it out to be. The presence of a multitude of poor migrants would not raise the total tax burden of a community, and the redistribution of the unpaid excess would effectively return the settled inhabitants to the same amount that they would have paid in the absence of the poor migrants. Admittedly the collection of unpaid taxes could require threats of prison or seizures and lead to expensive legal disputes, but other solutions were possible, such as leasing commons to pay part of the tax burden26 or putting aside enough money to cover these possible shortfalls from year to year. It may be the unfairness that most upset people. In many communities even the poorest settled inhabitants were taxed a nominal amount, and the presence of a group of workers and unemployed people who paid no taxes at all surely angered many.

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Access to communal resources in northern Burgundy was limited to residents of the community that owned them,27 but it was not always clear whom this included. Often the answer was that access to commons was reserved for those who were listed in the tax rolls. Poor migrants who paid no taxes and were often temporary residents at best had no official rights to communal resources. A sense of outrage over the misuse of commons was therefore a significant motivation behind the requests for rules governing poor migrants. In some cases the rules governing the policing of strangers were part of the community’s rules on the use of common resources. The village of Manziat (19 April 1775) within the marquisate of Bagé had the Parlement approve a ten-clause project on the use of commons, forbidding people from pasturing rented animals, ripping up grass to use as feed, and collecting manure off the commons. The ninth clause warned landlords that if they did not verify the in-migration certificates of their tenants (see below), they could be “declared responsible for the degradations ... they may commit.” Toulon-sur-Arroux (28 July 1775) was motivated in its request by “the maintenance of good order in society and by the conservation of the communal forests belonging to the city,” while the village of Vanvey (22 December 1785) complained that poor migrants stole wood from the forests “because they have nothing to lose.” In Mirebeau (1 November 1787) they complained that “these new inhabitants do no commerce or traffic other than in the forests of the community and those of a nearby seigneur whom they travel two leagues to rob. Because they are beggars they have no fear of the sentences pronounced against them.” The community of Pontailler (9 January 1788) creatively decided that no new inhabitants could have access to the distribution of firewood from the communal forest until they deposited 12 livres with the municipal government, which would be applied to the following year’s taxes. Communities also noted that the presence of so many poor migrants effectively overwhelmed local resources and reduced the amount of charity available to local and deserving poor, but this occupied a relatively small place in the records. The city of Chalon-sur-Saône clearly explained the logic: Most of these strangers, “although able to work, live a lazy life and have no other resource for their subsistence and that of their families than to beg and use the assistance destined for true inhabitants from whom they unfairly take opportunities that the founders [of the funds for the charitable disbursements] reserved principally for the poor of the city, who have paid taxes for years.”28 It was generally only in larger towns and cities that the arguments for the need of rules

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governing poor migrants focused on access to poor relief, whereas in villages and towns they most concerned the problems associated with common land and forests, perhaps because poor relief in villages was more personal and discriminatory than it was in cities. While taxation and communal resource issues were important in pushing communities to seek to control in-migration, there was also a moral element to the complaints. The documents denied any form of individuality to poor migrants. The authors made reference to the arrival of “an infinity of strange people,” “an infinity of bad subjects,” and a “quantity of beggars, insolvent and homeless mass of people who have thrown themselves into their community.” All migrants possess the same main characteristic, namely laziness: they practice a “lazy and leisurely life” and generally are described as layabouts (fainéants). They spend their day begging and even “send their children to beg bread instead of putting them into service” (another notes that they “refuse to work or make their children work”). Other elements of their lifestyle came in for criticism, notably the fact that they packed many people into the same room or apartment: they “lodge many families together,” and “without being related or allied they come together to live in the same room.” It was largely this element that led to them being described as libertines as well as beggars, vagabonds, and layabouts. The notion that they brought “disorder” with them crops up several times: “they yield themselves to all types of excess and disorder and sometimes even to crimes.” One noted that “disorder and brigandage is multiplied,” while one mentioned that several thefts had been discovered recently by local officials. One of the aspects that most bothered long-term residents was how little was known about these poorer migrants. Ordinary people did not so much look askance at mobility, but they were disturbed by the arrival of people who had no apparent connection to the area or visible means of support. Good migrants were those who knew someone locally, came with references, and stayed for at least long enough to pay taxes. Little was known about many poor migrants, and villagers let their imaginations run free. “Maybe they have been thrown out of other regions,” opined one village community; “they have been chased or banished from their pays,” wrote another; and a third expressed concern about “people who have been banished from their previous residence by their bad conduct.” Although these community requests date from the eighteenth century, there is little that is recognizably linked to Enlightenment discourses

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about poverty. There is notably little discussion of the transformation of the able-bodied poor into productive members of society, and the complaints seem primarily to reflect early modern, pre-Enlightenment attitudes. Only one community was much concerned with making poor migrants productive: the community of Bourbon-Lancy (13 June 1768) argued that able-bodied vagrants should be working as servants in farms (their laziness “does harm to the cultivation of the land”), and ordered that the local officials draw up a list of “all beggars ... who are able to work in service.” No community mentioned the “public good,” despite the familiarity of village inhabitants with the concept, as demonstrated in petitions over taxation or road construction.29 Burgundian municipalities sought to control migration by requiring local officials to vet all new arrivals. In the first half of the eighteenth century there was some experimentation with different types of rules governing in-migrants. A few communities tried to impose barriers to in-migration or to expel those already residing who had not followed the rules. In 1711, for example, the small city of Mirebeau ordered that upon arrival all new inhabitants had to pay 36 livres to the local officials, a significant amount that was about twice as much as the average annual taille assessment and far more than what the working poor could afford to pay. The magistrates of the Parlement of Dijon, however, refused to allow it and never approved any policies requiring a payment for residence.30 In 1772, when approving a request from the community of Fontaine-Française, the magistrates specified that the proposal was accepted “with the exception of the residency fee, which is stricken from the deliberation, and we forbid the supplicants from requiring any fees from strangers who come to establish themselves in their community.”31 This is not surprising, given the magistrates’ support for the principle that all Burgundians should be free to establish their residence where they saw fit. The question of what to do with those already living in the community at the moment that the new law passed, however, was sticky, and the Parlement’s jurisdiction evolved over time. In 1741 and 1743, the magistrates accepted clauses specifying that those “strangers” already residing within the cities of Autun and Châtillon-sur-Seine had one week to register with the municipal government, on threat of expulsion. By the 1760s, however, the Parlement would no longer countenance the expulsion of those already residing, and in several cases the magistrates explicitly rejected such clauses. They ratified regulations within the seigneuries of Bissey (29 December 1769) and Verdun (21 May 1767) with the following caveat: “this ruling

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will be executed only upon those who will establish themselves in the future.” By the second half of the eighteenth century most of the requests sent to the Parlement of Dijon for approval contained the same measures. Town and village officials knew what was being tried in other communities and were familiar with the kinds of rules that the Parlement was supporting to deal with the fiscal problems related to the mobility of the poor. This was made explicit in the comments of the general procurator to his colleagues in the Parlement when the village of Pourlans (27 March 1783) sent its request: “the same precautions have already been taken in different justices, and the court has been pleased to approve them.” Burgundian communities regulated in-migrants through rules imposed on landlords. Upon arrival, strangers were to present a certificate of good life and morals to the village alderman (échevin or procureur syndic). This certificate was to have been issued by either the priest or the local court in their most recent place of residence and should testify to their “life and morals, faculties, profession, state or commerce.” If the papers were in order, the alderman provided written permission to the new resident, which he needed in order to rent a home or a room in the community. Enforcement was to be assured in two ways. The first, and perhaps most obvious, was the expulsion of new in-migrants who failed to perform all of the steps, but it is highly unlikely that communities really kept track of new arrivals and actively expelled a significant number of people. For this reason the most important enforcementrelated part of the ruling was the requirement that a landlord could only rent to someone who had written permission to reside in the community. A landlord who did not meet this requirement automatically assumed responsibility for all of the migrant’s unpaid taxes (“tailles royales, négociales et capitation,” as well as work duties [corvées] and the lodging of soldiers in cities) and in many cases was also subject to a 10 livre fine. Burgundian communities of varying sizes, including villages, towns and cities, used this procedure. In fact the use of migrant-monitoring systems that placed the onus on landlords and those providing lodging was common in French cities in the eighteenth century, including Paris.32 The forty-nine municipalities that requested legalization of their regulations include twelve cities and six small towns, with the remaining communities being villages. Almost half of these villages were located either directly along the Saône river or in close proximity to it. The requests

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for legalization occasionally described the special circumstances that made their community a particular target of poor migrants, and several mentioned the importance of easy access by water and road. The inhabitants of Pierre-de-Bresse (27 March 1783) noted that, “being in proximity to the rivers of the Doubs and Saône, to the great road to go from Lons-le-Saunier to Chalon, Seurre, Verdun and Dijon and where there is regularly a market each Monday, seems favourable to lazy people.” In Vitteaux (21 January 1769) the mayor and council pointed out that the problem of vagabonds “that the road attracts” required urgent action on the part of the community. Similarly the barony of Austrude (17 March 1783) was situated “along the road from Semur to Noyers and along that from Avalon to Montbard, which means that many strangers pass through, given the good condition of these roads, in addition to the waters that pass through the village.” People generally knew of the rules put into place because the new laws were read out by the priest and repeated annually at the assizes of the local seigneurial court that were attended by all heads of household. In the justice of Belleneuve, for example, in 1780 the judge had the following read out: “Wishing to prevent the introduction of bad subjects ... we expressly forbid the renting of any lodging to strangers, even to those who have lived here before,” without the presentation of a certificate.33 A comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of these policies is not possible, in part because of a lack of documentation in communal, judicial, and seigneurial archives concerning the enforcement of the rules. The absence of registers listing the permissions granted after the verification of certificates may simply reflect their disappearance rather than the fact that no such registers existed. A decade spent working in seigneurial court records provided no examples of landlords sentenced to pay their tenants’ taxes in application of these rules, but this is not conclusive, because my search has been far from exhaustive. My research in seigneurial courts has turned up only two cases of migrants expelled for not having completed the formalities of inmigration. In 1777, during the annual assizes of the seigneurial court of Pasques, the judge required François Gindré to “leave the village of Pasques and go live elsewhere” because he had never presented his certificate. The judge also ordered “Denis Aubri who provided him with lodging to expel him from his home” and reminded all inhabitants that they should not rent to any new villagers without certificates that had been seen and signed by the judge. However, what may initially seem

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like simple enforcement of the kinds of politics that many communities had in place by the late-eighteenth century actually turns out to be more complicated. There was no action taken against the landlord who had illegally rented to him and who could have been fined and made to pay for his wood thefts. More important, immediately after the judge had ordered him to leave, the inhabitants verbally submitted a litany of complaints against Gindré. In 1775 he had illegally cut some trees in the communal forest. He had also stolen two cartloads of stumps and other wood from the seigneurial forest and had ploughed and planted small plots in the commons. The court assessed 40 livres in fines and restitution against him, although he likely never paid any of it. The judge ended with a reminder that he was to leave the pays, “on threat of being pursued extraordinarily” (that is, judged as a criminal for the wood thefts).34 What looks initially like an expulsion for not registering as a new inhabitant turns out to be the banishment of a troublemaker at the request of the community. Nobody denounced him to the court for at least three years, and it was only after his repeated abuse of village resources that the court and the community banded together to get rid of him. The other case, which also came up at the annual assizes of the local seigneurial court, involved someone who was not necessarily a troublemaker. In Bonnencontre in 1779 the prosecutor asked the judge to assess a 10 livre fine against Claude Besancenot “for having given asylum in his home since last August to a certain stranger [inconnu] François Voisin who has presented no certificate of life and morals either to the village alderman or to the officers of the court.” Besancenot’s explanation that “it was only after several inhabitants of Argilly vouched for Voisin that he received him into his home” reveals that potential landlords sensibly conducted their own enquiries, which were no doubt more stringent than the simple requirement of the official certificate. The judge did not assign the fine but ordered Besancenot to expel Voisin within a week if he did not provide the necessary paperwork to the alderman.35 Policies put in place by the later decades of the eighteenth century were largely ineffective at controlling the mobility of the poor, mostly because ordinary people were willing to tolerate the arrival of new people as long as they did not behave as criminals. In 1775 the city of Toulon-sur-Arroux requested a ruling from the Parlement of Dijon concerning the presence of strangers. These strangers, who arrived each fall and left in the spring, were decimating their communal forests. In 1764 the city had put in place the usual rules requiring certificates in

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order for people to rent homes, but “despite this arrêt, we see each year a number of unknown people fixing their residence in Toulon, whether because of the ease with which they obtain certificates of life and morals from the priests who are happy to see them leave their parishes or whether because of the greed of landlords who rent their homes, often a single room in which more than four households use the same hearth; many of these unknown people rent a basement or an attic for their residence, and landlords do not ask to see either a certificate or a written permission.” The only solution that the municipal officers or the Parlement could offer was to reiterate the same requirements, which hardly seems likely to have brought the problem under control.36 Indeed, in their requests sent to the Parlement of Dijon for permission to regulate in-migrants, communities spent almost as much time criticizing settled inhabitants for being too quick to rent rooms and apartments as they did complaining about the behaviour of poor migrants. In Nolay (27 June 1786) they specified that “this disorder has its source in the greed of those who lodge unknown people,” a phrase that was repeated nearly verbatim in the requests from the community of Minot (26 September 1787) and Toulon-sur-Arroux (28 July 1775). Historians have noted the laxity of enforcement of the rules targeting migrants. Indeed it is a recurring theme in the contributions to an important book on the policing of migrants in France.37 The editors of the work note that historians of all periods are struck by the nonenforcement of the rules governing the policing of migrants in cities. They argue that the repetition and the re-issuing of rules are more than just proof that the rules were not enforced, and that over time new social practices and behaviours could percolate down into society.38 In the same volume Daniel Roche notes that ordinary people did not necessarily agree with the definitions of residents, migrants, and vagrants imposed by the laws. He argues that the notion of a “moral economy” that has proven so helpful in understanding collective behaviour related to prices and taxation could also be applied to the history of the policing of migrants and migration.39 The rules that sought to ensure that only solvent residents moved into communities were often flouted because of the kindness or the greed of landlords and neighbours. This may have meant that people could move at will into any village of their choosing, or much of the local regulation of in-migration was done informally. There is evidence that informal regulation of in-migration did have some effect on where people were able to establish their residence. The example of common land

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presented in chapter 6 suggests that a combination of access rules to communal resources and local control over the stock of homes probably worked to keep out potential migrants in ways that remain mostly hidden to us. Movement into and out of a village had a significant impact on the financial situations of established residents through taxation and access to communal resources, and it is not surprising that communities sought to retain some influence over the arrival of new inhabitants and even succeeded to a small degree. Residents and “Strangers” What does acknowledgment of the ubiquity of migration mean for rural history? Much rural history is concerned with the history of village communities and has argued for the existence of a strong sense of local identity formed in opposition to the seigneur, the central state, and the neighbouring communities.40 Once we recognize that those who lived in their parish of birth for their entire life comprised only a small proportion of the inhabitants of most rural communities, this opens up a series of questions concerning local and regional identity, the disposition of common resources, the regulation of in-migration, and the integration of new inhabitants into the community. James Collins is one of the few historians to have written about the impact of mobility on the ways that villages in France conducted their affairs.41 He argues that the families that controlled local political affairs often tended to form long-term local dynasties and to remain in the village for generations. While wealthy tenant ploughmen did move over large distances, in general much of the mobile population in the villages were poorer landless day workers and small farmers whose voice counted for little in determining village affairs.42 Everywhere in France villages were faced with the issues of how membership in the community could be acquired or conferred, but the solutions could differ depending on a host of factors. In the Middle Ages most rural communities in France imposed fees or other conditions on those wishing to acquire full residency rights, similar to acquisition of bourgeois status in cities, although by the eighteenth century most probably no longer did so. Jean-Pierre Gutton lists Burgundy as one of the provinces that maintained these types of rules into the eighteenth century, and he associates their survival with the strength of communal agricultural regulations.43 This is based on a statement by Pierre de Saint Jacob that it was common for Burgundian villages to charge

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a habitantage fee, but he cites only a single example, that of Menesble, where it cost two bushels each of wheat and oats to acquire the right to reside, and he provides no explanation of the period from which the example is taken.44 Antoine Follain questions whether most Burgundian communities still collected such dues in the eighteenth century.45 None of the village regulations approved by the Parlement made any mention of the practice, other than to forbid it. The provincial intendant and the Parlement of Dijon emphasized the importance of allowing people to live where they saw fit and repeatedly refused to countenance any kind of fee that could discourage migration. By the eighteenth century, villages in the province had no authority to forbid people from moving in, although they may have required that permission be obtained to build new homes. There was some diversity within France in terms of the ways that villages regulated and controlled in-migration, but in most cases by the eighteenth century the community did not have the formal right to exclude migrants. One exception seems to be Alsace, where villages named committees to oversee the admission of new inhabitants and required payment of both an admission tax and a deposit. Still, bourgeois inhabitants repeatedly complained that their community allowed anyone to move in.46 Jean-Michel Boehler analysed the geographic origins and occupations of in-migrants to Alsatian villages: 50 per cent came from outside the province, and only 3 per cent of the in-migrants practised an agricultural profession.47 It thus seems likely that most farmers who migrated from nearby were accepted into the community without these formalities and that the procedure resembled the acquisition of bourgeois status in a city, a procedure with which very few new residents ever bothered. In Normandy, communities apparently imposed no restrictions, as they were mostly interested in having new taxpayers to help share the tax burden.48 In Burgundy there was no formal distinction made between the different types of residents when it came to their status as members of the community. The right to participate in village deliberations and decisions was conferred, at least theoretically, by paying taxes. In some parts of France, rural communities allowed in-migration but imposed strict divisions between various types of residents. In general it seems clear that communities in the mountains, where good land was often scarce and population density was high, limited in-migration more strictly than did villages in the rest of the country. In much of the Pyrenees strict limitations on the number of “houses,” single-heir

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succession, and the exclusion of those not tied to a house from the use of commons limited in-migration.49 The exclusion of migrants (other than those marrying into established stem households) from official community life makes them very hard to count. Patrice Poujade estimates that “simple inhabitants” (those with no political or economic rights) made up 30 per cent of the population in communities in the Pyrenees, although this includes both in-migrants and the non-inheriting native born.50 The situation was probably similar in the Alps, although it has been demonstrated more conclusively for Switzerland than for France. In the Tessin, for example, any potential new resident in a village required the permission of both the community and the court, plus the payment of a deposit of 50 scudi, “in order to assure the living of his sons, who will have no resources, as well as the payment of any debts or taxes.”51 Within the pays de Gex, a mountain region outside of the province of Burgundy but administered by the intendant of the generality of Dijon, villages apparently accepted migrants but charged a tax for access to commons on “those who, having established themselves in these communities, benefit from common land.” The tax, assessed according to the number of animals held, was relatively modest (1–4 livres) but may have discouraged some migrants.52 There was, therefore, considerable regional diversity within France in terms of the regulations pertaining to the integration of new inhabitants. And at a local level there were probably informal practices and unwritten rules that historians only rarely glimpsed, although these were becoming less common as intendants and local courts formalized their oversight of local affairs.53 People regularly travelled within a 10 km radius of their place of residence, and about half of all moves took place within that same area. Does this mean that people identified with this broader geographic micro-region rather than with their community of residence? French historians have demonstrated that small regions existed and played an important role in ordinary people’s lives,54 but while there was doubtless some identification with a small region, it remained much weaker than the local identity focused on the village.55 In northern Burgundy, despite the fact that people regularly travelled within an area considerably larger than a single village, they identified themselves primarily with their village of residence. When ordinary people mentioned their “pays,” they meant the village in which they lived. Emilliand Guillin, for example, testified that it was several years ago that “he left the pays.” He had, however, only moved

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to the town of Seurre, a community contiguous to Grosbois where the inquiry was carried out.56 Claude Guyenot, a ploughman, could not testify to what happened in an inheritance case because “he does not live in the same pays”; he too lived in the next village, no more than a few kilometres away.57 The conflation of village and pays is also evident when a seventeen-year-old engraver noted, when asked his village of birth, that he was “native of he knows not what pays” because his parents died when he was only three years old.58 Jeanne Bergeret, the wife of a vigneron, criticized two young men from the village for fighting, saying, “It was shameful between people from the same pays.”59 In 1776 two men were talking in the village of Écharnant, a certain Thévenot, a local, and Laurent Cordier, from Vic-des-Prés. They saw a woman pass through the village, and, recognizing her, Thévenot said, “There’s a woman from your pays who is going by.” Cordier is said to have replied “that she was not from his pays, but close to it.” It turns out that the woman (who was murdered on the road before she could arrive home) was from Bessey-la-Cour, the closest community to Vic, and only about 2 km away.60 In the cahiers de doléances prepared in each parish, there is the same direct association between pays and village. When the inhabitants of Aisy-sous-Thil complained about mainmorte, the seigneurial right that forced people to live with their parents if they wished to inherit, they used village and pays as direct synonyms: “villages subject to mainmorte are worth less than pays that are not burdened by this right.”61 When the inhabitants of Praslay wanted to request that repairs be carried out to the local roads from village to village, they referred to the state of the “roads from one pays to another.”62 In an agricultural inquiry conducted in the province in 1786 the priest of Saint-Aubin noted that “the consumption of oats in this pays is very small” as there were only three horses and seven or eight mules, numbers that clearly refer to a single village.63 Thus people who referred to mon pays generally were speaking about their village of residence rather than their community of birth or a larger region around their place of residence. There is little indication in the records that ordinary people identified themselves with a geographic area composed of multiple communities.64 This is not to say that there was not a larger sense of identification, with the province and the kingdom. Villages were in frequent contact with provincial administrations, most often the provincial estates, but also the intendant and even the Parlement, so it is perhaps unsurprising that, in the 1789 parish cahiers de doléances, communities frequently invoked their provincial

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privileges and liberties as Burgundians. Like many other communities, for example, the village of Dracy-les-Vitteaux requested that the province’s “ancient privileges” be maintained, while acknowledging that reform of provincial institutions was necessary.65 Frequent recourse to provincial authorities may have led to the development of a provincial identity, but it remained weak compared to the sense of belonging to the local community, or at least played a less important role in daily affairs. A sense of belonging to the local community can sometimes be seen in the insults that were proffered against the villagers who were perceived to be outsiders. The most common of these involved the claim that a crime had forced him to move. Jean Jobard insulted Jean Chaussenot by saying that “if he had not killed two men in his pays he would not be living in Pagny today,” and he went on to add that all of Chaussenot’s property came from thefts against the community.66 In SaintVivant, the wife of Michel Vaugeon spread rumours about Claude Vincent’s wife, accusing her of being “an army whore [coureuse d’armée] worth nothing, and [saying] that she had been chased and banished from her pays.”67 Jean Gallant was overheard insulting the wife of François Grivot by saying that “she was a damn bitch and a whore, that she lost her children, and that it would have been better for 500 devils to come to the pays than her.”68 These insults could be understood as proof that non-native inhabitants were perpetually seen as outsiders, were it not for the fact that they linked the non-native status to some other undesirable characteristic rather than it constituting an insult in itself.69 The insulters often invoked past criminal behaviour, the possibility that a woman had had a baby out of wedlock or that a man had stolen property, or the simple fact of being unknown to locals. Uncertainty about new inhabitants who had no apparent connections to the community could leave the migrants open to accusations, whether real or fantastic, by those who had other reasons to dislike them. At one village assembly an inhabitant loudly told another to leave the meeting because “we don’t know him, we don’t know where he’s from and maybe he came from the Bonnet Rouge under the linden trees” (a reference to the boys’ orphanage in Dijon).70 The possibility that newly arrived inhabitants might have been expelled from their previous place of residence haunted the imaginations of Burgundian villagers, but the migrants whose reasons for moving to the village were known were unlikely to create much scandal. Like the term pays, villagers used the word étranger (stranger) to distinguish between those who were inhabitants of the village and those

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who resided elsewhere. In other words, people referred to those whom they knew well and who lived very nearby as strangers. They even referred to people born in the village as strangers after they had moved away. Judges who reminded villagers of the rules governing the renting of homes specified that new inhabitants were all strangers: “we forbid the inhabitants to receive any strangers to make their residence and rent buildings to them without the permission of the judicial officers.”71 The same term, étranger, appears in relation to the access to and use of common land: strangers are those who have no access to commons. Villagers sometimes took their own part of common resources and sold them to non-inhabitants, including wood and quarried stone, both of which were reserved for inhabitants’ personal use.72 The village of Billey is a good example, because the judge explained clearly that a stranger was anyone not residing in the village: “we forbid ... the inhabitants of Billey from selling to strangers, by taking any wood outside of the village and territory of Billey.”73 Similarly, in Meursault landless inhabitants were not to pasture rented sheep on commons, regardless of whether the sheep were rented from “inhabitants or strangers,” and a litigant argued in court that he should only be obliged to register (and pay stamp tax) on his marriage contract in court cases that involved “strangers and not ... inhabitants of the pays.”74 The judge of Belleneuve reminded villagers that they could not rent to “strangers, even people who had left the village,” unless they showed the relevant certificate, which means that even those who were born in the community became strangers when they left.75 The clerk of the seigneurial court of SaintSeine-sur-Vingeanne differentiated between those fines to be paid by “inhabitants” and by “étrangers” for forest offences.76 In almost all cases the term étranger was used simply to designate those who were not residents in the community in question and who therefore had no rights of access to local resources. Very occasionally, however, the term had a slightly broader meaning, indicating that something other than simple residence could be required in order to lose the status of stranger. In 1786, during an investigation into local tax-collecting practices in Blancey, one of the inhabitants, François Finot, a tenant farmer with half a plough team, told the investigator that he knew nothing about how the rolls were prepared “since he is a stranger to the pays.” Finot therefore thought that one could live in a community as a stranger. However, he also added that he had paid taxes only once in the community, which means that he had been a resident of the community for two years (the “following year” plus one

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tax-paying year). The period of being a resident stranger was limited: Finot was attempting to persuade a government official that he was not responsible for the community’s tax fraud, and he may have hoped that he could stretch the category of stranger to make himself seem innocent. A similar use of the term can be found in the 1796 census list for Ternant, Rolle, and les Rentes, in which the agent specified that “all of the individuals on the present document are not strangers.”77 It would seem superfluous to specify that those listed as residents were not strangers, and this was probably a reference to temporary residents, those who had come into the community but had left before paying taxes or assuming any of the responsibilities of residence. Indeed in the 1763 request by the town of Seurre to control in-migration, there is talk about étrangers “without homes or faculties” who pay no taxes and assume none of the burdens of life in the community. It was thus possible to remain a stranger while being a resident, but generally only for a short period and by refusing to share any of the burdens that inhabitants were required to bear. This is similar to the situation in the city of Aix-en-Provence where, despite the very small number of people who bothered to acquire the official status of bourgeois resident of the city, those who had resided only a few months automatically lost their status as étranger: “a stranger is not one who comes from elsewhere, but someone who continues to be from elsewhere.” Residency status in Aix was conferred by residence, work, and acquisition of property in the community, in other words by participation in community life.78 It is also similar to early modern Milan, which defined a foreigner as “every person who does not reside permanently in the state with his family, even if he is a native inhabitant.”79 The Integration of New Inhabitants and the Social Costs of Migration People did not think of immigrant families as strangers, and the status of inhabitant was acquired simply by participating in local life. But this does not mean that migrants could expect to be fully integrated into local life or that there were no social costs associated with migration. Paul-André Rosental provides some significant clues in his important study of nineteenth-century France. For example, he notes that shortdistance migrants married native inhabitants about half of the time. Those moving over short distances were therefore relatively well integrated into local networks, since natives made up about half of the pool

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of eligible partners. However, three-quarters of long-distance migrants married another migrant, which suggests that non-natives from significant distances away were not always well integrated into the local community.80 Steven King has analysed the relationship between social and geographic mobility in the West Riding in England between 1650 and 1820. Based on family reconstruction enriched by other types of records, King shows that few first-generation migrants became landowners, migrants were more likely to find themselves on poor relief, and they often found it more difficult to get credit. By the second generation these disadvantages had disappeared.81 It is not clear to what extent the differences identified by Rosental and King were due to the social selectivity of migration rather than to the movement into a new place; those who migrated were poorer than those who did not and may have been less likely to buy land or marry well even if they had remained in their place of birth. A thorough examination of the integration of migrants into rural communities would most likely involve the reconstruction of village social, economic, and familial networks, perhaps by using witnessing at marriages and baptisms.82 The approach adopted here is less exhaustive and provides results that are provisional. It involves determining whether those appointed to local office in their community were native born or migrants.83 Communities named those whom they saw as reliable and trustworthy to the positions,84 and determining which officers were native-born inhabitants allows insight into the extent to which migrants could be integrated into the local community. Communities accepted non-natives in some positions but generally only after they had had a relatively long stay in the village. About 65 per cent of the municipal officers were natives in the sample from 1758 to 1762, only slightly higher than in the overall population. An estimated 82 per cent of officers were born in the village or were married to a native woman, whereas the comparable proportion was less than 70 per cent in the 1796 census. There was a slight preference for the nomination of native inhabitants in virtually all types of local offices, and exogamous marriage allowed a man to become integrated in his new community as though he were native born. The preference for native-born officials, while real, was not overwhelming, as we see in table 7.1. There are several types of offices for which there was only a weak preference for native inhabitants, including alderman, assessor, field guard, and estimator. However, tax collectors and principal inhabitants were almost exclusively born in the village or

Regulating Migration  171  Table 7.1.  Village officers by migration status Total no. % Native % of Non-natives who % of Officers who were arrived in exogamous neither native born nor marriages* married to a native woman Tax assessor Tax collector Vestry officer Field guard Estimator Principal inhabitant Alderman

659 140 38 530 470 189 296

64 76 58 62 63 75 67

51 71 38 53 49 82 51

18 7 26 18 19 4 16

*This is calculated from a smaller sample of only 599 non-native officers because it excluded those whose geographic origins were determined from the witness depositions.

married to someone who was, because they were basically responsible for the taxes of the entire village and could be imprisoned or forced to pay for those villagers who were behind in their taxes. This means that they needed to be able to mobilize a familial network within the community in order to raise the money or to exert pressure on recalcitrant taxpayers. Non-natives could find themselves nominated for several of the different positions within the community, but in general it was only after a relatively long stay. The average stay before being nominated to local office was sixteen years (the median was fifteen years).85 Almost nobody was named by his neighbours to assume local office before being a resident for at least five years (see table 7.2), and about twothirds of non-natives had resided for at least twenty years in the village. This partly reflects the age of officers (most were in their forties) and the higher migration rates of younger people. Still, even among those officers who were in their fifties, virtually none had arrived within the previous ten years. More than a decade was required before a migrant could be considered by his new neighbours to be trustworthy. Table 7.2.  Number of years that non-native officers had resided in the village, n = 330

Tax assessor Field guard Alderman Estimator

0–5 years

6–19 years

20 and over

3% 2% 6% 6%

30% 40% 34% 31%

69% 59% 60% 64%

172  Strangers and Neighbours

Office-holding patterns reveal some of the difficulties of becoming integrated into a new community, except by marriage. But local officers were not necessarily those who held the reins of power in the village. There was sometimes a little money to be made in these offices because aldermen were paid for the trips they made on behalf of the community, and tax collectors charged a small amount for their services, but in general, however, villagers saw local office as onerous, in part because the job could cost the officer money.86 Also, because even small communities had to find up to a dozen officers each year among the male heads of household, the responsibilities may have been shared broadly enough to exaggerate the openness of village society. It is also worth emphasizing that none of these positions conferred real power on the holder because tax assessments had to be approved by the village community (in most cases this was just a formality, but villages sometimes disavowed an assessment), field guards had to have their reports and seizures validated by the local court, and even aldermen had no authority to commit the village without the express approval of the assembled community. The formal decisional authority in villages resided in the “community of inhabitants” rather than in the officers themselves.87 According to provincial law, all heads of household were obliged to attend meetings of the community of inhabitants.88 It was, however, rare to have a high turnout, except when the local judge or the intendant had ordered a meeting and insisted that the document recording the decision contain the individual opinion of all eligible villagers. Non-native inhabitants rarely attended village assemblies. In northern Burgundy few villages maintained much in the way of communal archives before the Revolution, so the records of village assemblies are distributed throughout several types of documents and are generally easiest to find in the archives of notaries and seigneurial courts. The minutes of each meeting included a list of those attending, which can be matched to mobility data in the villages for a small sample of assemblies.89 If we exclude the unmatched villagers, fully 80 per cent of those attending village assemblies were native born (see table 7.3). For seven of the ten assemblies, matching to parish registers revealed that 57 per cent of the non-native men were married to a native woman, which means that about 92 per cent of those who attended these village assemblies were therefore either born in the village or married to someone who was. Some might argue that minutes from village assemblies did not necessarily list all those who were present, but there is no reason to suspect

Table 7.3.  Migration status of inhabitants attending village assemblies Village and document* Reason for assembly

Date

Documents for matching

Total no. Natives NonNon-natives Unknown attending natives married to native wife

Chamblanc Chambolle 4E 54/929

23 Oct. 1785 28 Apr. 1755

1796 census witness depositions

55 70

33 36

9 4

3 ?

13 30

1 Feb. 1780

witness deposition

36

16

3

?

17

repairs to a bridge corvée on royal roads Corberon 4E 54/760 banvin (seigneurial due) Corberon 4E 54/760 communal forests Corgengoux B2 546/3 second cutting of hay Flammerans B2 598/6 lawsuit over commons Flammerans B2 597/8 second cutting of hay Gilly-lès-Citeaux 4E repairs to church 54/933 steeple Martrois B2 579/1 nomination of extra tax assessor Nogent B2 783/2 second cutting of hay

3 Sep. 1780 witness depositions 16 June 1785 parish registers and witness depositions 21 June 1781 parish registers 13 July 1783 parish registers 30 Nov. 1760 parish registers

39 17

12 12

6 5

? 4

21 0

42 37 29

33 31 22

8 6 7

4 1 7

1 0 0

9 May 1784

parish registers

32

25

7

4

0

8 Aug. 1784

1796 census

18

7

2

2

9

*All documents are in the ADCO. Those in series B2 are to be found in the archives of the relevant seigneurial court, while 4E are notarial archives.

174  Strangers and Neighbours

that the lists were not generally complete, especially since they were frequently drawn up by the clerk of the seigneurial court.90 But it matters little. Those whose names were left off the lists did not belong to the “most sane and major part of the inhabitants,” the expression used in these records to demonstrate the legitimacy of the assembly to decide for the community. In addition, there seem to be no significant patterns that depend on the reasons for the assembly. All inhabitants would have to contribute money to repair the bridge in Chamblanc or the steeple in Gilly, and all therefore had a stake in the meeting. While the sample here is relatively small, each of the ten village assemblies follows the same pattern. It looks very much as though the village assembly in practice was composed almost exclusively of men who were connected to well-established familial networks through birth or marriage. This informal policy of Burgundian rural communities was never described or explained in official documents. The provincial intendants and other authorities were concerned that communities were taking costly decisions in assemblies in which only a minority of households were represented, and they sometimes ordered a second assembly where the individual opinion of each member was to be recorded.91 In 1773, before agreeing to legalize a new tax roll for the village of Sennecey, the Dijon Parlement ordered that each eligible inhabitant express his opinion at the meeting.92 While such cases are not rare, the intendant or the élus of the Estates generally did not express concern that non-natives had little voice in village assemblies. It may be that this was implicit in references to factions and cabals because it would be unlikely that non-natives could set themselves up at the head of a village faction. Rural communities in northern Burgundy were more or less controlled by native men and men who had married native women.93 This makes sense considering the non-persistence of most migration into these communities. As we have seen, only about 60 per cent of migrants stayed for more than a year, and only 33 per cent persisted for more than five years. It would have been a serious mistake to involve all of these people in long-term decision making because the majority would have moved away before the costs of their decisions would be borne. There were barriers to full integration into the village that apparently persisted for several decades. This tells us little, however, about social bonds between natives and non-natives. Non-natives were frequently called as witnesses in lawsuits, and there are many examples of credit relationships between natives and non-natives.94 More research is needed to resolve the issue of the integration of migrants into early

Regulating Migration  175 

modern French villages, notably on the mechanisms allowing new inhabitants to become trusted and accepted. It nevertheless seems clear that migrants sacrificed some of their political capital by moving even a short distance other than for marriage and would likely find themselves at least partially marginalized in local political affairs in their new community for a decade or more. Conclusion Villages in northern Burgundy were made up of a mixture of nativeborn inhabitants, those who married into established families, relatively well-integrated long-term migrants, and a host of short-term migrants, many of whom were young and single. There were no formal barriers to those who wanted to move to a new village, because no community had the right to refuse residency to those who arrived with a certificate of life and morals, and it is unlikely that most in-migrants even bothered with that. Furthermore, as long as migrants paid their taxes, provincial authorities did not intervene to discourage migration. In responding to an agricultural survey in Year V, the administrator responsible for the form for the canton of Flavigny estimated that the total population was 5,054, but he added that “many come and go. We counted those presently existing.”95 It would make little sense to nominate these shortterm residents as local officials, and living in a community was not the same thing as being an integral part of it. Burgundian villages had an inner circle that was composed mostly of native men and those who had married native women. It was from this group that village officers were primarily recruited, and, most important, these were the villagers who made the decisions that had an impact on the life of all inhabitants. The line between the inner and outer circles was never entirely closed, however, if only because there were not enough native inhabitants to do all the work required to patrol the fields, defend the community’s interests, and assess and collect taxes. Non-native inhabitants could also have their voices heard on occasion, notably at the annual assizes before the local court or when the intendant or the Estates insisted that all eligible inhabitants vote on a specific question. All administrative bodies in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy were concerned with mobility and migration. One way to interpret this would be to emphasize the irrational fears that the mobile poor engendered and to argue that the regulations were an attempt to establish boundaries between rule-abiding settled inhabitants and a

176  Strangers and Neighbours

counterculture of poor migrants. But village communities were much more concerned with protecting their communal resources and ensuring that taxes were paid fairly than with making the able-bodied poor work, and many of the rules governing migration were related to taxation rather than to poor-relief issues. The energy devoted to regulating mobility in eighteenth-century Burgundy is simply evidence of the extent of migration between villages each year. Many of the regulations were applied and enforced selectively, but, with migration rates and nonnative proportions as high as they were, it would be surprising indeed if there were no regulations. Keith Snell has argued that community-based identity existed in English villages in the nineteenth century, despite the very widespread mobility that characterized this society.96 This also applies to eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, even if the sense of “community identity” depended on excluding a substantial number of people who were living or staying in the village, such as domestic servants and migrant workers. And others might need to live in the village for a decade or longer before their opinion counted in local affairs. Perhaps there was an expectation that people take at least a second six- or nineyear lease in order to demonstrate their commitment to the community. It was possible for non-natives who were willing to invest their time to become members of the inner circle, and those born in a village of nonnative parents were fully accepted as native inhabitants. Simona Cerutti has published an analysis of what it meant to be a “stranger” in the city of Turin during the eighteenth century. She argues that the word did not have the meaning or connotations in the eighteenth century that it has today, and she cautions especially against assuming that a stranger was somehow defined as an “Other” in the early modern period. Strangers were those who were extraneous to the community in the sense that they were not part of a stable network of sociability, family, and work. She emphasizes that the status of stranger was transitory and that the process of becoming a citizen of Turin (and losing the status of stranger) involved gaining the confidence of those already residing. The process was gradual and never entirely complete for anyone, even the native born.97 She also cautions against assuming that being accepted as belonging to a community meant adopting a new identity. Belonging had to do with access to goods held in common and to credit (both money and reputation), rather than with being identified and identifying oneself with the group. These insights are helpful for understanding part of the complex problem of the way

Regulating Migration  177 

in which the integration of new inhabitants took place in northern Burgundian villages. As in most early modern cities, the main issue separating strangers from inhabitants was simply a person’s place of residence, which was determined by where people paid their taxes and had access to common land and forests. Temporary migrants, minors, and vagabonds were excluded, but everyone else automatically lost the status of stranger as soon as they publicly acknowledged that they had changed their place of residence and they expressed their willingness to share in the burdens of residency. However, becoming a “citizen” or non-stranger of a rural community did not mean that one was entirely accepted. Migrants had to reside for many years before their neighbours would trust them enough to nominate them to the most important local offices, and there was a central core of local decision makers that was almost closed to those who were born elsewhere. Villages in northern Burgundy were very open to in-migration of all those who were willing to share in collective burdens, but they were slow to integrate them fully into the decision-making networks of the community.

Conclusion

The eighteenth century was largely a pre-statistical age without regular nominal censuses or population registers. Furthermore, France seems to lack the types of sources that have allowed historians of other western European countries to analyse migration and mobility in the period. In England ecclesiastical courts began the deposition of each witness with a residential history that included the places they had lived since birth, and the application of the Poor Laws in England and Scotland generated records concerning the migration of the working poor. Annual lists of those present at Easter mass can be found in several countries, and some German communities kept records of all newly arrived residents, including their places of origin or last residence. None of these sources exists in significant numbers for rural communities in northern Burgundy. Still, despite the seeming poverty of the sources, it is possible to reconstruct patterns of migration in rural France by combining information from a variety of documents and varying the scale of analysis. Using a combination of witness depositions, censuses, tax rolls and inquiries, parish registers, and municipal and provincial administrative archives allows us to address a greater range of questions than a single-source approach can, notably because we can situate people within their communities. Migration and mobility were not marginal phenomena in eighteenthcentury northern Burgundian villages. At any given time at least twofifths of the adult residents of rural communities were living elsewhere than their place of birth. While native-born inhabitants generally formed a slight majority in village communities, it would be highly misleading to argue on this basis that most country dwellers were “sedentary,” as non-native proportions are not residential histories. A sizeable

Conclusion 179 

proportion of native-born inhabitants either had already out-migrated and returned or would move out of their community of birth sometime later in life. In Corgengoux fewer than one out of five native-born taxpayers died in the village, which figure does not account for those who had left and then returned before reaching their mid-twenties and starting to pay taxes. Many people who had never moved at the time that they appeared in the records would emigrate later in life. Villages in northern Burgundy included 40–50 per cent non-natives and 15–20 per cent return-migrant, native-born inhabitants. Among the other 30–45 per cent of not-yet-moved inhabitants, about a third would leave the community at some later date, leaving about 20–35 per cent of adult villagers who would remain residents of the same community for their entire lifetime. Like most research in migration history for early modern Europe, these figures are uncertain, but they are probably reasonably accurate. About 5 per cent of the adult population of villages in northern Burgundy moved to another community in any given year, a rate that is not appreciably lower than in many industrialized countries today, including France. All of these figures include only permanent changes to the principal place of residence and therefore leave out the countless short-term, work-related migrations that brought so many people into every village for periods of varying length throughout the year. If a substantial majority of villagers could expect to move at least once in their lifetime, the distances involved were often quite small. With median distances between 10 and 15 km in most rural communities and for most socio-economic groups, few country dwellers crossed provincial, departmental, or even bailliage jurisdictional boundaries. There were groups of people in early modern Europe who moved over much greater distances than did villagers, including migrant masons and pit sawyers, sailors, nobles, itinerant traders, criminals, and members of religious minorities.1 But the short distances should not be made to bear too much interpretative weight. Migration scholars have long recognized that the vast majority of moves occur over short distances; the notion is central to gravity and intervening opportunities models of migration. Most important, rural migrants frequently left the area of a few villages with which they were intimately familiar and where they did most of their working, buying, selling, and socializing. The frequency with which ordinary people moved is striking in the light of the reconstruction of social networks that internal migration could entail. Witnesses never assumed that villagers remained in contact once

180  Strangers and Neighbours

they had moved away, and while family bonds were stronger than those of neighbourliness, guardianship records suggest that most of those who moved more than 10 km away ceased to have regular contact with their relatives. Migration was often associated with a change in both wealth and occupation. Many internal migrants were striking out in an attempt at upward mobility, and others were trying to leave behind economic woes; in both cases, this meant substantial upheaval and many changes to daily life. Others were moving because of life-course changes that uprooted in significant ways. Young adolescents beginning their first contract as a domestic servant faced major adjustment, even if subsequent service-related moves were probably easier.2 Moving to a husband’s or a wife’s village in exogamic marriage was also quite uprooting, although marriage also provided access to a network of support in the new community. In his account of his mother’s life Restif de la Bretonne commented on the fact that she “had no one on her side in the village, because she was a stranger,” although he gave no further details on her experience of integration into the community.3 Those recently widowed or old people who were no longer able to care for themselves also faced a life that was profoundly different after they moved. There were real costs associated with internal migration, notably a loss of social capital in terms of acceptance as a permanent member of the new community. Internal migrants were not pariahs, and it is important not to exaggerate the extent to which they were excluded from village life. Villagers generally accepted new inhabitants as long as they knew something about their antecedents and their reasons for moving. It is nevertheless true that newly arrived migrants were unlikely to be trusted enough for them to occupy positions of local importance such as tax collector or alderman. Of greater significance is that, even after a decade or more of residence in a new community, they were generally not welcome at the village assemblies in which local affairs were largely decided. Despite the social, familial, and economic costs of moving, a very substantial number of individuals and families nevertheless did so. One of the main goals of this book has been to demonstrate that migration was not simply something that ordinary people were “forced” into by the demographic system or a lack of suitable brides and grooms in a small community, but that it represented a conscious choice to seek out more favourable conditions. Owing to the nature of the records, it is easier to demonstrate that migrants sought certain types of communities

Conclusion 181 

than it is to say exactly why specific individuals chose to move. Potential migrants actively looked for places that had lower tax rates, they steered clear of villages where the seigneur had too much power, and they were drawn to places where the economy was doing well. It looks very much as though information about relative conditions in different communities circulated within the micro-region, helping to determine who moved how far and where. There were likely as many reasons to move as there were individuals moving, but the motivations fit into a few broad categories and were driven by a limited number of events in people’s lives. Economic factors and the need to make a living were by far the most important types of motivation, starting in adolescence with apprenticeship training and domestic service. During their twenties and thirties people moved around a great deal as they sought employment opportunities. Wealthier peasants did not move for employment (though their presence in a village generally drew employment-seeking migrants) but rather for economic opportunity in the form of land available for leasing. In the rare documents in which ordinary people explained why they moved, such as the exit interviews from Dijon and the court cases involving communal land, people cited economic motivations far more often than anything else. Money was not, however, the sole motivation for moving. A sense of family duty frequently played a role, as people moved to care for and be taken care of by parents, children, older siblings, and other family members. People moved because of homesickness and in order to be in the company of someone they missed. The search for companionship and love was involved in marriage-related migration, and a few people simply took to the road to find adventure. The life course was a crucial component of migration patterns. Mobility could begin shortly after birth and could continue to adolescence as one’s parents moved. Adolescence and early adulthood brought a higher chance of migrating than did any other stage of life, as people struck out on their own and then gradually settled down and found employment, housing, and a spouse. Women and men moved in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy, but there were some differences in their patterns and experiences of migration. Marriage brought more brides to their husband’s village than the inverse, as was the case in most of Europe at that period. The tendency, however, was too weak to make male and female migration patterns substantially different overall. More women than men moved from the countryside to the city: in the non-nominal 1786 census,

182  Strangers and Neighbours

Burgundian communities of under 1,000 inhabitants had a sex ratio of males to females of 0.97 while communities of over 2,500 had a sex ratio of 0.90. Ravenstein argued that women were more mobile than men but tended to migrate over shorter distances, but in northern Burgundy this “law” of migration applied only partially. Women were more likely than men to be living outside of their place of birth, a difference on the order of slightly more than 5 per cent (55 per cent of male witnesses were natives, and only 49 per cent of women were), most of which is due to exogamy patterns. However, men were at a greater risk of moving than were women at all stages of life; by this measure, men were clearly more mobile than were women, even if the difference is small. What about distances? Men moved slightly larger average distances than did women, but part of the difference is explained by the fact that more women moved for marriage than did men, since exogamy-related mobility involved shorter distances than most other types of migration. The most important difference may be that more men than women engaged in long-distance seasonal migration. Women and men had similar mobility patterns. Annual mobility rates by age were very close and rose and fell at exactly the same points in the life course. The wealthy of both sexes moved less than did the poor but tended to go greater distances when they did move. A substantial number of moves involved couples and families where a man and a woman were making the same move together. Single people moved more often than did the married, and this applies to both women and men. There were not two different mobility systems for men and women in eighteenth-century villages but rather a single system that touched the lives of virtually everyone. Migration “is part of the general human pattern, essential for functioning of families and crucial to the operation of the labor market.”4 It nevertheless takes on different characteristics depending on the economic, legal, political, and family systems in place. In contrast to several recent studies,5 this book mostly leaves aside questions of lineage and inheritance. While the census of the Year IV generally links minor children to their parents, and servants to their masters and mistresses, the family ties of adults remain unknown because it was not feasible to perform family reconstitution or analyse witnesses at marriages and baptisms for samples of this size. Family, lineage, and inheritance issues affected migration patterns in significant ways, and the inability to account for the importance of family remains one of the main disadvantages of using sources that are focused on the individual and provide mobility

Conclusion 183 

data at a single point in time for a large number of individuals. Nevertheless, many families, couples, and individuals moved to one place for a few years and then moved on to another place for one of many reasons, and they were not following family strategy in any obvious manner.6 Like much of western Europe, in northern Burgundy few agricultural households had enough land to be able to provide for their children until marriage. People married relatively late, on average in their midtwenties.7 A substantial number of young people thus spent a decade or more moving from household to household and village to village, working as domestic servants. Early and frequent migration throughout youth may have helped to accustom people to moving; agricultural workers, the most mobile adult villagers by profession, were also those most likely to have worked in domestic service when they were young. Outside of the villages of mainmorte, young couples generally set up their own household rather than living with their parents and in-laws, which probably contributed to the mobility of the young. Nuclear families were thus most common in the region, but in serf villages one of the sons generally lived with his spouse in the parental home to avoid being disinherited. As we have seen, this created migration patterns that were distinct from those in free villages. Inheritance systems clearly affected migration patterns. Studies of rural communities have demonstrated that the eldest children were less likely to out-migrate than were their siblings, although historians have studied the effect for regions of primogeniture much more than for regions of partible inheritance.8 The legal Custom of Burgundy accorded considerable freedom to people dividing up their estates as long as all heirs received their légitime of a third of what they would have received in an equal division.9 Daughters were excluded if they had received a dowry, although parents could and often did “recall” their married daughters, effectively placing the dowry amount back into the estate before dividing it.10 Equal division was probably most common in the province, but in mainmortable villages parents generally selected one or two male heirs and excluded the others. Even in the rest of the province, testators sometimes chose to advantage one heir over the others for reasons that are not always obvious to the historian.11 Most ordinary villagers died intestate, which meant that equal partition was to apply, although historians generally have little evidence concerning what happened in these cases unless the heirs contested the settlement.12 The link between migration and inheritance may have been weaker in this province, which was characterized by general egalitarian division

184  Strangers and Neighbours

and testamentary liberty, than it was in regions that practised strict primogeniture, but the relationship existed here too. In villages practising viticulture or arable agriculture, landholding was extremely fragmented and had to be reconstituted by each generation.13 Some families arranged to give more of the land to one heir than to the others, often by giving him less of the movables, which means that the effect of inheritance on mobility would be almost as strong as in areas of primogeniture, although we would expect birth order to be less of a determining factor. However, most people owned very little land, if any at all, and their heirs would therefore be available for migration regardless of birth order or inheritance patterns.14 No inheritance systems allowed everyone to stay put. House-based systems with stem families made for stabler communities by imposing primogeniture and forbidding the sale of land outside the family. This created a very stable local elite but increased the number of out-migrating, non-eldest children.15 In a society where only a small minority of people lived their entire life in the same village and where migration was a large part of everyday life, no rural communities were cut off from the outside world. Villages in northern Burgundy were open to a multitude of outside influences, and their inhabitants maintained links and connections to a panoply of faraway places.16 Each year ordinary people made multiple trips to town, and villages received temporary residents who came from very far away to work as masons, forest workers, and threshers. All communities, even small ones, had inhabitants who were born in or had previously lived in a city and at least a few inhabitants who had been born over a 100 km away.17 As Hugues Neveux has argued, in most villages there were a substantial number of people with personal knowledge of the “outside world,” who could act as cultural mediators and ensure that communities remained connected to broader networks of both urban and rural communities.18 Villages were very unstable groupings, places that each year saw the arrival of countless temporary and seasonal migrants and a smaller but nevertheless substantial number of new inhabitants, most of whom would not stay for longer than a few years. Communities had to determine whom to integrate, to what extent, and under what conditions. Belonging to a community meant sharing in both onerous duties (taxes, collective work) and privileges (access to commons, distribution of communal resources), and villages everywhere in the province wrestled with the issue of migrants’ access to local resources. Provincial law forbade communities from refusing entry to in-migrants, and there was

Conclusion 185 

basically a free market in internal migration. As long as they could find lodging, people could settle where they wanted, but acceptance into the community was not assured. Local affairs were decided by those who had resided in the community for a decade or more, even though the law gave an equal voice to all tax-paying household heads. In an interesting article on England, Henry French argues that many rural people thought of villages as being highly stable, because the village elite tended to remain in place for longer than did small tenant farmers, labourers, and the working poor, although even members of the local elite generally disappeared after a couple of generations. The immobile “village of the mind” thus really existed but was composed only of the very small number of families who made up the local elite.19 James Collins likewise argues that the village elite was generally composed of a relatively sedentary core of families. In seventeenth-century Brittany, those who had no apparent family connection to other inhabitants (as measured by patronyms) were generally excluded from local politics and were about twice as likely to migrate out of the village as were other inhabitants.20 This book has focused on migration within the countryside rather than towards cities, owing to the relative abundance of work on migration towards early modern cities and to source problems; no Burgundian city consistently identified non-native inhabitants in the 1796 census, and I was unable to locate urban courts that provided the place of birth for witnesses. This separation of labour can, however, tend to perpetuate the notion that cities and villages had highly distinct mobility patterns, when, in fact, communities of all sizes were part of the same migration system. While it is no doubt true that cities drew more people, migration into villages closely resembled migration towards cities. Groups of migrants that went to cities in large numbers included domestic servants, artisans (masters, journeymen, and apprentices), seasonal migrant construction workers, beggars, vagrants, and liberal professionals. As we have seen, all of these groups also moved into and out of rural communities in significant numbers. Migrants to both cities and villages were mostly young and more likely to be single than married. In communities of all sizes, most migration did not “stick,” and the majority of migrants moved on to another place. The policies put in place to control migration were also strikingly similar in urban and rural communities. The main concerns of inhabitants of communities of all sizes were the participation in the burdens of collective life and the protection of the property and privileges of those already residing. By the eighteenth

186  Strangers and Neighbours

century, cities and villages alike generally sought to limit the arrival of “undesirable” migrants by regulating access to lodging, and landlords, innkeepers, and owners of boarding houses were required to keep track of arrivals. As in cities, policies such as these were largely ineffective at controlling migration into the communities. Finally, migrants to cities and villages could be integrated into the community, but this took time and, especially, the demonstration of one’s willingness to share in collective life and responsibilities. The experience of migration for those moving into villages in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy was doubtless less uprooting than it was for those who crossed national borders, continents, and oceans. Most of the internal migrants to villages arrived in places that shared their language, religion, clothing style, and general world view, and integration was clearly easier for them than it was for people coming from greater distances away. However, they sought economic opportunity in order to provide a better life for themselves and their children. They drew on information about conditions in communities around them and planned their moves accordingly. Most of those who arrived would go somewhere else after a relatively short stay, and a significant proportion would eventually return home for financial or familial reasons. They arrived in places that were happy to accept their contributions to the local economy and especially their tax revenue but which were at best ambiguous to the idea that their voices counted as much as the voices of those who had been born locally. Villagers moving into new rural communities had more in common with larger-distance, bordercrossing migrants than might be expected.

Appendix: Sources

Table A.1.  Principal samples constructed for this study Documents

Information noted from document

Census of 1796, Name, occupation, nominal lists age, place of residence, years residing Census of 1796, Number of nonnominal lists native inhabitants per community, year of arrival, total population Witness depositions, seigneurial courts

Name, age, place of residence, place of birth, signature, content of deposition (if related to mobility or travel) Census of 1872, Name, occupation, nominal lists age, place of residence, village and department of birth

Information calculated or Sample size deduced by document matching Household structure, sex, age at time of move

18,576 individuals in 86 rural communities

This is a non-nominal database composed of those census lists not transcribed in the nominal sample presented above.* Sex, distance between places of birth and residence

44,556 individuals in 163 rural communities

15,181 depositions; 12,874 individual witnesses (after eliminating those testifying multiple times)

Household structure, 6,534 individuals sex, distance between in 22 rural places of birth and communities residence (Continued)

188 Appendix Table A.1.  Principal samples constructed for this study (Continued) Documents

Information noted from document

Tax records, bailliage of Nuits-StGeorges, 1759–62

Name, occupation, taille and capitation amounts, occasional lists of new inhabitants or those who had left

Information calculated or Sample size deduced by document matching

First and last year of 14,712 tax entries taxation for all those for 3,870 paying fewer than separate tax 4 years, place of households previous residence for those moving in these 4 years from within the bailliage Tax records, Name, occupation, First and last year of 2,318 tax entries for village of taille and taxation, year of birth, 356 separate tax Corgengoux, capitation amounts marriage, and death households 1701–89 (matched from parish registers) List of local Name, signature Occupation, taxation 3,300 officers officers amount (from (from annual matching to tax assizes in records), migration seigneurial status (from matching courts and tax to parish registers, records) 1796 census, and witness depositions), whether married in the village (from matching to parish registers) *See Introduction. There were also some 269 lists that were excluded because they either left out women or separated men and women, and 59 lists that were excluded because they very obviously undercounted non-natives.

Appendix 189 

Table A.2. Sample nominal list from the 1796 census (ADCO L515, recensement de l’an 4) Département de la Côte-d'Or Canton de Bligny‑sur‑Ouche Commune d'Écutigny Tableau des citoyens de la commune, au-dessus de l'âge de douze ans, fait en exécution de la loi du 10 vendémiaire, an quatre de la République française, une et indivisible Nos

Noms

Prénoms Âges Professions Lieu de Temps Observations l’habitation auquel le citoyen a commencé d’habiter la commune

1e

Chaugannier Liger Salomon veuve Chaussard Auger Lagrange Boyer Dechaux

Antoine

38

manouvrier

Pierrette Louise

40 50

sa femme Écutigny manouvrière Écutigny

Louise Paul Catherine Claude Antoine

17 27 28 45 25

sa fille manouvrier sa femme cultivateur volontaire

2 3 4 5 6 7 … 150

Écutigny

Écutigny Écutigny Écutigny Écutigny Écutigny

Toute sa vie Onze ans Toute sa vie Id Trois ans Id Douze ans Toute sa vie

               

Conforme à celui qui a été dressé par l'agent de la Commune d'Écutigny le treize nivôse de l'an quatrième de la République française, une et indivisible. Taisand, secrétaire. Department of the Côte-d’Or Canton of Bligny-sur-Ouche Commune of Écutigny

190 Appendix Table of the citizens of the commune, over 12 years of age, done in execution of the law of 10 vendémiaire, Year IV of the French Republic, one and indivisible. Nos

Family names

First names

Ages Professions Place of Time at Observations residence which the citizen started to live in the commune(*)

1st

Chaugannier Liger

Antoine

38

2

Pierrette 40

cottager

Écutigny

his wife

Écutigny Écutigny

Écutigny

3

Widow Louise Salomon

50

4

Chaussard Louise

17

5 6 7

Auger Lagrange Boyer

Paul 27 Catherine 28 Claude 45

cottager (feminized form) her daughter cottager his wife ploughman

Dechaux

Antoine

volunteer

… 150

25

His whole life Eleven years Her whole life

 

Écutigny

Ibid

 

Écutigny Écutigny Écutigny

Three years Ibid Twelve years His whole life

     

   

 

An exact copy of the list prepared by the agent of the commune of Écutigny the 13 nivôse of Year IV of the French Republic, one and indivisible. Taisand, secretary.] (*This column can contain either a number of years or the calendar year of arrival in the community.)

A Transcribed Sample Witness Deposition Providing Place of Birth

In a court case in the seigneurial court of Antilly (ADCO B2 411/15), dated 22 May 1761, the preamble cited the decision ordering witnesses to be heard. The sixth deposition (of eight who testified that day) was recorded as follows: Jacques Maugé mûnier demeurant à Antilly natif de Pressy-sous-Thil, bailliage de Semur âgé d’environ quarante-deux ans, témoin assigné de la part dudit Jeannin par exploit de Guillaume du seize de ce mois ainsi qu’il en justifie par la copie qu’il représente. Le serment de lui pris par lequel il a promis de dire et de déposer vérité, ayant déclaré n’être parent, allié, débiteur, serviteur ni domestique des parties,

Appendix 191  Examiné sur les faits contenu en notre sentence préparatoire, dont lecture lui a été faite, Dépose que dans le courant du mois d’août mille sept cent cinquanteneuf il enleva et voitura de la part de Delettre environ une toise de pierres mureuses qui étaient devant les bâtiments des héritiers Bretin qu’il conduisit au moulin d’Antilly, que du depuis il a vu des pierres sur la même place, mais ne sait qui les y avait fait conduire, qui est tout ce qu’il a dit savoir. Lecture faite audit témoin de sa déposition, il a dit qu’elle contient vérité, y persiste et a signé : J Maugé Taxé audit témoin à sa réquisition quarante sols. [Jacques Maugé miller residing at Antilly native of Pressy-sous-Thil, bailliage of Semur, about forty-two years old, witness assigned by the said Jeannin by a summons from Guillaume dated the sixteenth of this month, a copy of which document he presented. The oath was administered to him, by which he promised to tell and depose the truth, having declared that he is not family, allied, debtor, servant or domestic of the parties, Examined on the facts contained in our preliminary sentence, which was read to him, Deposes that during the month of August seventeen hundred and fiftynine he removed and carted for Delettre about a toise (2.43 metres) of wall stones that were in front of the buildings of the Bretin heirs. He moved them to the mill of Antilly, and since then he has seen stones in the same place, but he does not know who moved them there, which is all that he claims to know. After having his deposition read to him, he said that it contains the truth, persisted in his affirmation and signed: J. Maugé Assessed to the witness at his request forty sols.]

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Notes

Introduction 1 ADCO (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or) B2 246/4, bailliage de Saulieu, 20 May 1760. 2 ADCO 38F 116, fonds de la seigneurie de Chevigny-Saint-Sauveur, pétition, 1779. 3 Gérard Béaur, “Mobiles ou sédentaires? Les familles rurales normandes face au problème de la migration au XIXe siècle (Bayeux, 1871–74),” in Luigi Lorenzetti, Anne-Lise Head-König, and Joseph Goy eds., Marchés, migrations et logiques familiales dans les espaces français, canadien et suisse, 18e–20e siècles (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 263–77. 4 Colin G. Pooley and Ian D. Whyte, “Introduction: Approaches to the Study of Migration and Social Change,” in Colin G. Pooley and Ian D. Whyte eds., Migrants, Emigrants, and Immigrants: A Social History of Migration (New York: Routledge, 1991), 5. 5 Jacques Dupâquier, ed,, Histoire de la population française, tome 2: De la Renaissance à 1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988). More recently, Dupâquier aknowledged that villagers were quite mobile. See Jacques Dupâquier, “Sédentarité et mobilité dans l’ancienne société rurale. Enracinement et ouverture, faut-il vraiment choisir?” Histoire et sociétés rurales 18, 2 (2002): 121–35. 6 Jean-Pierre Poussou, “Les migrations internes et à moyenne distance en France à l’époque moderne et au XIXe siècle,” in Antonio Eiras Roel and Ofelia Rey Castelao, eds, Les migrations internes et à moyenne distance en Europe, 1500–1900 (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1994), 224; Jean-Pierre Poussou, “Migrations et mobilité en France à l’époque moderne,” in Les mouvements migratoires dans l’Occident moderne (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 1994), 51.

194 Notes to pages 4−6 7 Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, La population française à l’époque moderne: Démographie et comportements (Paris: Belin, 2008), 92. 8 Jean Ganiage, Trois villages d’Île-de-Fance au XVIIIe siècle: Étude démographique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 41–9. The quotation is from page 28. 9 Jean Vassort, Une société provinciale face à son devenir: Le Vendômois aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1995). 10 Antoine Follain, Le village sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 105–6. 11 Timothy J.A Le Goff, Vannes and Its Region: A Study of Town and Country in Eighteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 12 Donald M.G. Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770–1796 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 105–8. 13 Bernard Derouet, “Famille, ménage paysan et mobilité de la terre et des personnes en Thimerais au XVIIIe siècle,” Études rurales 86 (1982): 47–56. 14 Gérard Bouchard, Le village immobile: Sennely-en-Sologne au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1972), 76–9. 15 James B. Collins, “Geographic and Social Mobility in Early Modern France,” Journal of Social History 24, 3 (1991), 563–77; James B. Collins, “Translation de domicile: Rethinking Sedentarity and Mobility in the Early Modern French Countryside,” French History 20, 4 (2006): 387–404. See also James B. Collins, Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 80–90. 16 Alain Croix, “L’ouverture des villages sur l’extérieur fut un fait éclatant dans l’ancienne France. Position de thèse,” Histoire et société rurales 11, 1 (1999): 109–46. Two responses were published that largely defended the notion of micro-mobility: Jean-Pierre Poussou, “L’enracinement est le caractère dominant de la société rurale française d’autrefois,” Histoire, économie, société 21, 1 (2002): 97–108; Dupâquier, “Sédentarité et mobilité.” For a presentation of the debate see Anne Radeff, “Loin des centres: Consommation et mobilités du XVIIIe au XIXe siècle,” Revue suisse d’histoire 49, 1 (1999): 115–24; and Anne Radeff, “Nouvelles controverses sur de très anciennes mobilités: Repères bibliographiques,” Revue suisse d’histoire 49, 1 (1999): 138–47. 17 Vincent Gourdon and Marion Trévisi, “Âge et migrations dans la France rurale traditionnelle: Une étude à partir du recensement de l’an VII à la Roche Guyon,” Histoire économie et société 19, 3 (2000): 307–30. 18 Paul-André Rosental, Les sentiers invisibles: Espace, familles et migrations dans la France du 19e siècle (Paris: Éditions de l'EHESS, 1999); J. Bourdieu, G. Postel-Vinay, P.-A. Rosental, A. Suwa-Esienmann, “Migrations et

Notes to page 6  195 

19

20 21

22

23

transmissions inter-générationnelles dans la France du XIXe et du début du XXe siècle,” Annales. Histoire et sciences sociales 55, 4 (2000): 749–89; Paul-André Rosental, “La migration des femmes (et des hommes) en France au XIXe siècle,” Annales de démographie historique 107 (2004), 107–35. The sample in question is the descending genealogy 3,000 family TRA sample for nineteenth- and twentieth-century France. For a presentation of the method and preliminary results see Jacques Dupâquier, “L’enquête des 3000 familles,” Annales de démographie historique 107 (2004), 7–18; Jérôme Bourdieu, Lionel Kesztenbaum, and Gilles Postel-Vinay, L’enquête TRA, histoire d’un outil, outil pour l’histoire. vol. 1, 1793–1902 (Paris: Ined éditions, 2013). Daniel Roche, Humeurs vagabondes: De la circulation des hommes et de l’utilité des voyages (Paris: Fayard, 2003); Luigi Lorenzetti, Anne-Lise Head-König, and Joseph Goy, eds., Marchés, migrations, et logiques familiales dans les espaces français, canadien, et suisse, 18e–20e siècles (New York: Peter Lang, 2005); Carla Hesse and Peter Sahlins, eds., “Special Issue: Mobility in French History,” French Historical Studies 29 (2006). Both Rosental and Roche contributed articles to this special issue. Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992). Martin Dribe, “Household and Family Aspects of Children Leaving Home: Rural Youth Migration in Nineteenth-Century Scania, Sweden,” in D. Barjot and O. Faron, eds., Migrations, cycle de vie familial et marché du travail (Paris, 2002), 95; Martin Dribe, “Migration of Rural Families in 19th Century Southern Sweden: A Longitudinal Analysis of Local Migration Patterns,” The History of the Family 8, 2 (2003), 247; Matteo Manfredini, “Families in Motion: The Role and Characteristics of Household Migration in a 19th-Century Rural Italian Parish,” The History of the Family 8, 2 (2003): 317. Michel Oris, “The History of Migration as a Chapter in the History of the European Family: An Overview,” The History of the Family 8, 2 (2003): 187–215. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives,” in Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 32; David Souden, “Pre-industrial English Local Migration Fields,” (PhD diss., Cambridge University, 1981), 6; Moch, Moving Europeans, 6. This is the definition adopted by geographers, demographers, and migration sociologists as reflected in textbooks in both English and French. William Norton, Human Geography (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2013), 192; James M. Rubenstein, The Cultural Landscape: An Introduction to Human Geography

196 Notes to pages 6−7

24

25

2 6 27

28

(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 71; France Meslé, Laurent Toulemon, and Jacques Véron, eds., Dictionnaire de démographie et des sciences de la population (Paris: Armand Colin, 2011), 280–2; Roger Brunet, Robert Ferras, and Hervé Théry, Les mots de la géographie, dictionnaire critique (Paris: Reclus – la documentation Française, 1993). The same was true in nineteenth-century Germany. Steve Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity: Migration in Germany, 1820–1989 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 7–8. Bourgeois lists: Jean-Pierre Kintz, “La mobilité humaine en Alsace: Essai de présentation statistique, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles,” Annales de démographie historique (1970), 157–83. Work using censuses is plentiful, but there is little on France before the late-nineteenth century. See Yves Tugault, La mesure de la mobilité: Cinq études sur les migrations internes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1973); Janine Combes-Monier, “L’origine géographique des Versaillais en 1792,” Annales de démographie historique (1970), 237–50. Collins, “Geographic and Social Mobility,” 563–77. Most works in French demographic history from the 1960s to the 1980s provided geographic exogamy proportions. One classic is Ganiage, Trois villages d’Île-de-France. Also François Lebrun, “Mobilité de la population en Anjou au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales de démographie historique (1970), 222–6. A more sophisticated attempt to use family reconstitution to estimate mobility can be found for England in David Souden, “Movers and Stayers in Family Reconstitution Populations,” Local Population Studies 33 (1984), 11–28, and in Barry Stapleton, “Migration in Pre-industrial Southern England: The Example of Odiham,” Southern History 10 (1988), 47–93. For France, see Gregory M.W. Kennedy, “Pushing Family Reconstitution Further: Life Course, Socioeconomic Hierarchy, and Migration in the Loudunais, 1705–1765,” Journal of Family History 37, 3 (2010): 303–18. Recruitment of artisans: Edward J. Shephard, Jr, “Social and Geographic Mobility of the Eighteenth-Century Guild Artisan: An Analysis of Guild Receptions in Dijon, 1700–1790,” in Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia J. Koepp, Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 97–130. On hospitals: Christine Lamarre, L’hôpital de Dijon au XVIIIe siècle (Langres, France; Dominique Guéniot, 2004). On succession documents: Béaur, “Mobiles ou sédentaires?,” 263–77; Fabrice Boudjaaba, “Mesurer la mobilité sans registre de population en France au XIXe siècle: L’apport des registres de successions à l’étude des migrations des ruraux,” Cahiers québécois de démographie 41, 1 (2012): 9–35.

Notes to pages 7−8  197  29 The bailliage of Chalon-sur-Saône was divided between the departments of the Côte-d’Or and the Saône-et-Loire, and so only a small number of the seigneurial courts in this bailliage have records in the ADCO. 30 The courts whose depositions I recorded had jurisdiction over the following seigneuries: Veuvey-sur-Ouche, Chambolle, Saint- Vivant, Merceuil, Cirey, Molaize, Buisson, châtellenie of Argilly, châtellenie of Comblanchien, Corgoloin et dépendances, châtellenie of Labèrgementle-Duc, châtellenie of Chaux, Antilly, Agencourt, Bagnot, Baslon, Blignysous-Beaune, Bouze, Broin, Chamblanc, Chamboeuf, Charney, Chassagne, Cheilly, Chorey, Cissey, Clemencey, Collonges, Bévy and Curtil, Concoeur and Corboin, Corberon, Corgengoux, Mazarotte, Parué, Curley, Cussigny, Gerland, marquisat of Ivry, Thoisy-la-Berchère and Boncourt-le-Bois, marquisat of la Borde-au-Chateau, Lanthes, baronnie of Lays, Meuilley, Mont and Chazelle, Montmain, baronnie of Pagny, Pouilly-sur-Saône, Premeau, Quincey, comté of Serrigny, Tailly, Ternant (including Semesange and Curley), châtellenie of Tichey, Varennes-lès-Beaune, Vignolles, VillarsFontaine, Villers-la-Faye, Villy-le-Mouthier, Bligny-sur-Ouche, and Cissey. See the bibliography for the archival references for each of these courts. 31 I removed the duplicates manually but subsequently noticed that a number had slipped through. To remove them at this later stage, however, would have meant either redoing all of the calculations or having various sample sizes. However, a few hundred remaining duplicates are not numerous enough to skew results, and there is no reason to think that those testifying multiple times were more or less likely to have migrated than other villagers. 32 For a transcribed and translated sample witness deposition, see appendix A. It is important to note that, whereas witnesses in English ecclesiastical courts provided a residential history of the places they had lived up to the time they appeared in court, the Burgundian depositions provide only the places of residence and birth. The most important works based on English witness depositions are Souden, “Migration Fields,” and two articles by Peter Clark. Peter Clark, “The Migrant in Kentish Towns, 1580–1640,” in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (London: Routledge, 1972), 117–63; Peter Clark, “Migration in England during the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Past and Present 83, 1 (1979): 57–90. Several local studies from the 1960s also contain some analysis of smaller samples of witness depositions in ecclesiastical courts. The discovery of high levels of mobility in England was also the result of Peter Laslett’s comparison of successive censuses in Clayworth and Cogenhoe. Peter Laslett, “Clayworth and Cogenhoe,” in Peter Laslett, ed., Family Life and

198 Notes to pages 8−9 Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), the definitive version of a text that Laslett first published in 1963 and then again in 1968. A presentation of the historiography of migration in early modern Great Britain can be found in David Souden, “Internal and Medium Distance Migration in Early Modern Great Britain, 1500–1750,” in Antonio Eiras Roel and Ofelia Rey Castelao, eds., Les migrations internes et à moyenne distance en Europe, 1500–1900 (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1994), 101–26. 33 The proportion is almost identical in one case study in western France, where women made up 26 to 29 per cent of witnesses. See Fabrice Mauclair, La justice au village: Justice seigneuriale et société rurale dans le duché-pairie de la Vallière (1667–1790) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), 232. The situation was also similar in ecclesiastical courts in England, where there were 3.86 times more male than female witnesses. Souden, “Local migration fields,” 46. 34 The sample is probably at least as socially representative as the samples taken from depositions in ecclesiastical courts that English historians have used so tellingly to analyse geographic mobility. For a discussion of the social representativity of the English source, see Souden, “Migration Fields,” 58–68. 35 See chapter 6 for a detailed description of the document linkage between depositions and tax records. 36 See chapter 5 for a presentation of this source and of the works that analyse it. 37 Rosental argues that the lack of sources allowing the reconstruction of migration life histories is particularly acute for France, as compared to other western European nations. Paul-André Rosental, “Between Macro and Micro: Theorizing Agency in Nineteenth-Century Migrations,” French Historical Studies 29, 3 (2006): 478–9. Also, Boudjaaba, “Mesurer la mobilité.” 38 For a transcribed and translated sample nominal list see appendix A. 39 Howard Brown, Ending the French Revolution: Violence, Justice, and Repression from the Terror to Napoleon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 205–7. 40 “Décret sur la police intérieure des communes de la République,” 10 Vendémiaire an IV (2 Oct. 1795), in Code criminel et correctionnel ou Recueil chronologique des lois, décrets, arrêtés et instructions sur la législation criminelle et correctionnelle depuis 1790 jusques et compris l’an XIII, avec tables chronologiques et alphabétiques des matières (Paris: Rondonneau, 1805), 208–14. 41 Brown, Ending the French Revolution, 206. 42 Jean-Noël Biraben, “Inventaire des listes nominatives de recensement en France,” Population 19. 2 (1963): 305–27.

Notes to pages 10−16  199  43 Marcel Reinhard, Étude de la population pendant la Révolution et l’Empire: Instruction, recueil de textes et notes (Paris: Gap, 1961), 43. Sara Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 31; P. Deprez, “Problems of Geographical Mobility in Belgium in the Eighteenth Century,” International population Conference / Congrès international de la population, London 1969 (1971), 2327–31; Claude Brunel, “Mobilité rurale et migrations de campagnes vers les villes: Le Brabant wallon du XVIIe au XIXe siècle,” in Yves Landry, John A. Dickinson, Suzy Pasleau, and Claude Desama, eds., Les chemins de la migration en Belgique et au Québec du XVIIe au XXe siècle (Louvain-La-Neuve: Publications MNH, 1995), 99–110; Jean-Paul Nougard, “Migrations et anthroponymie à Mons au XVIIIe siècle,” in Landry, Dickinson, Pasleau, and Desama, Les chemins de la migration, 111–22. 44 Vassort, Société provinciale; Jean Vassort, “Un indicateur social: La mobilité rurale; L’exemple du Vendômois à la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 36, 4 (1989): 640–57; Gourdon and Trévisi, “Âge et migrations,” 307–330. The census of 1792 provides the place of birth (but not the date of arrival). See Combes-Monier, “L’origine géographique,” 237–50. These lists seem to exist in greater numbers than those of the Year IV. 45 E.G. Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration, Second Paper,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 52, 2 (1889): 241–305. 1. Exogamy, Native Proportions, and Distances 1 A good presentation of most of the types of sources available to historians of mobility can be found in T.H. Hollingsworth, “Historical Studies of Migration,” Annales de démographie historique (1970), 87–96. 2 See, for example, Jean-Pierre Lescarret, “Démographie et société dans la Haute-Lande depuis le XVIIIe siècle: Saugnac-et-Muret” (PhD thesis, Université de Bordeaux III, 1978), 333. Also Jean-Pierre Poussou, “Les migrations dans la Haute-Lande aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles” in J.-B. Marquette, La grande Lande: Histoire naturelle et géographie historique (Paris; Éditions du CNRS, 1985), 368–70; Georges Augustins, “Mobilité résidentielle et alliance matrimoniale dans une commune du Morbihan au XIXe siècle,” Ethnologie française 11, 4 (1981): 319–28. 3 See Collins, “Translation de domicile,” 387–404; Collins, “Geographic and Social Mobility,” 563–77; Le Goff, Vannes and Its Region, 59–63; Hervé Lacrampe, “Un monde ouvert sur l’extérieur: Mobilité et migrations dans l’élection de Poitiers au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 113, 4 (2006): 2–17.

200 Notes to pages 17−20 4 Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, La population française, 92. 5 John A. Dickinson, “Capital d’exploitation, âge et mobilité au mariage en Normandie au XVIIIe siècle,” in Luigi Lorenzetti, Anne-Lise HeadKônig, and Joseph Goy, eds., Marchés, migrations et logiques familiales dans les espaces français, canadien et suisse, 18e-20e siècles (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 197–209. See also Emmanuel Todd, “Mobilité géographique et cycle de vie en Artois et en Toscane au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations 30, 4 (1975): 726; Croix, “L’ouverture des villages sur l’extérieur,” 109–46; Dupâquier, “Sédentarité et mobilité,” 121–35; Poussou, “L’enracinement,” 97–108; Gourdon and Trévisi, “Âge et migrations,” 307–30; Collins, “Translation de domicile,” 387–404. 6 Jan Kok argues that marriage certificates or registers do not accurately measure social mobility over generations, because of the exclusion of the unmarried, because occupations are not given for deceased fathers, and especially because the listed occupations of fathers come from much later in the life course than do those of grooms. Jan Kok and Henk Delger, “Bridegrooms and Biases: A Critical Look at the Study of Intergenerational Mobility on the Basis of Marriage Certificates,” Historical Methods 31, 3 (1998): 113–21. 7 Andrew J. Pain and Malcolm T. Smith, “Do Marriage Horizons Accurately Measure Migration? A Test Case from Stanhope Parish, County Durham,” Local Population Studies 33 (1984), 44–8. See also Cathy Day, “Geographic Mobility in Wiltshire, 1754–1914,” Local Population Studies 89 (2012), 56. 8 Anne-Sofie Kälvemark, “The Country That Kept Track of Its Population: Methodological Aspects of Swedish Population Registers,” in J. Sundin and E. Soderlund, eds., Time, Space, and Man: Essays on Microdemography (Atlantic Highlands, NJ; Humanities Press, 1979), 221–38. 9 These were the two main criteria for inclusion in the sample. 10 Paulette Poncet-Cretin, “La pratique testamentaire en Bourgogne et en Franche-Comté de 1770 à 1815” (PhD diss., History of Law, Université de Bourgogne, 1973), 14–15. Only about a third of the wills in her sample privileged sons (or a son) over daughters. 11 By comparison, in Peter Laslett’s study, marital mobility accounted for between 5 and 10 per cent of moves. Laslett, “Clayworth and Cogenhoe,” 70. 12 In the Italian parish of Casalguidi the household migration rate was also 0.035. Manfredini, “Families in Motion,” 324. 13 For another discussion of whole-family migration see Yves Blayo, “La mobilité dans un village de la Brie vers le milieu du XIXe siècle,” Population 25, 3 (1970): 586–7.

Notes to pages 20−6  201  14 Jeremy Hayhoe, “Rural Domestic Servants in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy: Demography, Economy, and Mobility” Journal of Social History 46, 2 (2012): 549–71. 15 Jean-Pierre Poussou, “Note sur la mobilité de la vieillesse et les déplacements de la population en pays pré-pyrénéen pendant la Révolution française,” Histoire, économie, société 21, 3 (2002): 292. 16 Jean Vassort found about the same variability in the Vendômois. In his sample of thirty-eight villages the non-native proportion varied from about 25 per cent to about 75 per cent. Vassort, Société provinciale, 222–3. 17 Cercle généalogique de Côte-d’Or, Cahiers. The number of the cahiers for the marriage records follows the name of the commune: Bligny-sur-Ouche (604), Argilly (578), Serrigny (618), Meuilley (602), Pagny-la-Ville (36 and 37). The data has since been made available (for a small membership fee) at the CGCO’s website, http://www.cgco.org/. 18 Generally all marriages were supposed to be celebrated in the bride’s parents’ parish, but in the communities studied here there were always some marriages celebrated that involved a local man and a woman who was born elsewhere. In some cases these marriages probably involved women who, while born elsewhere, had been living in their fiancé’s community. Unfortunately the parish registers do not provide the residential histories that would be required to sort this all out. It is nevertheless clear that these brides were living outside of their place of birth. 19 The difference is statistically significant at a 95 per cent confidence level. 20 Ian D. Whyte and Kathleen A. Whyte, “The Geographical Mobility of Women in Early Modern Scotland,” in Leah Leneman, ed., Perspectives in Scottish Social History: Essays in Honour of Rosalind Mitchison (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 87. 21 Blayo, “La mobilité,” 596. See also S. Hochstadt, "Migration in Pre-industrial Germany," Central European History 16, 3 (1983): 195–224; Ian Whyte, Migration and Society in Britain, 1550–1830 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2000), 44. 22 K.D.M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity, and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and his “English Rural Societies and Geographical Marriage Endogamy,” Economic History Review 55, 2 (2002): 262–98. 23 Souden, “Movers and Stayers,” 11–28; Alain Brideau and Guy Brunet, “Stay or Leave? Individual Choice and Family Logic: The Destinations of Children Born in the Valserine Valley (French Jura) in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” The History of the Family 1, 2 (1996): 159–68. 24 Pooley and Turnbull have argued strongly against the notion. See Colin G. Pooley and Jean Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain

202 Notes to pages 26−30

2 5 26

27 2 8 29 30

31 32

3 3 34

3 5 36 37

38

39

Since the Eighteenth Century (London: UCL Press, 1998), 325. Also R. Houston, “Geographical Mobility in Scotland, 1652–1811: The Evidence of Testimonials,” Journal of Historical Geography 11, 4 (1985): 387–8; and Christopher Charles Pond, “Internal Population Migration and Mobility in Eastern England in the Eighteenth Century,” (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1980), 257. Pond, “Internal Population Migration,” 69. See Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, 67; J. Trent Alexander and Annemarie Steidl, “Gender and the ‘Laws of Migration’: A Reconsideration of Nineteenth-Century Patterns,” Social Science History 36, 2 (2012): 223–41. Note that I excluded temporary migrant workers from these figures, so the resulting numbers include only actual residents. Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity, 81. Poussou, “Les migrations internes,” 212. Marcel Lachiver, Vin, vignes et vignerons en région parisienne du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Pontoise, France: Société historique et archéologique de Pontoise, 1982), 528–30. Georges Durand, Vin, vigne et vignerons en lyonnais et beaujolais (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1979), 345–9. Pierre Goujon, “La mobilité au sein des sociétés vigneronnes: L’exemple des vignobles mâconnais et chalonnais du XIXe siècle,” in Jean-Luc Mayaud, ed., Clio dans les vignes: Mélanges offerts à Gilbert Garrier (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1998), 81–6. Vassort, Société provinciale, 248. The same was true for Dutch farmers and artisans. See Anne McCants, “Internal Migration in Friesland, 1750–1805,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, 3 (1992): 403–4. Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, 66. Roche, Humeurs vagabondes, 925. Jean-Claude Farcy and Alain Faure, La mobilité d’une génération de français: Recherche sur les migrations et les déménagements vers et dans Paris à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris: Institut national d’études démographiques, 2003), 36. In 1883 the average size of a canton in France was about 180 km2. This means that a single canton plus all of the adjacent cantons could easily form a region that was over 1,000 km2. Marie-Vic Ozouf-Marignier and Nicolas Verdier, “Le canton d’hier à aujourd’hui: Étude cartographique d’un maillage,” in Yann Lagadec, Jean Le Bihan, and Jean-François Tanguy, eds., Le canton, un territoire du quotidien (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009), 281–96. Vassort, Une société provinciale, 213. An average area of 180 km2 per canton gives an average radius per canton of about 7.6 km, which means that

Notes to pages 30−7  203 

40

41

42 43

4 4 45 46 47

48

49

50

51

using the canton as a cut-off between two types of migration counts many moves of only a few km as long-distance moves. Rosental, “La migration des femmes,” 109–10. Rosental also uses 15 km as the threshold, as in Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions intergénérationelles,” 764. In the Dauphiné, artisans headed about one household in ten. Alain Belmont, Des ateliers au village: Les artisans ruraux en Dauphiné sous l’Ancien Régime (Grenoble, France: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1998), vol. 1, 153. Wilbur Zelinsky, “The Hypothesis of the Mobility Transition,” Geographical Review 61, 2 (1971): 219–49. Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain, 321–2. One of the main theses of their book is that modernization did not make people more mobile, in opposition to Zelinsky’s theory of a mobility transition. Rosental, Les sentiers invisibles, 34–5. Whyte, Migration and Society, 173. Moch, Moving Europeans, 22. Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity; see also Steve Hochstadt, “The Socioeconomic Determinants of Increasing Mobility in NineteenthCentury Germany,” in Dick Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch, eds., European Migrants: Global and Local Perspectives (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 141–69. Jelle van Lottum, Across the North Sea: The Impact of the Dutch Republic on International Labour Migration, c. 1550–1850 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), 165–71. Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, “The Mobility Transition Revisited, 1500–1900: What the Case of Europe Can Offer to Global History,” Journal of Global History 4, 3 (2009): 347–77. Ehmer also notes that Lucassen and Lucassen count migrants, which is more problematical than counting migrations. Joseh Ehmer, “Quantifying Mobility in Early Modern Europe: The Challenge of Concepts and Data,” Journal of Global History 6, 2 (2011): 327–38. Dieter Langewiesche and Friedrich Lenger also argue that the steep rise in migration during the late-nineteenth century was the result of the overlapping of pre-modern and modern migration patterns. Dieter Langewiesche and Friedrich Lenger, “Population, Labour, and Migration in 19th and 20th Century Germany,” in Klaus J. Bade, ed., Internal Migration: Persistence and Mobility (Leamington Spa, UK: Berg, 1987), 91. This was apparently true in England over the same period. See Pond, “Internal Population Migration,” 256–7.

204 Notes to pages 37−41 52 For a study of mobility based in part on this source see Poussou, “Les migrations dans la Haute-Lande,” 365–85. 53 The transcription of the 1872 census, which is available on the web page of the ADCO, was done by Marc-Alain Bonenfant, my research assistant. I selected seven villages in the top, middle, and bottom third in terms of non-native proportion from the 1796 census. 54 All are available on the website of the ADCO. 55 See Paul Hohenberg, “Migrations et fluctuations démographiques dans la France rurale, 1836–1901,” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 29, 2 (1974): 469. 56 A student’s t-test returns a two-tailed p-value of 0.8265. 57 Farcy and Faure, La mobilité d’une génération de français, 522. 58 In other words, since the census of 1796 does not provide place of birth, it is only possible to determine that mobile couples arrived together (in the same year) or separately. In about 10 per cent of couples in 1796 both the husband and the wife were born outside the village of the census but arrived in different years. These couples were not counted as exogamous for 1796 because of the likelihood that they had settled in the community before marriage. Without year of arrival, however, these couples would be counted as exogamous in 1872. In addition, in 1796, 18 per cent of couples were already married when they arrived in the village, and none of these couples was counted as exogamous. Assuming that about half of these couples were exogamous (and the other half were composed of individuals born in the same village and moving together), the exogamy rate for 1796, calculated according to the method applied to the census of 1872, would be approximately 64 per cent (45 + 10 + 9 per cent). 59 Once again, it should be noted that these numbers are indicative only, since they are based on different samples of villages. 60 This was the case in England as well. Pond, “Internal Population Migration,” 254. 61 Souden, “Movers and Stayers,” 25–7. 62 Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions inter-générationelles,” 754. 63 Brigitte Baccaïni, “Les migrations internes en France de 1990 à 1999: L’appel de l’Ouest,” Économie et statistique 344, 4 (2001): 39–42. See also Daniel Courgeau, “Migrants and Migrations,” Population: Selected Papers 3 (1979), 1–35. According to his data from 1948 to 1967, about 4–5 per cent of people in France changed their commune of residence annually. 64 Liana Vardi, The Land and the Loom: Peasants and Profit in Northern France, 1680–1800 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

Notes to pages 42−3  205  2. Annual Migration Rates 1 Ingrid Eriksson and John Rogers, “Mobility in an Agrarian Community: Practical and Methodological Considerations,” in Kurt Agren, ed., Aristocrats, Farmers, Proletarians: Essays in Swedish Demographic History (Uppsala: Scandinavian University Books, 1973), 64. 2 Moch, Moving Europeans, 18–19; also Humphrey R. Southall, “The Tramping Artisan Revisits: Labour Mobility and Economic Distress in Early Victorian England,” Economic History Review 44, 2 (1991): 273. 3 The work of Peter Knights and Michael B. Katz in the 1970s on nineteenth-century American and Canadian cities did much to correct this notion. Peter R. Knights, The Plain People of Boston, 1830–1860: A Study in City Growth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-19th Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Also Dick Hoerder, “Immigration and the Working Class: The Remigration Factor,” International Labor and Working Class History 21 (1982): 28–41. 4 Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity, 136–41. See also James H. Jackson Jr, Migration and Urbanization in the Ruhr Valley, 1821–1914 (Boston: Humanities Press, 1997). 5 Muriel Neven, “Terra Incognita: Migration of the Elderly and the Nuclear Hardship Hypothesis,” The History of the Family 8, 2 (2003): 271–2. 6 Manfredini, “Families in Motion,” 317–43; Marco Breschi and Matteo Manfredini, “Individual and Family Mobility: First Results from an Analysis of Two Italian Villages,” in Dominique Barjot and Olivier Faron, eds., Migrations, cycle de vie familial et marché du travail (Paris: Cahiers des Annales de démographie historique, 2002), 43–63. 7 Hochstadt, Moblity and Modernity, 85–90. 8 Martin Dribe, “Dealing with Economic Stress through Migration: Lessons from Nineteenth-Century Sweden,” European Review of Economic History 7, 3 (2003): 271–99. Dribe shows that bad economic times, as measured by high grain prices, could increase the likelihood of short-distance internal migration for families that owned minimal land, but had no effect on either the landless or the landowning farmers. 9 Several historians have used the censuses of 1796 and 1792 to analyse mobility, and none has found that the patterns of migration during the Revolution were fundamentally different from those in the eighteenth century. Vassort, Une société provinciale; Nougard, “Migrations et anthroponymie”; Brunel, “Mobilité rurale”; Deprez, “Problems of

206 Notes to pages 43−7

10 11

1 2 13

14

1 5 16 17

18

19

20

21 22

Geographic Mobility”; Gourdon and Trévisi, “Âge et migrations”; Combes-Monier, “L’origine géographique.” The correction involves assuming a sex ratio of one and applying the migration rate of the young men who were present to those who were absent. Peter Clark and David Souden, introduction to Peter Clark and David Souden. eds., Migration and Society in Early Modern England (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 29–34. Souden, “Pre-industrial English Local Migration Fields,” 122. Alfred Perrenoud, “Mobilité et reproduction à l’échelle d’une communauté rurale,” in Jean-Pierre Bardet, François Lebrun, and Renée Le Mée, eds., Mesurer et comprendre: Mélanges offerts à Jacques Dupâquier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993), 452. See also Manfredini, “Families in Motion,” 333. In the following discussion I rely entirely on the transcribed sample of nominal lists, which means that most migration rates are slightly higher than the real average rates for the entire province. However, the sample is likely representative when it comes to length of stay as well as the relative mobility of different socio-economic and occupational groups. Eriksson and Rogers, “Mobility in an Agrarian Community, 67. Jackson, Migration and Urbanization, 231. See, for example, Adrien Remund, “Rester ou repartir? Une analyse des usages de la ville par les migrants dans la Genève des années 1837–1843,” Annales de démographie historique 124, 2 (2012): 65–87. This is based on the assumption that, if 767 adults arrived in these villages in 1795, the same number had arrived in 1794. Only 40 per cent of those who (probably) arrived in 1794 were still there in 1796. As the length of stay increases, the durations tend to cluster around the fives and tens; for example, 140 had been in their village for nine years, whereas 289 had been there for ten years. This means that the length-ofstay figures become increasingly imprecise, but remain useful if we take groupings of several years, as I have done in table 2.1. Among long-term migrants there were people who had arrived as children as young as three years old, whereas among recent migrants there was no one who arrived before the age of eighteen (because I limited the analysis to those over the age of twenty in 1796). In the study I therefore eliminated all the children and adolescents from the long-term migrants. The same was true in nineteenth-century Germany. Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity, 104. The actual difference would be larger, since widows were not included among the married women, and widows tended to stay longer than spinsters.

Notes to pages 47−51  207  23 Note that I included widowers among unmarried men. In other words, this category includes all adult men who did not have a wife in the nominal lists. 24 It would have been possible to compare recent migrants to all those migrants with over ten years in the village, but I chose to limit it to 10–20 years because of the effects of mortality as the years in place rose. 25 See Gourdon and Trévisi, “Âge et migrations,” 307–30. 26 Hollingsworth, “Historical Studies of Migration,” 88–9. 27 Ernst Georg Ravenstein, “The Laws of Migration,” Journal of the Statistical Society 48, 2 (1885): 196–7. 28 See also Rosental, “La migration des femmes,” 113 and 116–17. 29 Historians have written little about the migration of the elderly. See Gourdon and Trévisi, “Âge et migrations”; Neven, “Terra Incognita.” 30 While families are grouped together, the nominal lists generally do not clearly separate one household from another (that is, there is no blank line between households), which can present a problem when dealing with people living alone, as was sometimes the case for older villagers. In addition, linking family members by name recognition is problematical, especially for mothers, who did not share a last name with their children. There is, therefore, some uncertainty in the figures calculated here. I should also point out that only a minority of the nominal lists grouped people by family (see the introduction), but that these are the lists that make up my sample. 31 L37, renonciations à l’incolat, 12 May 1704, Municipal Archives, Dijon. 32 About 33 per cent of elderly women migrated alone, whereas the proportion among men was only about 5 per cent lower in this sample of three villages. Neven, “Terra Incognita,” 275. 33 On the issue of how many widows lived alone and how many lived with families, see Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux, “Widows and Their Living Arrangements in Preindustrial France,” The History of the Family 7, 1 (2002): 101–16. Fauve-Chamoux demonstrates that widows lived alone more often in cities than in the countryside, and more often in regions where nuclear families predominated than in regions where stem families were common. 34 Gourdon and Trévisi, “Âge et migrations,” 322–3. 35 In eighteenth-century France 46 per cent of women who were widowed in their thirties would remarry, whereas 72 per cent of widowers in the same age group did so. Among those widowed in their forties, 20 per cent of widows and 52 per cent of widowers remarried. See Olwen Hufton, “Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Family History 9, 4 (1984): 355–76.

208 Notes to pages 51−7 3 6 Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, 37, 60. 37 Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity, 11. 38 I limited the sample to those witnesses who testified before 1745, because the genealogical data is generally available on the website only up to the start of the Revolution (1802 for Villy-le-Moutier and Argilly, and 1792 for Bligny-sur-Ouche). I also limited the analysis to witnesses who were twenty-five years old or over when they testified, which means that nobody should have died in the village in question after the records end. The sample contains information on 327 witnesses. In two of the three villages the burial records provided age at time of death, which allowed for the problem of homonyms to be eliminated. 39 In one Belgian sample based on genealogical data, 30 per cent of adult men were born, had married, and had died in the same village, although it is not clear how this study dealt with the never-married. Brunel, “Mobilité rurale,” 105. 40 Souden, “English Local Migration Fields,” 122. 41 Those who were born in the hamlet of Paruey and lived in Corgengoux were not considered to have moved, and only departure outside of the parish counted as a move. Tax records: ADCO C7070 and C7071, taille et capitation, Corgengoux, Mazerotte, and Paruey. I began with 1701 and ended at 1789, but unfortunately not all years are covered in the tax records. The missing years are 1704, 1707, 1709–14, 1716, 1719–20, 1744, 1748, 1754, 1771, and 1773. There are therefore tax records for seventy-three years, with few years missing after 1720. Parish registers: Cercle généalogique de Côte-d’Or, “Corgengoux. État civil des naissances et décès de 1672 à 1792, relevé et saisie par Michel Berard,” Cahier 268 (2e trimester 1996); and “Corgengoux. État civil des mariages de 1672 à 1792, relevé par Michel Berard et saisie par Germaine Schneider,” Cahier 269 (4e trimestre 2001). 42 Note that these averages are calculated by taking the assessment paid in the first year of taxation by all male taxpayers. This mitigates the fact that people paying taxes for longer years likely saw a slight increase over time. 43 In the Breton city of Vannes 43 per cent of taxpayers disappeared over a period of five years. Le Goff, Vannes and Its Region, 59–63. 44 In seventeenth-century Nottinghamshire about a quarter of adults were baptized, married, and buried in the same village. Anne Mitson, “The Significance of Kinship Networks in the Seventeenth Century: South West Nottinghamshire,” in Charles Phythian-Adams, ed., Societies, Cultures, and Kinship, 1580–1850 (Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1993), 24–76. 45 Jacques Dupâquier et al, Histoire de la population française, vol. 2, De la Renaissance à 1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988), 236.

Notes to pages 57−9  209  46 Several historians have noted that those who live longer have a greater chance of migrating. Steven Ruggles, “Migration, Marriage, and Mortality: Correcting Sources of Bias in English Family Reconstitutions,” Population Studies 46, 3 (1992): 507–22; Alice Bee Kasakoff and John W. Adams, “The Effect of Migration on Ages at Vital Events: A Critique of Family Reconstitution in Historical Demography,” European Journal of Population 11, 3 (1995): 199–242. 47 There was some variety in the number of tax-paying households from year to year, especially before about 1750. Thereafter, the number of fiscal households rose gradually from about thirty to about forty, with a maximum of forty-five in 1788. 48 This necessarily excludes all those who were still paying taxes in 1789, because there is no way of knowing when they stopped paying taxes or when they died. 49 Sutherland, The Chouans, 105–8. I calculated the household migration rates from the data given in table 4.10, p. 106. 50 Lacrampe, “Un monde ouvert,” 6–7. 51 Collins, “Translation de domicile,” 391. 52 Recently Jérôme Luther Viret has analysed in-migration from tax records for the town of Argence in Normandy. But since he provides the number of in-migrating households as a proportion of new taxpayers rather than as annual rates, it would be very difficult to compare his results to those presented here. Jérôme Luther Viret, La famille normande: Mobilité et frustrations sociales au siècle des Lumières (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013), 149–52. 53 The method is only applicable to the eighteenth century, because parish registers are often incomplete and the survival of tax rolls is spotty for the seventeenth century. 54 Poussou, “L’enracinement est le caractère dominant,” 108. 55 Laslett, “Clayworth and Cogenhoe.” See also Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), where high levels of mobility are one of the main elements distinguishing the individualist English and continental peasant societies. 56 Poussou, “L’enracinement est le caractère dominant,” 107. On Italy he is referring to Todd, “Mobilité géographique et cycle de vie,” 726–44. Poussou also cites his own forthcoming article that directly compares mobility patterns in France and the British Isles, but I have been unable to locate this publication. 57 Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, La population française, 92–3.

210 Notes to pages 62−5 5 8 Poussou, “Note sur la mobilité de la vieillesse,” 292. 59 Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1966), 37–46; the citation is from p. 46. 60 Herman Diedericks, “Internal Migrations in the Netherland from the Late Middle Ages to the 19th Century,” in Antonio Eiras Roel and Ofelia Rey Castelao, eds., Les migrations internes et à moyenne distance en Europe, 1500–1800 (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1994), 147–78; Roger Schofield, “Age-Specific Mobility in an Eighteenth-Century Rural English Parish,” Annales de démographie historique (1970), 261–74. 61 Souden, “Pre-industrial English Local Migration Fields”; Audrey Perkyns, “Migration and Mobility in Six Kentish Parishes, 1851-1881,” Local Population Studies 63 (1999), 30–70; Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions,” 749–89; Clark, “Migration in England,” 57–90. 62 Souden, “Pre-industrial English Local Migration Fields,” 125. 63 Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, 65–70; Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions,” 754. 64 Colin G. Pooley, “The Influence of Locality on Migration: A Comparative Study of Britain and Sweden in the Nineteenth Century,” Local Population Studies 90, 2 (2013): 13–27. 65 David Hackett Fischer, Historians Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 21–4. 3. The Meaning of Distance 1 Among many others, see Ganiage, Trois villages d’Île-de-France, 59–61; Durand, Vin, vigne et vignerons, 344–50; Martine Segalen, Nuptialité et alliance: Le choix du conjoint dans une commune de l’Eure (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1972). 2 Jean Vassort, Les papiers d’un laboureur au siècle des Lumières: Pierre Bordier, une culture paysanne (Seyssel, France: Champ Vallon, 1999); Jacques Bernet, Le journal d’un maître d’école d’Île-de-France (1771–1792), Silly-en-Multien, de l’Ancien Régime à la Révolution (Lille: Septentrion, 2000). 3 The best example is Thomas Brennan’s work on credit and economic relations in Champagne. See his “Peasants and Debt in EighteenthCentury Champagne,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37, 2 (2006): 175–200; and especially “La dette et l’économie rurale en Champagne au dernier siècle de l’Ancien Régime,” in Antoine Follain, ed., Campagnes en mouvement en France du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2008), 55–70. See also Sylvain Vigneron, “La sphère des relations foncières des ruraux: L’exemple du Cambrésis (1681–1791),” Histoire et sociétés rurales 20, 2 (2003): 53–77; Pierre Chaunu, Histoire, science sociale:

Notes to pages 65−7  211  La durée, l’espace et l’homme à l’époque moderne (Paris: SEDES, 1974), 188–91; Anne Jollet, Terre et société en Révolution: Approche du lien social dans la région d’Amboise (Paris: CTHS, 2000). 4 This is the same distance in Jacques Dupâquier, “Mobilité géographique et mobilité sociale,” in Antonio Eiras Roel and Ofelia Rey Castelao, eds., Les migrations internes et à moyenne distance en Europe, 1500–1900 (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1994), 4. 5 These are the cases I analysed in Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008). I have chosen here only to include those cases heard in regular session, which means I have excluded the cases settled at the Grands-Jours or annual assizes. This decision is based on the predominance of minor farming disputes at the Grands-Jours, which were virtually always between neighbours. The courts analysed are Aisy-sousThil and Pont d’Aisy, Bagnot, Billey and Villerrottin, Flée, Foncegrive, Fontaine-en-Duesmois, barony of Gemeaux, Lanthes, Meursault (including Auxey-le-Grand and Auxey-le-Petit), Montot, prieuré de Saint-Bénigne, Ampilly-lès-Bords, Senailly, Ancey, Chazilly-le-Haut, Chazilly-le-Bas (archival references can be found in the bibliography). 6 This is calculated after subtracting close to 150 cases that were engaged by the court itself against an individual. 7 Jeremy Hayhoe, “Neighbours before the Courts: Crime, Village Communities, and Seigneurial Justice in Northern Burgundy, 1750–1790,” French History 17, 2 (2003): 127–48. 8 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past and Present 50, 1 (1971): 41–75. Robert Muchembled sees groups of young men as responsible for much of the violence occurring in early modern Europe and argues that their disciplining explains the decline in violence observed by historians. See his Histoire de la violence – De la fin du Moyen Âge à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 2008). 9 ADCO B2 763/1, justice seigneuriale de Montot, 22, 23 May 1787, 31 July 1782. 10 However, lawsuits against seigneurs or other village communities were more likely to drag on indefinitely, to cost a great deal of money, and to return to court repeatedly than were lawsuits requiring a poor inhabitant to abandon a small plot that he had cleared on the commons. Jeremy Hayhoe, “Litigation and the Policing of Communal Agriculture in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy, 1750–1790,” Agricultural History Review 50, 1 (2002): 51–68. See also Liana Vardi, “Peasants and the Law: A

212 Notes to pages 67−76

1 1 12 13

1 4 15 1 6 17 18 1 9 20

2 1 22 23 24 25

26

2 7 28 29 30 31 32

Village Appeals to the French Royal Council, 1768–91,” Social History 13, 3 (1988): 295–313. Vigneron, “La sphère des relations foncières,” 63. ADCO B2 734/2, justice seigneuriale de Meursault, 27 July 1789. Jack Thomas, Le temps des foires. Foires et marchés dans le Midi toulousain de la fin de l’Ancien Régime à 1914 (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1993). Anne Jollet, Terre et société, 285–94. Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Roche, Humeurs vagabonds, 923–5. The courts also heard from a large number of inhabitants of the village in which the fête was held. Jean-Louis Flandrin, Familles, parenté, maison, sexualité dans l’ancienne société (Paris: Hachette, 1976), 42. Bernet, Le journal d’un maître d’école. Michel Vernus, Une vie paysanne en Franche-Comté: 1740–1790, le livre de raison de Jean-Claude Mercier laboureur à Mamirolle (Vesoul, France: Éditions de folklore comtois, 1999), 73–6. ADCO B2 621/1, justice seigneuriale de Gerland, 24 January 1727. ADCO B2 1177/6, justice seigneuriale de St Vivant, 17 January 1789. ADCO B2 SUP 122, justice seigneuriale de Bligny-sur-Ouche, 18 May 1776. ADCO B2 669/2, justice seigneuriale de Lanthes, 29 May 1779. A good presentation of work on the clientele of pubs and other drinking establishments in early modern Europe can be found in Beat Kümin, “Public Houses and Their Patrons in Early Modern Europe,” in Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty, eds., The World of the Tavern: Public Houses in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), 44–62. Jeremy Hayhoe, “La police aux Grands-Jours dans la Bourgogne du nord: Pouvoir des seigneurs ou auto-régulation?” in François Brisé, Antoine Follain, and Véronique Sarazin, eds., Les justices de village: Administration et justice locale; Actes du colloque d’Angers, des 26 et 27 octobre 2001 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003), 205–18. ADCO B2 799/3, baronnie de Pagny-le-Château, 7 December 1771. ADCO B2 684/4, baronnie de Lays, 23 April 1742. ADCO B2 651/1, marquisat de la Borde-au-Château, 26 January 1728. ADCO B2 799/3, baronnie de Pagny-le-Château, 7 December 1771. ADCO B2 546–547, justice seigneuriale de Corgengoux. ADCO B2 1181/4, prieuré de Bar, 4 October 1781; ADCO B2 547/2, justice seigneuriale de Corgengoux, 30 August 1735.

Notes to pages 76−80  213  33 ADCO 589/2, justice seigneuriale d’Esbarres, 26 June 1760; ADCO B2 499/3, justice seigneuriale de Charnay, 29 August 1781. 34 ADCO L557, foires et marchés, an 7. 35 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme XVe–XVIIIe (Paris: A. Colin, 1979), v.2, 17; Dominique Margairaz, Foires et marchés dans la France préindustrielle (Paris: EHESS, 1988), 53; Guillaume Daudin, Commerce et prospérité: La France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2005), 97–8; Thomas, Le temps des foires, 76–84. 36 Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism. 37 The accounts for Cessey-sur-Tille: ADCO C484, intendant provincial, dossiers par village, Cessey. For Montagny and Bousselange: ADCO B2 470/1, justice seigneuriale de Montagny et Bousselange. For La Perrièresur-Saône: ADCO E Dépôt 480/1, archives communales, La Perrière-surSaône, Liste des journées de Jean Laportole, échevin. 38 Charles Tilly, “Migration in Modern European History,” in William H. McNeill and Ruth S. Adams, eds., Human Migration, Patterns and Policies (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978), 50–5, 67. 39 Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, 301. Similarly Steve Hochstadt complains of the way that many historians of migration “assume without proof a relationship between social consequences and distance or permanence” (Mobility and Modernity, 25). 40 Rosental, Les sentiers invisibles, 53. See also Daniel Courgeau and Eva Lelièvre, “Individual and Social Motivations for Migration,” in G. Caselli, J. Vallin, and G. Wunsch, eds., Demography: Analysis and Synthesis (San Diego, CA: Academic Press-Elsevier, 2006), 353–4. 41 For a similar argument see Goujon, “La mobilité au sein de sociétés vigneronnes,” 85. 4. Temporary and Seasonal Migration 1 Croix, “L’ouverture.” 2 Three book-length studies are based substantially on this source, namely Abel Chatelain, Les migrants temporaires en France de 1800 à 1914 (Villeneuve-d’Ascq, France: Publications de l’Université de Lille, 1977); Abel Poitrineau, Remues d’hommes: Les migrations montagnardes en France, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1983); Jan Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe, 1600–1900: The Drift to the North Sea (London: Croom Helm, 1987). Olwen Hufton also made extensive use of it in her The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 69–107. See also Moch, Moving Europeans, 78–96. For a presentation of the

214 Notes to pages 80−1









inquiry, see Vincent Denis, “Surveiller et décrire: L’enquête des préfets sur les migrations périodiques, 1807–1813,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 47, 4 (2000): 706–30. 3 Chatelain did consider the impact of migrant workers in rural communities in the plains, and his publications contain much that is useful on the subject, although the fact that his book is a national survey means that he does not generally descend to the level of the local community. Jan Lucassen analyses labour migration primarily from the point of view of the region receiving the workers in what he calls the “North Sea System,” but the situation is different outside of this area of dense population, rural industry, and large-scale dairy farming. Hufton also discusses the work performed in rural communities by seasonal migrants. Hufton,The Poor, 75–95. Patrice Poujade has analysed in some detail the lives of Auvergnat seasonal migrants (primarily coppersmiths, cauldron makers, and merchants) who came into the Pyrenees. See his Le voisin et le migrant: Hommes et circulations dans les Pyrénées modernes (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011); and Une société marchande: Le commerce et ses acteurs dans les Pyrénées modernes (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2008). See also Pier Paolo Viazzo, Upland Communities: Environment, Population, and Social Structure in the Alps since the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Abel Poitrineau, Les Espagnols de l’Auvergne et du Limousin du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Aurillac, France: Malroux-Mazel, 1985); Belmont, Des ateliers au village; Abel Poitrineau, La vie rurale en Basse-Auvergne, 1726–1789 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965). 4 Archives nationales, F20/434, enquête sur la migration des ouvriers, Côted’Or. These were copied later in the nineteenth century and included in the Statistiques de la Côte-d’Or, ADCO (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or) 1F/38/1, pp. 451–3. 5 Lucassen, Migrant Labour, 78. 6 Marie-Annie Moulin, “Les maçons de la Haute-Marche au XVIIIe siècle” (PhD diss., Université de Clermont-Ferrand II, 1986); Alain Faure, “Les maçons creusois de Paris au XIXe siècle ou le double mouvement,” Maçons de la Creuse. Bulletin de liaison 7 (2003): 17–22. 7 On the experiences of Creuzois masons in Paris, especially during the nineteenth century, see for example Alain Corbin, “Limousins migrants, limousins sédentaires: Contribution à l’histoire de la région limousine au XIXe siècle (1845–1880),” Le mouvement social 88 (1974): 7–29; Alain Corbin, Archaïsme et modernité en Limousin au XIXe siècle (Paris: Rivière, 1975); Casey Harison, The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Newark: University of

Notes to pages 81−4  215  Delaware Press, 2008); Kiva Silver, “The Peasants of Paris: Limousin Migrant Masons in the Nineteenth Century,” French History 24, 4 (2014): 498–519. 8 Moulin, Les Maçons de la Haute-Marche, 17–8; Poitrineau, Remues d’hommes. 9 Alfred Dittgen,”L’évolution de la population de la France de 1800 à 1945,” in Chantal Blayo, ed., La population de la France: Évolutions démographiques depuis 1946 (Paris: INED, 2005), 38. 10 He was twenty-nine years old, and there is no information on his marital status. ADCO B2 1134/6, justice seigneuriale de Chambolle, 23 January 1769. 11 ADCO B2 949/2, justice seigneuriale de Villers-la-Faye, 9 November 1782. 12 ADCO B2 876/2, justice seigneuriale du comté de Serrigny, 30 August 1736. 13 See also Poitrineau, Remues d’hommes, 83. 14 For a presentation of the areas with a large number of seasonally migrating masons in the Limousin, see Louis Pérouas and Marie-Claude Lapeyre, “L’émigration des maçons creusois avant le XIXe siècle,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 23, 3 (1976): 369–93. 15 Kiva Silver, “Building Communities: Immigration, Occupation, and the Boundaries of Limousin Solidarity in Nineteenth-Century Paris,” French Historical Studies 35, 1(2012): 61–93. 16 Poitrineau, Remues d’hommes, 224–30. 17 Lamarre, L’hôpital de Dijon, 174–5. See also Moulin, “Les maçons de la Haute-Marche,” 71. 18 ADCO B2 1177/3, justice seigneuriale de Saint-Vivant, 9 September 1744. 19 Annie Arnoult argues that sedentary pit sawyers were always more numerous than migrants, but this does not seem to have been the case in northern Burgundy. Annie Arnoult, La grande histoire des scieurs de long (Feurs, France: Collection au bon laboureur, 1996), 29. 20 This was standard among most migrant workers in France from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Poitrineau, Remues d’hommes, 72. 21 Moulin, “Les maçons de la Haute-Marche,” 20. 22 Poitrineau, Remues d’hommes, 41–2. 23 See Chantal Maistre, Gilbert Maistre, and Georges Heitz, Colporteurs et marchands savoyards dans l’Europe des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Annecy, France: Académie Salésienne, 1992). Also Laurence Fontaine, Histoire du colportage en Europe (XVe–XIXe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993). Note that the Napoleonic inquiry does not include information about pedlars, perhaps because they were not considered to be “workers and day labourers” as described in the documents. 24 ADCO B2 505/3, justice de la baronnie de Châteauneuf, 17 August 1772. 25 On itinerant pedlars see Fontaine, Histoire du colportage; Maistre, Maistre, and Heitz, Colporteurs et marchands savoyards; D.J. Siddle, “Migration as

216 Notes to pages 84−8 a Strategy of Accumulation: Social and Economic Change in EighteenthCentury Savoy,” Economic History Review 50,1 (1997): 1–20, as well as two general classic works on migrant workers, Poitrineau, Remues d’hommes, and Chatelain, Les migrants temporaires. 26 ADCO C3003, États, décrets de 1739, décret 10. 27 ADCO B2 546/3, justice seigneuriale de Corgengoux, 10 April 1780. 28 AN F/20/434-5,enquête sur la migration des ouvriers, 1809–1812. 29 ADCO B2 503/2, justice seigneuriale de Chassagne, 20 December 1782. 30 ADCO B2 956/1, justice seigneuriale de Villy-le-Moutier, 12 July 1729. 31 On chimney sweeps see Mark Walz, “Alpine Chimney Sweeps in Western, Central, and Southern Europe from the 16th to the Early 20th Century,” in Klaus J. Bade, Pieter C. Emmer, Leo Lucassen, and Jocen Oltemer, eds., The Encyclopedia of Migration and Minorities in Europe from the 17th Century to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 229–31. 32 These journeymen registered for work in Tours from 1782 to 1789. Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the EighteenthCentury French Trades (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 100; see also Josef Ehmer, “Worlds of Mobility: Migration Patterns of Viennese Artisans in the 18th Century,” in Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997), 186. 33 Cynthia M. Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Régime France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 112–13. A good short description of the Tour de France can be found in Abel Poitrineau, although the author may overestimate how common it was for artisans to travel such large distances. Abel Poitrineau, Ils travaillaient la France: Métiers et mentalités du XVIe au XIXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 1992), 62–74. 34 A short but useful description of compagnonnage in the nineteenth century, emphasizing continuity with the eighteenth century, can be found in Jean-Michel Gourden, Le peuple des ateliers: Les artisans du XIXe siècle (Paris: Éditions Créaphis, 1996), 95–102. See also William H. Sewell Jr, Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 40–61. 35 James R. Farr, Hands of Honor: Artisans and Their World in Dijon, 1550– 1650 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 65; Henri Hauser, Les compagnonnages d’arts et métiers à Dijon aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Librairie Alphonse Picard et fils, 1907), 35–7. 36 Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 295. 37 Michael Sonenscher, “Journeymen’s Migrations and Workshop Organization in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Steven Laurence Kaplan

Notes to pages 88−90  217  and Cynthia J. Koepp, eds., Work in France: Representation, Meaning, Organization, and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 74–96; Sonenscher, Work and Wages, 120–30. See also Ulrich-Christian Pallach, “Fonctions de la mobilité artisanale et ouvrière: Compagnons, ouvriers et manufacturiers en France et aux Allemagnes (17e–19e siècles),” Francia 11 (1983): 365–406. Pallach cites the example of journeymen bookbinders in Frankfurt am Main, of whom 43 per cent had travelled less than 50 km from their place of birth, 27 per cent had travelled 50–100 km, 12 per cent had travelled 100–150 km, and less than 20 per cent had travelled over 150 km. 38 Ehmer’s comparison to France is based on Sonenscher’s work. Josef Ehmer, “Perceptions of Mobile Labour and Migratory Practices in Early Modern Europe,” in Josef Ehmer and Catharina Lis, eds., The Idea of Work in Europe from Antiquity to Early Modern Times (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 312. 39 Ehmer, “Quantifying Mobility,” 327–38. 40 Josef Ehmer, “Journeymen’s Migrations as Nineteenth-Century Mass Migration,” in René Leboutte, ed., Migrations et migrants dans une perspective historique: Permanences et innovations (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000), 104. 41 Ehmer, “Journeymen’s Migrations,” 106. 42 Belmont, Des ateliers au village, vol. 2, 28–31. 43 This includes all artisans over sixteen years of age and under twentyfive who were not called apprentices or masters in the records, as well as artisans of all ages specifically identified as journeymen or bachelors (compagnons or garçons). 44 None of the prefects provided numbers for journeymen migrations. Some mentioned them, noting that it would be impossible to count them, or that they spent all of their earnings locally and so did not contribute to cash flows between the departments. Many simply did not mention journeymen at all. Archives nationales, F20/434. 45 Belmont, Des ateliers au village, 31. 46 Martin Dribe and Christer Lundh, “People on the Move: Determinants of Servant Migration in Nineteenth-Century Sweden,” Continuity and Change 20, 1(2005): 57–9; Dribe, “Household and Family Aspects of Children Leaving Home,” 95–122. Jan Kok, “Youth Labor Migration and Its Family Setting, the Netherlands, 1850–1940,” The History of the Family 2, 4(1997): 507–26. See also Moch, Moving Europeans, 32–5. 47 Ann Kussmaul, "The Ambiguous Mobility of Farm Servants." Economic History Review 34, 2 (1981): 228. 48 Dribe and Lundh, “People on the Move,” 57–9.

218 Notes to pages 91−4 49 There are twenty-four witnesses who were migrant threshers. 50 ADCO B2 313/2, justice de la châtellenie de Labèrgement-le-Duc, 15 January 1790. Abel Chatelain mentions this specialty of the Bugey in Les migrants temporaires, 13, and in “L’émigration temporaire des peigneurs de chanvre du Jura méridional avant les transformations des XIXe et XXe siècles,” Études rhodaniennes 21, 3(1946): 166–78. The prefect of the Ain described hemp carders as travelling in groups of between two and five people “under the supervision of a chief” and leaving home either in the fall or spring. 51 In the Loudunais and the Mirebalais the grain was harvested by two distinct groups of temporary migrants. Métiviers performed the actual harvesting of the grain, and faucheurs cut the straw left by the harvesters. Almost all faucheurs were men, and they came from distances of 100 km or more. Métiviers, however, travelled over shorter distances (about 30 km) and included whole families. Sébastien Jahan, “Femmes du peuple itinerants: L’exemple du Centre-Ouest aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest 113-4 (2006): 115–34. 52 Liana Vardi shows that gleaning was not always reserved for locals; farmers sometimes sold the right to glean their fields or included the right as part of the pay of the harvesters they hired. Governments at all levels attempted to eradicate such practices during the eighteenth century. Liana Vardi, “Construing the Harvest: Gleaners, Farmers, and Officials in Early Modern France,” American Historical Review 98, 5(1993): 1424–47. 53 ADCO B2 693/2, justice seigneuriale de Longecourt, 23 June 1787. 54 ADCO B2 540/1, justice seigneuriale de Concoeur et Corberon, 29 August 1742. 55 ADCO B2 1177/3, justice seigneuriale de Saint-Vivant, 24 December 1739. 56 ADCO B2 330/1, justice de la châtellenie de Chaux, 16 January 1761. 57 ADCO B2 SUP 124, justice seigneuriale de Bligny-sur-Ouche, 3 July 1787. 58 Dennis Morelot, Statistiques de la vigne dans le département de la Côte-d’Or (Dijon, 1831), 210–11. 59 Moulin, “Maçons de la Haute-Marche,” 20–2. In the village of Banize 92 per cent of conceptions to mason fathers occurred during November to March. 60 ADCO C73, intendant, enquête, Saint-Rémy. 61 Sussman argues that the Morvan did not become an area of wet-nursing Parisian-born babies until into the nineteenth century and that Normandy and Picardy were the main areas taking babies from the capital in the eighteenth century. George D. Sussman, Selling Mother’s Milk: The Wet-Nursing Business in France, 1715–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 51.

Notes to pages 94−8  219  62 Francine Rolley, “Reproduction familiale et changements économiques dans le Morvan du nord au XIXe siècle,” in Luigi Lorenzetti, Anne-Lise Head-König, and Joseph Goy, eds., Marchés, migrations et logiques dans les espaces français, canadien et suisse (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 25–40. 63 The four villages in the Morvan studied by Houdaille did not have conception and birth patterns that would be expected in places specializing in seasonal migration. Jacques Houdaille, “Quatre villages du Morvan, 1610–1870,” Population 42, 4–5(1987): 649–70. 64 ADCO E1250, seigneurie de Minot, 21 June 1759. Note that two of the four seigneurs behind the case were conseillers in the Parlement of Dijon, and a third was Urbain-Aubert de Tourny, conseiller d’état. The merchant had little chance of winning against these plaintiffs. 65 Abel Chatelain, “Les migrations temporaires en Côte-d’Or au XIXe siècle,” Annales de Bourgogne 23 (1951): 271–2. 66 Sébastien Jahan and Emmanuel Dion, Le peuple de la forêt: Nomadisme ouvrier et identités dans la France du centre-ouest aux temps modernes (Rennes, France: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2002). 67 Jahan and Dion note that carters were at the summit of the forest social hierarchy and often served as intermediaries between the villages and the forest inhabitants. While there are many carters listed in both the census and the depositions, the documents do not distinguish between those carting wood and those transporting other materials, so I am unable to include them here. 68 ACO B2 466/2, justice de Bonnencontre, 3 October 1720. In the original: “Je ne suis pas surpris que tu ne veuilles pas me les payer. Autant de charbonniers, autant de fripons.” 69 Arlette Brosselin, La forêt bourguignonne (1670–1789) (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 1987), 207. 70 Parents’ occupation was only recorded in a few of the transcriptions, which is why the sample is so small. 71 I consulted the transcription of the document with a paid subscription at http://actes.cgco.org/. A scan of the original document can be found at http://archivesenligne.cotedor.fr/ark:/71137/c7f152ae416864f9. 72 Nicolas Millery, “Vagabonds, sans-aveu et répression prévôtale à Semuren-Auxois au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales de Bourgogne 322 (2009): 49–78. 73 Hufton, The Poor; Robert M. Schwartz, Policing the Poor in EighteenthCentury France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Jean-Pierre Gutton, La société et les pauvres: L’exemple de la généralité de Lyon, 1534–1789 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1971); Jérome Luther Viret, “Vagabonds et mendiants dans les campagnes au nord de Paris dans

220 Notes to pages 98−103 le premier tiers du XVIIIe siècle,” Annales de démographie historique 111 (2006): 7–30. 74 Viret, “Vagabonds et mendiants,” 16–17. 75 Both inquiries can be found in ADCO C5088, États, nouveaux pieds de taille. 76 On the migration patterns of sailors from rural communities see Thierry Sauzeau, “Du village à la ville: Les trajets professionnels des marins de la Seudre (1770–1793),” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 113-4 (2006): 83–96. 77 Biagio Salvemini, “Migrants saisonniers et pouvoirs territoriaux: Les Pouilles à l’époque moderne,” in Claudia Moatti, Wolfgang Kaiser, and Christophe Pébarthe, eds., Le monde de l’itinérance en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne (Bordeaux: De Boccard, 2009), 163–4. 78 Lucassen, Migrant Labour in Europe, 105–8. 5. Migrants’ Reasons for Moving 1 For an historical study of migration that includes both written and oral sources see Anne-Marie Granet-Abisset, La route réinventée: Les migrations des Queyrassins aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1994). 2 Several historians have described rural mobility this way. See Dupâquier, “Mobilité géographique et mobilité sociale,” 4. Among those critical of the model: Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions inter-générationelles,” 750; Alfred Perrenoud, “L’incidence de la migration sur la dynamique et les comportements démographiques,” in Antonio Eiras Roel and Ofelia Rey Castelao, eds., Les migrations internes et à moyenne distance en Europe, 1500–1900 (Santiago de Compostela: Xunta de Galicia, 1994), 485. 3 Gérard Béaur, “Les catégories sociales à la campagne: Repenser un instrument d’analyse,” Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’ouest 106, 1 (1999): 159–76. See also Harvey Smith, “Getting to Know Peasants: Local Population Records and Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century France,” Histoire Sociale / Social History 28, 56 (1995): 375–419. 4 ADCO (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or) C740–C7110, rôles de taille et capitation. The tax records used were those for 1759–62, which I matched to witnesses deposed in those same villages between 1750 and 1770. Out of 885 male witnesses living in the villages within the bailliage and testifying during these two decades, I was able to locate 535 in tax records. 5 The difference is statistically significant. 6 François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, Reading and Writing: Literacy in France from Calvin to Jules Ferry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

Notes to pages 103−10  221  See also Karen E. Carter, Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 198–227. 7 Pierre Lévêque, “Problèmes de l’alphabétisation en Bourgogne sous la monarchie censitaire,” in François Furet and Jacques Ozouf, eds., Lire et écrire: L’alphabétisation des français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, vol. 2 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1977), 153–86. 8 In the department of Ille-et-Vilaine in the nineteenth century there was a strong correlation between a commune’s mobility and literacy rates for men, but not for women. See Michael J. Heffernan, “Literacy and Geographical Mobility in Nineteenth-Century Provincial France: Some Evidence from the Département of Ille-et-Vilaine,” Local Population Studies 42 (1989): 32–42. 9 The tendency is the same, albeit weaker, among married women. Among wives of ploughmen, 7 per cent of non-natives and 8 per cent of natives could sign. For wives of vignerons, 3 per cent of non-natives and 4 per cent of natives could sign. Among wives of cottagers and day labourers, 3 per cent of non-natives and 3 per cent of natives could sign. 10 Rosental, “La migration des femmes,” 107–35. 11 For a similar conclusion see Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions inter-générationalles,” 765; Rosental, Les sentiers invisibles, 190. 12 Some communities did not make the marginal notations, and some did not distinguish between in-migrants and newly married native inhabitants. 13 Jean-Marc Moriceau emphasizes the mobility of wealthy tenant fermiers. See his Les fermiers de l’Île-de-France: L’ascension d’un patronat agricole (XVe– XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 33. 14 In Burgundy an ouvrée measured about 428 square metres, and most landowner vignerons had less than ten ouvrées. 15 Among landowning families 36 per cent of patronyms disappeared over the course of the eighteenth century, while 40–50 per cent of patronyms disappeared in the overall sample. Guy Brunet, Pierre Darlu, and Dominique Barbero, “Patronymes, propriété et mobilité géographique: L’avant-pays savoyard du XVIIIe au XXe siècle,” Histoire et sociétés rurales 30, 2 (2008): 67–90. 16 This represents about a fifth of all migrants, assuming an annual rate of about 0.05. 17 Collins, “Translation de domicile,” 399–400. 18 Lucassen and Lucassen, “Migration, Migration History, History,” 9–40. 19 Fontaine, Histoire du colportage, 20. 20 Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions inter-générationnelles,” 776–7. 21 For a similar argument see Vassort, Société provinciale, 235, 247.

222 Notes to pages 111−19 22 Translations de domicile sometimes explain the motivations of migrants. Marcel Lachiver, “Une source méconnue pour l’étude de la mobilité géographique en France au XVIIIe siècle: Les congés et translations de domicile.” Population 32, 1 (1977): 356. 23 This was related to the renonciation à l’incolat that was required for transfer of residence within the province (see chapter 7). 24 The renonciations can be found in AM Dijon L37 to L40. As these records are in chronological order, in the following discussion I simply provide the dates for the cases cited. The population estimate for Dijon is from ADCO L496, recensement de 1786. 25 The proportion is very close in the élection of Mantes, where twenty-four out of thirty-six people leaving the city went to a village. Lachiver, “Une source méconnue,” 363. 26 22 October 1729. 27 Edme Barbemoiret, 31 September 1705; Gally, 22 October 1729; Thomas, 20 September 1711; Garnier, 15 September 1705; Forestier, 2 September 1711; Chanchot, 15 July 1710; Goussard, 12 June 1709; Bunet, 10 May 1710; Guienot, 29 March 1704. 28 Tanner’s widow, 7 May 1710; Goussard, 28 September 1710; Saget, 20 December 1709; Gautier, 30 September 1710. 29 Finet, 8 October 1717; Massenot, 4 December 1710 and 29 September 1715; Clere, 15 March 1708. Note that Massenot left Dijon twice, and both times he complained about his high taxes. 30 Nodot, 10 November 1707; Darcy, 10 July 1730; Delgrone, 27 December 1728. 31 Moch, Moving Europeans, 96. 32 There has been some excellent work on the nineteenth century, most notably Farcy and Faure, Mobilité d’une génération de français. 33 For most usage rights, prescription applied after twenty-nine years. 34 ADCO B2 SUP 122, justice seigneuriale de Bligny-sur-Ouche, 12 May 1777. 35 ADCO B2 484/2, justice seigneuriale de Broin, 29 May 1770. 36 ADCO B2 534/4, justice seigneuriale de Clomot, 8 April 1788. 37 ADCO B2 621/1, justice seigneuriale de Gerland, 8 March 1720. 38 ADCO B2 652/6, justice du marquisat de la Borde-au-Château, 27 May 1777. 39 ADCO B2 523/1, justice seigneuriale de Cissey, 7 May 1746. 40 Souden, “Pre-industrial English local migration fields.” 41 Jacques Dupâquier, “Sédentarité et mobilité,” 127–31; Poussou disputes the application of the term migration to short-distance moves, arguing that they are simply instances of mobility or micro-mobility. Poussou, “Les migrations dans la Haute-Lande,” 370; Poussou, “Les migrations internes,” 216.

Notes to pages 119−25  223  4 2 43 44 45 46

4 7 48 49 50 51 5 2 53 54 55 56

5 7 58

Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, 302. Rosental, “La migration des femmes,” 108. ADCO B2 669/2, justice seigneuriale de Lanthes, 27 April 1770. ADCO B2 1224/1, justice seigneuriale de Cirey, 17 August 1734. ADCO B2 295/2-3, justice de la châtellenie d’Argilly, 1 September 1701. This meant that he could not testify to “immemorial usage” over the previous twenty-nine years. ADCO B2 781/1 justice seigneuriale de Neuilly et Sennecey, 4 December 1748. ADCO B2 944/4, justice seigneuriale de Champdôtre, 12 July 1749. ADCO B2 499/3, justice seigneuriale de Charney 4 September 1780. ADCO B2 484/2,justice seigneuriale de Broin, 25 April 1771. ADCO B2 314/6, justice de la châtellenie de Labergement-le-Duc, 27 April 1779. ADCO E 1175/13, Livre de naissance de Charles Lemulier. Bernet, Le journal d’un maître d’école, entry for March 1786. ADCO B2 589/1, justice seigneuriale d’Esbarres, 1 July 1743. ADCO B2 436/6, justice seigneuriale d’Auvillars et Glanon, 14 March 1773. Anne Fillon, “Louis Simon, étaminier 1741–1820, dans son village du Haut-Maine au Siècle des Lumières,” (PhD diss., Université du Maine, 1982). Or Jean Conan, a Breton, who travelled extensively, working as a cod fisherman off the coast of Newfoundland, a shipbuilder in Brest, a soldier in the Revolutionary armies, and a weaver. See Joël Cornette, “Fils de mémoire: L’autobiographie de Jean Conan, 1765–1834,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 39, 3(1992): 353–402. See also the case of Edward Barlow in seventeenth-century England: Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). ADCO B2 913/2, justice seigneuriale de Tichey, 3 July 1760. Vicomte de la Maillardière, Le produit et le droit des communes et terres vagues, usages et vaines pâtures (Paris, 1782), 138.

6. What Attracted Migrants? 1 Most historians of internal migration find the gravity model to be empirically useful but oversimplified. Whyte, Migration and Society in Britain, 12; McCants, “Internal Migration in Friesland,” 395–6; Rosental, Sentiers invisibles, 86. Rosental is more critical of this model than are the other historians cited. 2 Samuel A. Stouffer, “Intervening Opportunities: A Theory Relating Mobility and Distance,” American Sociological Review 5, 6(1940): 845–67. See also his reformulation, with the addition of the notion of competing

224 Notes to pages 125−34













migrants in order to account for the effect of population density rather than simply the number of communities that separate two points: Samuel A. Stouffer, “Intervening Opportunities and Competing Migrants,” Journal of Regional Science 2, 1(1960): 1–26. 3 The categories were established using the Jenks optimization method, an iterative approach for establishing categories in cartography. See Judith Tyner, Introduction to Thematic Cartography (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992), 181–4. 4 Most of the population data comes from the 1786 non-nominative census, but for about ten villages I had to use numbers from the 1793 census, taken from the website: “Des villages de Cassini aux communes d’aujourd’hui,” http://cassini.ehess.fr/cassini/fr/html/index.htm. For the census, L496, recensement 1786. A presentation of this non-nominative census can be found in Christine Lamarre, “La population de la Bourgogne à la fin du XVIIIe siècle à travers le dénombrement Amelot (1786),” Annales de Bourgogne 218 (1983): 65–99. 5 The population data for this calculation also comes from the 1786 non-nominative census. I excluded those who had left or moved to a community with more than 2,700 inhabitants. This was necessary because the places of birth came from seigneurial courts that sat in relatively small communities, which meant that the presence of even a small number of natives of Dijon or Beaune would skew the results. Regardless of whether I worked with the whole sample of mobile witnesses or I excluded all communities of more than 2,700 or 1,500, there were always slightly more people moving towards smaller communities than there were moving towards larger ones. In eighteenth-century England most moves took people to communities that were about the same size as the place they had left, although there were slightly more moves up than down the population scale. Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility, 96–8. 6 I emphasize again that the documents provide place of birth rather than place of previous residence and do not provide a snapshot of places of origin at one point in time like a census would. 7 See Day, “Geographic Mobility in Wiltshire,” 69–75. 8 Anne Zink, Pays ou circonscription: Les collectivités territoriales de la France du Sud-Ouest sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2000), 222–4. 9 R.J. Johnston and P.J. Perry, “Déviation directionnelle dans les aires de contact: Deux exemples de relations matrimoniales dans la France rurale du XIXe siècle,” Études rurales 46, 1(1972): 32–3; Alain Morel, “L’espace social d’un village picard,” Études rurales 45, 1 (1972): 63.

Notes to pages 135−6  225  10 The proportion of non-natives among masters rose from about half at the start of the eighteenth century to about two-thirds by the end. Shephard, Jr, “Social and Geographic Mobility,” 97–130. 11 Bruno Ramirez, La ruée vers le Sud: Migrations du Canada vers les États-Unis, 1840–1930 (Montreal: Boréal, 2003), trans. Pierrot Lambert, 102–12. 12 Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (Princeton: Harper Perennial, 2002), 19–21. 13 Clé Lesger, Leo Lucassen, and Marlou Schrover, “Is There Life Outside the Migrant Network? German Immigrants in the XIXth Century Netherlands and the Need for a More Balanced Migration Typology,” Annales de démographie historique 104 (2002): 29–50. 14 Leslie Page Moch, “Networks among Bretons? The Evidence for Paris, 1875–1925,” Continuity and Change 18, 3 (2003): 431–55. In her book on Breton migration to Paris Moch also argues that a substantial number of Breton migrants chose to live their life in Paris outside of the Breton group. Leslie Page Moch, The Pariahs of Yesterday: Breton Migrants in Paris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). See also Eleonore Canepari, “Les procesetti matrimoniali, une source pour l’étude de la mobilité (Rome, XVIIe siècle),” L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques 5 (2009), on-line journal, http://acrh.revues.org/1692. 15 Rosental, Sentiers invisibles, 105–30; Noël Bonneuil, Arnaud Bringé, and Paul-André Rosental, “Familial Components of First Migrations after Marriage in Nineteenth-Century France,” Social History 33, 1 (2008): 36–59. But see Colin G. Pooley and Shani D’Cruze, “Migration and Urbanization in North-West England circa 1760–1830,” Social History 19, 3 (1994): 351. This study of the moves made by the Shaw family argues that most migration followed family and community networks. See also Allen R. Newman, “The Influence of Family and Friends on German Internal Migration, 1880–85,” Journal of Social History 31, 2 (1979): 286. 16 I limited the sample to six contiguous villages in the bailliage of Nuits: Argilly, Bagnot, Chivre, Gerland, Pouilly-sur-Saône, and Villy-le-Moutier. The sample includes 1,377 adults over the age of twenty years. On the use of patronyms to study out-migration, with a method that is different from the one applied here, see Fabrice Foroni and Michel Vernay, “Patronymes, mobilité géographique et structure de la population,” in Alain Bideau and Guy Brunet, eds., Essai de démographie historique et de génétique des populations: Une population du Jura méridional du XVIIe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Institut national d’études démographiques, 2007), 145–58. See also Brunet, Darlu, and Barbero, “Patronymes, propriété et mobilité géographique,” 67–90.

226 Notes to pages 137−41 1 7 See also Whyte, Migration and Society in Britain, 42. 18 Le Goff, Vannes and Its Region, 64. He also found (p.70) that the presence of domestics in a household explained about 8 per cent of variation in persistence rates. 19 Moch, Moving Europeans, 72; Hochstadt, Mobility and Modernity, 71; Lyn Boothman, “Mobility and Stability in Long Melford, Suffolk, in the Late Seventeenth Century,” Local Population Studies 62, 1 (1999): 50. 20 Thanks to the work of a team lead by Jacques Ozouf, the data is now freely available online. See Béatrice Marin and Mathieu Marraud, “L’enquête postale de 1848,” L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques, Revue électronique du CRH 9 (2011), http://acrh.revues.org/3707. The Excel file containing the data: “Les données de l'enquête postale de 1848,” L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques: Revue électronique du CRH 9 (2011). http://acrh.revues.org/3708. I first discovered the inquiry and got the idea to use it to analyse migration from Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions inter-générationelles.” 21 Bourdieu et al, “Migrations et transmissions inter-générationelles,” 778. 22 Jean-Michel Boehler, “Du carrefour rhénan au cloisonnement de l’espace vécu: Immigration et micromobilité rurale en Alsace (1648–1789),” in Bernard Vogler, ed., Les migrations de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 1996), 55. 23 For more on this see chapter 7. 24 In Year IV (1796) and Year VI (1798) the government collected data on the number of animals in each village. AN F/20/112/2, Dénombrement de la population des cantons et des bestiaux de toute espèce qui existent dans ces cantons, Côte-d’Or. 25 I started from a complete list of 239 communities, including those transcribed and those simply counted. Among these I could determine the area held in common land for seventy-eight communities. On the Revolutionary division of commons see P.M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 137–54; John Markoff, The Abolition of Feudalism: Peasants, Lords, and Legislators in the French Revolution (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Nadine Vivier, Propriété collective et identité communale: Les biens communaux en France, 1750–1914 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998), 60–170; Georges Lefebvre, Les paysans du Nord pendant la Révolution française (Paris: Armand Colin, 1972, c. 1924), 61–104; Georges Bourgin, Le partage des biens communaux: Documents sur la préparation de la loi du 10 juin 1793 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1908); Kathryn Norberg, “Dividing Up the Commons: Institutional Change in Rural France, 1789–1799,” Politics

Notes to pages 141−3  227 

2 6 27

28

2 9 30 31 32

33

34

3 5 36

and Society 16, 2 (1988): 265–86; Noelle Plack, Common Land, Wine and the French Revolution: Rural Society and Economy in Southern France, c. 1789– 1820 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). For Burgundy see Marcel Henriot, “Le partage des biens communaux en Côte-d’Or sous la Révolution: L’exemple du district d’Arnay-sur-Arroux,” Annales de Bourgogne 19 (1947): 262–74; Jean Bart, La Révolution francaise en Bourgogne (Clermont-Ferrand: La Française d’édition et d’imprimerie, 1996), 304–27. The inquiries can be found in the following documents: ADCO (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or) L640, département, administration communale, Biens et revenus communaux. See also the files for each district: ADCO L1407, district de Beaune; ADCO L1283, district d’Arnay-le-Duc; L1488, district de Châtillon-sur-Seine; L1900, district d’Is-sur-Tille; L2050, district de Saint-Jean-de-Losne; L2249–51, district de Semur. Vivier, Propriété collective, 49–55. Bernard Derouet, “Territoire et parenté: Pour une mise en perspective de la communauté rurale et des formes de reproduction familiale,” Annales. Histoire et sciences sociales 50, 3(1995): 645–86. Pierre de Saint Jacob, Les paysans de la Bourgogne du nord au dernier siècle de l’Ancien Régime (Caen: Association d’histoire des sociétés rurales, 1995, c.1960), 50. Hayhoe, “Litigation and the Policing of Communal Agriculture,” 51–68. Leslie Page Moch has noted that agrarian policies could affect mobility patterns. Moch, Moving Europeans, 10. ADCO E Dépôt 572/2, Archives communales, Saint-Seine-en-Bâche, registre des délibérations, 6 May 1776. B.A. Holderness, “‘Open’ and ‘Close’ Parishes in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Agricultural History Review 20, 2(1972): 126. Villagers in the province of Maine also moved to find lower tax rates. André Bouton, Le Maine: Histoire économique et sociale, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1973), 48. ADCO E1245, seigneurie de Minot. The certificate was signed by the priest, the seigneur, and the judge, but the letter accompanying it was signed only by the seigneur, which explains the use of the first person. Of the seven who had left, there were three ploughmen, a cottager, a clog maker, a merchant, and a widow. ADCO C5090, États, nouveaux pieds de taille, 11 January 1777. AN F/20/7/1, États de situation des communautés pour la généralité de Dijon, 1784–1788. For a description of the procedure called the “renonciation à l'incolat,” see chapter 7.

228 Notes to pages 143−5 37 The 1777 total tax assessment per village comes from ADCO C5102, États, taille, rôles généraux, 1777. The 1824 assessments by village are from ADCO 2PH 7, contribution foncière et contribution des portes et fenêtres, liste par village et canton, 1824. From the larger sample of all communities transcribed and counted from the 1796 census I was able to match 145 to both 1774 and 1824 tax records. These communities were paying 2.74 times more in francs in 1824 than they paid in livres in 1774. 38 These are non-weighted averages calculated by dividing the sum of the non-native proportions in all villages by the number of villages. This is more useful for our purposes than a weighted average because we are interested in determining the communities that exerted a stronger pull. Undertaxed communities were on average larger than overtaxed communities (310 versus 237 inhabitants), and the tendency for small communities to have a larger non-native element means that the overall non-native proportions in over- and undertaxed villages are very close (that is, the total number of non-native inhabitants living in undertaxed villages, divided by the total population of those same villages). 39 Saint Jacob, Les paysans de la Bourgogne du nord, 107–25 ; Markoff, Abolition of Feudalism, passim; Thierry Bressan, Serfs et mainmortables en France au XVIIIe siècle: La fin d’un archaïsme seigneurial (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007). 40 There was a provision, called “recall” (rappel), whereby all heirs who had moved away could return to the village and inherit from a deceased parent as long as there was still one heir alive who had been living in communion with the parent. See Coutumes générales du pays et duché de Bourgogne (Dijon: Antoine Grangier, 1642), section of the custom on mainmorte, Art. XVII. Special thanks to Jean Bart for clarifying this point. 41 Jean Bart, La liberté ou la terre: La mainmorte en Bourgogne au siècle des Lumières (Dijon: C.N.R.S., 1984). 42 The mechanism, according to Collins, is to be found in the fact that mainmortables could not easily obtain credit, given that a lender could not be certain of repayment if the debtor moved outside his parents’ home and then died. In this case the lord would inherit everything, leaving creditors with nothing. Serf communities could not therefore obtain credit, and the state could not force them to borrow money to pay taxes. James B. Collins, “Le bonheur paysan: La liberté et la terre à Fétigny, hameau mainmortable,” in Jean-Jacques Clère, ed., Le bonheur est une idée neuve: Mélanges en l’honneur du Professeur Jean Bart (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2000), 111–24. 43 The cost of their freedom was a part of their communal forest and the creation of a new annual seigneurial due. The text of the charte can be found in Joseph

Notes to pages 145−8  229 

44

45

46

47

Garnier, Chartes de commune et d’affranchissement en Bourgogne (Dijon: J.-E. Rabutot, 1868–1918), vol. 3, 355–7. Cited in Bressan, Serfs et mainmortables, 28. Several other chartes included by Garnier make the same observation. AD Saône-et-Loire, 8G 172, officialité d’Autun, dispenses de mariage, 21 January 1774. Other villagers also testified, notably four ploughmen, who commented on “the vice of his birth and the location of his land that is subject to being seized by the seigneur.” This is based on 146 villages in the sample, the number of villages where tax data was available for both 1777 and 1822. There are 127 free villages and 19 serf villages. Note that serf villages are under-represented in this sample (serf villages account for about a third of all villages), which reflects the geographic make-up of the sample. To determine which of the 146 villages were free and which were serf communities I used Joseph Garnier, Chartes de commune et d’affranchissement. G. Gudin de Vallerin has studied marriage patterns in serf villages, but he has concentrated on the frequency of multi-generational families and double marriages between two sets of siblings. G. Gudin de Vallerin, “Les doubles mariages en Auxois au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales de Bourgogne 52 (1980): 213–25; and G. Gudin de Vallerin, “Mainmorte et communauté de famille eu Auxois, de la fin du XVIIe siècle jusqu’au début du XIXe siècle,” Mémoires de la Société pour l’Histoire du Droit et des Institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 37 (1980): 229–34. Michael J. Greenwood and Gary L. Hunt, “The Early History of Migration Research,” International Regional Science Review 26, 1(2003): 3–37.

7. Regulating Migration 1 The literature on the poor is too voluminous to cite in its entirety here. See notably Jean-Pierre Gutton, L’État et la mendicité dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle: Auvergne, Beaujolais, Forez, Lyonnais (Lyon; Centre d’études foréziennes, 1973); Hufton, The Poor; Schwartz, Policing the Poor; Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600–1814 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985); Micheline Baulant, “Groupes mobiles dans une société sédentaire: La société rurale autour de Meaux aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in B. Vincent, ed., Les marginaux et les exclus dans l’histoire (Paris: Cahiers Jussieu, 1979), 78–121; Viret, “Vagabonds et mendiants,” 7–30; Millery, “Vagabonds, sans-aveu et répression prévôtale,” 49–78. Much of this work is focused on the application of the law of 18 July 1724 and relies principally on the archives of the maréchaussée and prevotal courts. On citizenship and naturalization see Peter Sahlins, Unnaturally

230 Notes to pages 148−9









French: Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004); Jean-François Dubost and Peter Sahlins, Et si on faisait payer les étrangers? Louis XIV, les immigrés et quelques autres (Paris: Flammarion, 1999); Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). On the policing of migrants in cities see Marie-Claude Chaléard, et al., Police et migrants: France, 1667–1939 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2001); in this book see especially JeanFrançois Dubost, “Naissance de la police des étrangers dans le royaume de France (XVI–XVIIIe siècles),” 33–49. Vincent Milliot, “Réformer les polices urbaines au siècle des Lumières: Le révélateur de la mobilité,” Crime, histoire et societies / Crime, History and Societies 10, 1 (2006): 25–50. On the definition of a stranger in cities see Claire Dolan, “Famille et intégration des étrangers à Aix-en-Provence au XVIe siècle,” Provence historique 35 (1985): 401–11; Simona Cerutti, Étrangers: Étude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Bayard, 2012); Eleonora Canepari, “Structures associatives, ressources urbaines et intégration sociale des migrants (Rome, XVIe–XVIIe siècle),” Annales de démographie historique 124 (2012): 15–41; Bert de Munck and Anne Winter, eds., Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012). Bernard Derouet has published insightful analyses of the question of integration into rural communities: Derouet, “Territoire et parenté.” 2 This element is also emphasized for England in Norma Landau, “The Regulation of Immigration, Economic Structures, and Definitions of the Poor in Eighteenth-Century England,” The Historical Journal, 33, 3 (1990): 541–72. See also Eleonora Canepari, “Who Is Not Welcome? Reception and Rejection of Migrants in Early Modern Italian Cities,” in Bert de Munck and Anne Winter, eds., Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 101–15. 3 “Traité des tailles suivant les usages du Ressort du Parlement de Bourgogne,” BM Dijon MS 316, pp. 258–69. The manuscript itself is not signed, but the author was Millot, a lawyer. See Pierre d’OrgevalDubouchet, La taille en Bourgogne au XVIIIe siècle (Dijon: Pornon, 1938), 18. 4 The actual certificate of renunciation was given to the person moving, who probably showed it to the tax collectors in the new place of residence and then kept it for a year or two in case some problem arose related to residence. Certificates could theoretically make it into the archives as evidence in a court case over these issues, but I have not found any. 5 ADCO (Archives départementales de la Côte-d’Or) C7109, taille et capitation, Vosne, 1761.

Notes to pages 150−1  231  6 ADCO B2 651/1, justice du marquisat de la Borde-au-Château, 9 August 1729. Two other witnesses referred to Leflaive’s renunciation but without specifying that it involved publication in the church. 7 Collins, “Translation de domicile,” 395–8. 8 D’Orgeval-Dubouchet, La taille en Bourgogne, 125; BM Dijon MS 316, “Traité des tailles suivant les usages du ressort du Parlement de Bourgogne,” 229; Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy : The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 9 “Déclaration du roi, concernant les taillables qui exploitent des biens dans différentes paroisses d’une même élection.” 17 February 1728. Isambert et al. list the title of this Déclaration but do not provide the text. I consulted it in Mémorial alphabétique des choses concernant la justice, la police et les finances de France sur le fait des tailles (Paris: Huart, 1742). With the implementation of the taille tarifée within the élection of Paris in 1776, the procedure of the réunion de cotes was revoked. “Déclaration concernant la répartition de la taille dans la généralité de Paris,” 11 August 1776. François-André Isambert et al., Recueil général des anciennes lois françaises depuis l’an 420 jusqu’à la Révolution de 1789, t.24 (Paris: Belin-LePrieur, 1826). 10 Marcel Marion, Dictionnaire des institutions de la France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1952), under “taille.” See also Marcel Marion, Les impôts directs sous l’Ancien Régime, principalement au XVIIIe siècle (Geneva: Slatkine Megariotis Reprints, 1974, c. 1910), 11–12. 11 Mireille Touzery, L’invention de l’impôt sur le revenu: La taille tarifée, 1715– 1789 (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1994), 70–1. In the 1760s the president of the Parlement of Paris strongly supported the revocation of the 1728 reform, arguing that natural justice required that everyone be taxed only in his or her place of residence. To my knowledge, there are no studies of the application of the residencespecific elements of the reform of 1728. 12 Daniel Hickey, The Coming of French Absolutism: The Struggle for Tax Reform in the Province of Dauphiné, 1540–1640 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 21. This would explain why the Estates of Languedoc did not much discuss problems related to migration and mobility, at least compared to the Estates of Burgundy. In the deliberations for forty-six sessions of the Languedoc Estates held between 1648 and 1789 I could not find any discussion of taxation issues related to mobility. Jean-Pierre Donnadieu, Stéphane Durand, Jean-Claude Gaussent, Guy Le Thiec, and Henri Michel, eds., “Les délibérations des États de Languedoc” (CD-ROM, Université de Montpellier III, 2009). The situation in Provence was more complicated, but those people who were subject to the taille paid taxes in

232 Notes to pages 151−3 all communities in which their land was situated, so that taxation did not provoke debates about residency. See Rafe Blaufarb, The Politics of Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 1530s–1830s (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012), 27. 13 ADCO C3003, États, décrets, 1733, décret 10. 14 BM Dijon MS 316, “Traité des tailles suivant les usages du ressort du Parlement de Bourgogne,” 240–1. 15 My discussion of the debate up to 1730 is taken from Charles Papon, Le système financier bourguignon dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle (1710–1752) (Paris: Fondation Varenne, 2007), 547–51. See also Hugues Richard, “Esquisse d’histoire du domicile,” in François Burdeau, Administration et droit: Actes des journées de la Société internationale d’histoire du droit, tenues à Rennes, les 26, 27 et 28 mai 1995 (Paris: LGDJ, 1996), 156–66. In pays d’élection the period during which people paid to their previous place of residence was two years, although it could be as high as ten years in the case of those who moved from a taxed community to a place that had acquired the privilege to pay no taxes. Those who maintained significant economic interests in both their old and their new communities could continue paying a proportion of their taxes in both places indefinitely, a solution that was not possible in Burgundy, where each person was only to be taxed in one place. Finally, fermiers who gave up a lease in one community to take up one in another had a reduced “suite” period of only a year. “Déclaration du roi, portant règlement pour le fait des tailles.” Nouveau code des tailles (Paris: Prault père, 1761), 189–94. Diderot et al., Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, vol. 16, “Translation de domicile.” (Neuchâtel: Samuel Faulche, 1759). 16 “Déclaration du roi, concernant les taillables qui exploitent des biens dans différentes paroisses d’une même élection.” 17 ADCO C3003, États, décrets, 1730, décret 1. 18 ADCO C3003, États, décrets, 1733, décret 10. 19 ADCO C3009, États, remarques de MM. les commissaires alcades, 1772, remarque 7. 20 See the tax inquiry (nouveau pied de taille) for Sermesse-sur-le-Doubs in 1785. Land in the village was divided into river land (taxed at 33 sols per journal) and white land (23 sols per journal), or loam and chalk. All land held by inhabitants outside of the village was taxed at 28 sols per journal, the average between the two rates. ADCO B2 39/11, Parlement of Dijon, homologations, 15 July 1785. 21 The under-imposition of the wealthiest villagers was the main complaint made by communities requesting a new tax assessment. See ADCO C5088, États, pieds de taille.

Notes to pages 154−9  233  22 See especially Schwartz, Policing the Poor; also Iain Cameron, Crime and Repression in the Auvergne and the Guyenne, 1720–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 23 In the Côte-d’Or these inquiries can be found in ADCO C374–9. 24 Most of these documents are to be found in ADCO B2 39, Parlement, homologations. A few are in BM Dijon MS 1308–1309, Recueil des arrêts du Parlement de Dijon. Rather than provide the archival reference each time, in the following I give the date of the Parlement’s decision (both collections are organized chronologically). 25 In 1775 Turgot abolished contrainte solidaire for taxes, but the edict was never applied in Burgundy, where wealthy villagers continued to be imprisoned as guarantee of their village’s assessment until the Revolution. On the reform of 1775 see Marion, Les impôts directs, 46. On the situation in Burgundy see d’Orgeval-Duboucher, La taille en Bourgogne, 255, 280–1; Sébastien Evrard, “Centralisation normative ou libertés provinciales? L’intendant Amelot, les contraintes solidaires et la jurisprudence du Conseil d’État (1775–1788),” Mémoires de la Société pour l’Histoire du Droit et des Institutions des pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 64 (2007): 161–200. Also Marie Laure-Legay, “1775: L’abolition de la contrainte solidaire en France,” in Benoît Garnot, ed., La justice et l’argent (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2005), 195–6. 26 On this practice see Hilton L. Root, Peasants and King in Burgundy: Agrarian Foundations of French Absolutism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), 110. 27 The one exception occurred when a neighbouring community had the right of parcours and could thereby pasture its animals on the commons. This type of arrangement generated innumerable legal disputes. Coutume générale des pays et duché de Bourgogne, tit. 13, Art. 5. Saint Jacob, Paysans, 377. On the question of who had the right to use commons, see Hayhoe, “Litigation and the Policing of Communal Agriculture,” 51–68. 28 AM Chalon-sur-Saône, BB81, registre des délibérations, 4 August 1717. 29 Jeremy Hayhoe, “Les pétitions des communautés rurales sur les chemins ‘finérots’ envoyés aux États provinciaux de Bourgogne: Physiocratie et Lumières dans les villages vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle,” in Antoine Follain, ed., Campagnes en mouvement (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 2008), 221–32. 30 ADCO B2 39/11, Parlement de Dijon, homologations, 6 September 1784. 31 ADCO MS 1308, Recueil des arrêts du Parlement de Dijon, 27 November 1772. 32 Vincent Milliot, “Urban Police and the Regulation of Migration in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Bert De Munck and Anne Winter, eds.,

234 Notes to pages 159−65 Gated Communities? Regulating Migration in Early Modern Cities (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 135–53. 33 ADCO B2 451/1, justice seigneuriale de Belleneuve, Grands-Jours, 25 October 1780. 34 ADCO B2 666/7, justice seigneuriale de Lantenay et Pasques, GrandsJours, 28 October 1777. 35 ADCO B2 465/2, justice de Bonnencontre, Grands-Jours, 26 October 1779. 36 ADCO B2 39/9, Parlement de Dijon, homologations, 19 April 1775. 37 Chaléard et al., eds., Police et migrants. 38 Chaléard, Douki, Dyonet, and Milliot, “Police et migrants en France,” 17–18. 39 Daniel Roche, “Contrôle de la mobilité et des migrants: Principes et pratiques,” in Chaléard et al., Police et migrants, 23. 40 Saint Jacob, Paysans, 75–92; Pierre de Saint Jacob, “Études sur l’ancienne communauté rurale en Bourgogne. I, Le village: Les conditions juridiques de l’habitat,” Annales de Bourgogne 51 (1941): 169–202; Follain, Le village, 105–6; Benoît Garnot, Vivre en Bourgogne au XVIIIe siècle (Dijon: Éditions universitaires de Dijon, 1996), 78. 41 This may be because most who work on geographic mobility in France are demographic historians whose primary interest is in understanding the strategies of families, whereas Collins came to the study of mobility through those classic sources of rural history, tax records. This is meant not as a criticism of demographic historians but simply as an observation that they generally use sources that place the individual, the family, and the lineage rather than the community at the centre of their preoccupations. See, for example, Rosental, Sentiers invisibles. 42 Collins, “Translation de domicile.” 43 Jean-Pierre Gutton, La sociabilité villageoise dans l’ancienne France (Paris: Hachette, 1979), 32–3. 44 Saint Jacob, Paysans, 76. 45 Follain, Le village, 112. 46 Jean-Michel Boehler, Une société rurale en milieu rhénan: La paysannerie de la plaine d’Alsace (1648–1789), (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1995), 387–95. 47 See the table in ibid, 390. 48 Follain, Le village, 112. 49 Anne Zink, L’héritier de la maison: Géographie coutumière du sud-ouest de la France sous l’Ancien Régime (Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 1993); Anne Zink, Clochers et troupeaux: Les communautés rurales des Landes et du Sud-Ouest avant la Révolution (Bordeaux, 1997). 50 Poujade, Le voisin et le migrant, 65–9.

Notes to pages 165−7  235  51 Luigi Lorenzetti, Économie et migrations au XIXesiècle: Les stratégies de la reproduction familiale au Tessin (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 102–3. See also Viazzo, Upland Communities, 136–7. Laurence Fontaine does not explicitly address this issue for the French Alps in her History of Pedlars, but she does present these villages as being strongly dominated by a few wealthy and very powerful extended families. 52 AD Ain, C842, intendant, habitantage. 53 Saint Jacob, Paysans, 522–4. 54 Vassort, Société provinciale, 247; Yves Durand, Vivre au pays au XVIIIe siècle: Essai sur la notion du pays dans l’ouest de la France (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1984), 60–2. Zink, L’héritier de la maison, 488; Zink, Pays ou circonscription. 55 For England see Keith D.M. Snell, “The Culture of Local Xenophobia,” Social History 28, 1(2003): 1–30. 56 ADCO B2 547/1, justice seigneuriale de Corgengoux, Mazerotte, Parué, 29 August 1780. 57 ADCO B2 442/2, justice seigneuriale de Corberon, 7 September 1780. 58 ADCO B2 733/1, justice seigneuriale de Meuilley, 2 April 1767. 59 ADCO B2 648/5, justice seigneuriale de Thoisy-la-Berchère et Boncourt-leBois, 26 January 1787. 60 ADCO B2 SUP 122, justice seigneuriale de Bligny-sur-Ouche, 18 May 1776. 61 ADCO B2 254/1, bailliage de Saulieu, cahiers de doléance, 1789. This request was apparently part of a model cahier, since it recurs verbatim in a few others. 62 ADCO B2 209 bis, bailliage de Châtillon-sur-Seine, cahiers de doléances, 1789. 63 ACO B15, intendant, enquête agricole de 1786, Saint-Aubin. 64 Anne Mitson argues that there was in seventeenth-century England a strong sense of loyalty to a neighbourhood area composed of several parishes, but she only really demonstrates that there were links between people within this area. This is compatible with what we have seen in chapter 3 but does not necessarily mean that there was a sense of identity over these larger areas. Mitson, “Significance of Kinship Networks,” 24–76. 65 ADCO B2 226, bailliage de Semur-en-Auxois, cahiers de doléances, 1789. 66 ADCO B2 797/1, justice de la baronnie de Pagny-le-Château, 12 August 1762. 67 ADCO B2 1177/2, justice seigneuriale de Saint-Vivant, 68 ADCO B2 540/2, justice seigneuriale de Concoeur et Corboin, 17 August 1779. 69 Anne Zink likewise argues that there was little hostility towards migrants in southwestern France. Temporary migrants sometimes provoked a small amount of fear or hostility, but even this must not be

236 Notes to pages 167−70 exaggerated. Zink, Pays ou circonscription, 228–49. See also Canepari, “Who Is Not Welcome?,” 110. 70 ADCO B2 647/7, justice seigneuriale de Thoisy-la-Berchère, 7 March 1721. 71 ADCO B2 SUP 76, justice seigneuriale de Chazilly-le-Haut et Chazilly-leBas, Grands-Jours 18 September 1753. 72 For example, ADCO B2 734/1, justice seigneuriale d’Auxey-le-Grand et Auxey-le-Petit, Grands-Jours, 17 September 1755. 73 ADCO B2 457/3, justice seigneuriale de Billey et Villerrottin, Grands-Jours, 21 January 1754. 74 ADCO B2 737/8, justice seigneuriale de Meursault, délibération de la communauté, 24 June 1787. 75 ADCO B2 451/2, justice seigneuriale de Belleneuve, Savole, La-Motted’Ahuy et Lambelin, Grands-Jours, 25 October 1780. 76 ADCO B2 854/3, justice seigneuriale de Saint-Seine-sur-Vingeanne, Grands-Jours 2 December 1769. In other years they distinguish between inhabitants and forains, or non-residents. 77 ADCO L 522, recensement de 1796, Ternant, Rolle et les Rentes. 78 Dolan, “Famille et intégration des étrangers,” 410. 79 Canepari, “Who Is Not Welcome?” 106. 80 Rosental, “La migration des femmes,” 114–16. 81 Steven King, “Migrants on the Margin? Mobility, Integration and Occupations in the West Riding, 1650–1820,” Journal of Historical Geography 23, 3 (1997): 284–303. 82 For an approach that combines population registers and vital records for Antwerp and Stockhom, see Paul Puschmann, Per-Olof Grönberg, Reto Schumacher, and Koen Matthijs, “Access to Marriage and Reproduction among Migrants in Antwerp and Stockholm: A Longitudinal Approach to Processes of Social Inclusion and Exclusion, 1846–1926,” The History of the Family 19, 1 (2014): 29–52. A fascinating analysis of the relations between international migrants and locals in the English city of South Shields can be found in Laura Tabili, Global Migrants, Local Culture: Natives and Newcomers in Provincial England, 1841–1939 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 83 A list of 3,200 aldermen, tax collectors and assessors, field guards, estimators, and principal inhabitants who guaranteed collective tax payment was compiled from the tax records of the villages in the bailliage of Nuits for 1758–62 and from the annual assizes of twenty-eight seigneurial courts. By the matching of these to the 1796 census, witness depositions and parish registers provided migration data on 2,300 village officials. 84 See Hayhoe, “La police aux Grand-Jours,” 250–67; Robert M. Schwartz, “Beyond the Parish Pump: The Politicization of the Peasantry in Burgundy,

Notes to pages 170−4  237 

85 8 6 87 88

89

90

91

1750–1850,” in Michael P. Hanagan, Leslie Page Moch, and Wayne te Brake, eds., Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 122–35. This is based only on those officials matched to the 1796 census because the depositions and parish registers give no indication of date of arrival. Hayhoe, Enlightened Feudalism, 75. Saint Jacob, Paysans, 78–80. The royal declaration dates from 1687, requires “each inhabitant to find himself at the assemblies of the community,” and enjoins the aldermen to report absences to the local court. No definition is given of inhabitant, but it is safe to say that in general it was meant to include married men and widows, and possibly tax-paying bachelors. The text of the law can be found in Règlements généraux qui s’observent dans tout le ressort de la cour, et dont on fait lecture à la tenue des Grands Jours. Nouvelle Édition. Revue, corrigée et augmentée (Dijon: Causse, 1786), 20. The reform of Laverdy establishing municipal councils was never applied in Burgundy. There was a tendency for towns to seek to restrict access to local political decision making to the elite, by reducing the number of officers, by establishing a council of notables, or by making one of the échevin positions permanent. Hugues Richard has found fifty such reforms in the archives of the secrétaire d’État de la maison du roi. In general the provincial intendant and the Parlement of Dijon opposed these changes. Most of the places requesting such reforms seem to have been towns or small cities rather than villages. See Hugues Richard, “La réforme de l’administration de Givry (Saône-etLoire) de 1782,” Annales de Bourgogne 63 (1991): 23–88. The sample included 275 men attending ten village assemblies, of which 227 were successfully matched to migration data from depositions, the 1796 census, and parish registers. Gilles Camin, “Les communautés rurales du Val de Loire Nivernais à la fin de l’Ancien Régime, d’après les procès-verbaux d’assemblées des habitants,” Mémoires de la société académique du Nivernais 70 (1988–9): 53. I used the formal listing of those present that appears near the beginning of the record of each assembly, not the list of signatures and marks that can be found at the end of the documents. See Leslie Augueux, “L’administration villageoise au XVIIIe siècle: L’assemblée des habitants à Laignes et à Molesme,” Annales de Bourgogne 84, 2 (2012): 139–58. In the village of Molesme, situated along the provincial border between Burgundy and Champagne, most inhabitants did not attend the assemblies; a core group of about ten inhabitants regularly attended them and directed local affairs. Augueux does not

238 Notes to pages 174−183

9 2 93

94

9 5 96 97

address the native or non-native status of those attending, but she calculates the average age of the attendees by matching the lists to parish baptism registers, which suggests that, as in my sample, those attending were mostly native born. ADCO B2 39/9, Parlement de Dijon, homologations, 14 July 1773. The situation was similar in Essex villages. See Henry French, “‘Ancient Inhabitants’: Mobility, Lineage and Identity in English Rural Communities, 1600–1750,” in Christopher Dyer, ed., The Self-Contained Village? The Social History of Rural Communities, 1250–1900 (Hatfield, UK: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2007), 73–96. Steven King notes that, in eighteenth century England, migrants could participate in local networks of lending and borrowing (of tools, for example) but that their access was more limited than that of natives. King, “Migrants on the Margins,” 293–4. ADCO L554, enquête agricole, an V (1797), canton de Flavigny. See especially the introduction and conclusion of Snell, Parish and Belonging, 1–25 and 496–502. Cerutti, Étrangers, 292–6.

Conclusion 1 Bade, Emmer, Lucassen, and Oltmer, eds., Encyclopedia of Migration. 2 Moch, Moving Europeans, 34. 3 Restif de la Bretonne, La vie de mon père (Paris: Maxi-Livres, 1998, c. 1778), 105 (seconde partie, livre troisième). 4 Lucassen and Lucassen, “Migration, Migration History, History,” 9. 5 Among others, Rosental, Sentiers invisibles; Angélique Janssens, The Family and Social Change: The Household as a Process in an Industrializing Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 160–79; Cyril Grange and Jacques Renard, “Adolescent Migrants from Normandy in Paris at the end of the 18th Century,” The History of the Family 6, 3 (2001): 423–37; Perrenoud, “Mobilité et reproduction,” 449–61; Lorenzetti, Économie et migrations; Luigi Lorenzetti, “Economic Opening and Society Endogamy: Migratory and Reproduction Logic in the Insubric Mountains (18th to 19th Centuries),” The History of the Family 8, 2 (2001): 297–316. 6 See Gérard Béaur’s criticism of the notion of family strategy. He shows, for early nineteenth-century Normandy, that very few families had both enough surviving children and enough land to need to concern themselves with the transmission of land among multiple heirs. Only about a quarter of deceased married men had both land and multiple heirs, and only a small

Notes to page 183  239  proportion (11–26 per cent) of this small group had enough land to bother dividing. Gérard Béaur, “Trop de stratégie? Transmission, démographie et migration dans la Normandie rurale du début du XIXe siècle (Bayeux, Domfront, Douvres, Livarot),” in Jean-Pierre Poussou and Isabelle RobinRomero, eds., Histoire des familles, de la démographie et des comportements: En hommage à Jean-Pierre Bardet (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2007), 37–53. For a similar argument concerning England see Steven King, “Too Poor to Marry? ‘Inheritance,’ the Poor and Marriage/Household Formation in Rural England, 1800–1840s,” in Anne-Lise Head-König, ed., Inheritance Practices, Marriage Strategies and Household Formation in European Rural Societies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 129. Farcy and Faure are somewhat critical of the notion of lineage strategy as it relates to migration. See their comments concerning Rosental’s analysis, in Farcy and Faure, La migration d’une génération de français, 11. Fabrice Boudjaaba argues that the notion of family or lineage strategy, as developed to analyse regions of unequal succession, applies poorly to regions of equal partition, although his work on the question does not deal with migration. Fabrice Boudjaaba, Des paysans attachés à la terre? Familles, marchés et patrimoines dans la région de Vernon (1750–1850), (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008). 7 Garnot, Vivre en Bourgogne, 32. 8 See, for example, Grange and Renard, “Adolescent Migrants from Normandy,” 431; Bourdieu et al., “Migrations et transmissions intergénérationelles,” 761; Rolande Bonnain, “Houses, Heirs and Non-Heirs in the Adour Valley: Social and Geographic Mobility in the Nineteenth Century,” The History of the Family 1, 3 (1996): 275–95; Jérôme-Luther Viret, Valeurs et pouvoir: La reproduction familiale et sociale en Ile-de-France; Ecouen et Villiers-le-Bel (1560–1685) (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2004), 349–59. 9 Jean Bart, “L’égalité entre héritiers dans la région dijonnaise à la fin de l’Ancien Régime et sous la Révolution,” Mémoires de la Société pour L’Histoire du Droit et des Institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 29, 1 (1968–9): 65. The Custom was unclear on the question, but both practice and jurisprudence in the eighteenth century accepted the ability to advantage an heir. See Michel Petitjean, “Quand, dans les années 1780, on reparlait de la réformation coutumière des années 1570: À propos de la liberté de disposer à cause de mort,” Mémoires de la Société pour l’Histoire du Droit et des Institutions des anciens pays bourguignons, comtois et romands 46 (1989): 105–33. 10 Poncet-Cretin, “La pratique testamentaire en Bourgogne,” 65–8. Jean Yver, Égalité entre héritiers et exclusion des enfants dotes: Essai de géographie coutumière (Paris: Sirey, 1966).

240 Notes to pages 183−5 11 Francine Rolley warns historians against easy categorization of inheritance systems, arguing that within the same region some families divided each piece of land evenly while others prioritized the integrity of landholding. Francine Rolley “Comment poser le problème de la diversité de modes de transmission du patrimoine? L’exemple de la Bourgogne du nord au XVIIIe siècle,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome 110 (1998): 169–74. See also Béaur, “Trop de stratégie,” 51; Anne-Lise Head-König, “Inheritance Regulations and Inheritance Practices, Marriage and Household in Rural Societies: Comparative Perspectives in a Changing Europe,” in HeadKönig, ed., Inheritance Practices, Marriage Strategies and Household Formation in European Rural Societies (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2012), 17–48. 12 James F. Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 43–4. 13 Derouet, “Famille, ménage paysan et mobilité,” 55. 14 Béaur, “Trop de stratégie?” 15 Oris, “The History of Migration,” 203–4. 16 For a useful comparison see Clive Holmes, Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, UK: History of Lincolnshire Committee, 1980). 17 Vassort, Société provinciale, 251. 18 Hugues Neveux, “De l’horizon borné des paysans français aux temps moderns,” in Joseph Goy, Marie-Jeanne Tits-Dieuaide, and André Burguière, eds., L’histoire grande ouverte: Hommages à Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (Paris, 1997), 78–80. 19 French, “Ancient Inhabitants,” 73–96. Pierre Goujon also contrasts the considerable mobility that characterized wine-producing villages in the Mâconnais and the Chalonnais with contemporary discourse that emphasized the stability of rural communities. See Goujon, “La mobilité au sein de sociétés vigneronnes,” 81. 20 Collins, Classes, Estates, and Order, 81.

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Index

Aldermen: travel, 77–8; incolat, 149; regulation of migration, 159–60; migration status of, 170–2 année de suite. See following year Argilly, 22–3, 53, 70, 86, 119, 128, 130–1, 134, 161, 201n17, 208n38, 225n16 artisans: exogamy, 29; forest and construction, 28, 33; journeymen, 8, 35; long-distance migration, 33; spinners and weavers, 138; wives of, 28. See also seasonal migration Besançon, 71, 111–2 birth order, 183–4. See also inheritance Bligny-sur-Ouche, 22–3, 53, 70, 73, 92, 189–90 cabarets. See taverns census of 1786, 54, 111, 126, 181, 224n4 census of 1796: exogamy, 18–22; forest workers, 97; geography, 126; compared to 1872 census, 37–40; construction of sample, 9–12, 25, 187; journeymen, 88; length of stay for migrants, 46–8; non-native

proportion, 25; patronyms, 136–7; problems of interpretation, 10–1, 182; return migration, 44; survival of documents, 9–10. See also annual migration rates census of 1872, 16, 35–40, 187 Cercle généalogique de Côte-d’Or, viii, 201n17 Cerutti, Simona, 176–7 Clark, Peter, 45, 60–3, 197n32 collectors, taxes, 170–1, 180, 230n4 Collins, James B., 5, 17, 58, 108, 150, 163, 185, 234n41 Commons, and strangers, 168; incentive for migration, 140–2, 226n25; lawsuits, 67; leasing, 155; regulation of access, 142, 156–7, 165, 168 community: attitudes toward migrants, 180, 235–6n69; authority, 172–3, 237n88; local identity, 176; membership in, 163–5, 184; openness to in-migration, 177. See also aldermen compagnons. See seasonal migration, journeymen contrainte solidaire, 155, 233n25

270 Index Corgengoux: annual migration rate, 56, 60–4; exogamy, 58–9; geographic origins of inhabitants, 54–6; guardianship appointments, 75–6; lifetime taxpayers, 56–7; native proportion, 54–5, 60–4; net out-migration, 57; recruitment of migrants, 128–9, 133–4; similarity to larger samples, 58; village assembly, 85; tax records, 60–4, 208n41 cote d’office, 153 cottagers: animal ownership, 139–40; definition, 15; and distance, 31, 33; literacy, 104–5; migration, 24; persistence, 48; social mobility, 107–8; travel, 74 Creuse, 83 Croix, Alain, 5, 17, 80 Custom of Burgundy, legal, 183, 228n40, 239n9 day labourer: annual migration rate, 48; commons, 141; decline in mobility, 40; definition, 14; exogamy, 28; literacy, 102; motivations to migration, 123; non-native proportion, 24; social mobility, 108 Delahaye, Pierre-Louis Nicolas, 72 depositions, witness: cases involving the community, 116–8; construction of sample, 6–9, 187; differences from depositions in England, 118; as historical source, 8–9; journeymen, 89–91; literacy, 30, 102–4; matched to tax records, 102–4; non-native proportions, 25, 53–4, 60–4; place of death of witnesses, 53; seasonal migrants, 80–4, 91–3; travel, 71–6; urban-to-rural migration, 112

Derouet, Bernard, 5, 141 Dijon, 82–3, 86, 110–5, 126–8, 134, 77–8 Dupâquier, Jacques, 17–18, 194n4 dues, seigneurial, 116, 144. See also mainmorte Easter attendance, as sign of residence, 43, 152–3, 178 ecclesiastical dispensations for marriage, 145 Ehmer, Joseph, 35, 88–90 élections, pays d’, 150–1, 232n15 England, 59–63; communities, 142, 185; distance in migration, 26, 29; exogamy, 17, 24; lifetime risk of migration, 51; return migration, 45; residential histories, 118; servants, 90; social mobility, 170; witness depositions, 8 espace de vie : attendance at village festivals, 72; change over time, 70; distribution of market towns, 76; estate auctions, 76; and exogamy, 24; and lawsuits, 65–71; local identity, 165; and migration, 78–9 Estates-General of Burgundy: élus, 153; peddlers, 84; regulation of migration, 148–54; tax regulations, 98–9, 142, 151–2, 231n12; villagers contact with, 166 étranger, 167–9, 176, 230n1 exogamy, geographic: compared to migration, 19–20; Corgengoux, 59–60; criticism by historians, 17–8; distance, 18, 22, 196n27; in England, 24; and espace de vie, 24, 65; explanation for difference between men and women migrants, 42; non-native

Index 271  proportions, correlation, 21; by occupation, 20; patrilocal marriage, 18, 27, 29, 181; proportions, 18, 23, 39–40, 204n58; tendency to marry in bride’s village, 22, 201n18; uprooting, 180 farmers: distance, 31; exogamy, 20–1; lawsuits, 67–8; migration, 27, 40–1, 48, 139–40; travel, 74–5. See also cottagers, vignerons, ploughmen festivals, village, 71–2, 85, 96 Fischer, David Hackett, 64 following year, 149, 152, 168, 232n15 forest workers, 95–7. See also seasonal migration Franche-Comté, 27, 89, 93, 135

intendant, provincial, 77, 93, 148, 152–3, 166, 174 Italy, 6, 59–63, 200n12 Jenks optimization method, 223 justice, seigneurial: assizes, 160–2; documents, 12–3, 65–6, 211n5; estate auctions, 76; inter-community litigation, 66–7; lawsuits, 67–9; nomination of guardians for minors, 75–6; travel to attend court, 160–2. See also depositions

Habitantage. See renunciation de l’incolat Haute Marche, 82 Haute Marne, 94 Haute Saône, 95 Hochstadt, Steve, 34, 42, 51–2, 62, 213n39 Holland, 35, 59–63, 135, 202n34 hospital registers, 7, 16, 83

labour migration, Napoleonic inquiry, 8, 80–1, 86, 94–5, 213n2, 217n44. See also seasonal migration Lachiver, Marcel, 28, 222n22 Ladoix-Serrigny, 23, 70, 201n17 Laslett, Peter, 59, 62, 197–8n32 life course: journeymen, 87; migration, 9, 49, 120–1, 132, 181–2; similarity to twentieth century, 49; of men and women, 49, 53; old age, 50–1. See also servants life expectancy, 56–7, 209n46 literacy, 30, 74–5, 102–6, 126 Lucassen, Jan and Leo, 35, 99, 109, 195n23 Lyon, 76, 111, 134–5

incolat, renonciation à l’, 111–5, 143, 149–50, 230n4 inhabitant, principal, 170–1 inheritance: and family/lineage strategy, 183–4, 238–9n6; egalitarian division, 18, 238n9; house-based systems, 62, 164–5; inclusion of daughters, 18; ploughman families, 28. See also mainmorte

Mâcon, 28, 74, 87, 134 mainmorte, 12, 144–6, 666, 183, 228n42, 229n46 market towns, 76–7 Mercier, Jean-Claude, 72–3 migration − betterment migration, 109 − of city-dwellers, 27 − to cities, 185 (see also rural exodus) − communities, 5–142, 148, 154–63

Germany, 34–5, 42, 59–63, 88–90, 135, 178, 196n24

272 Index − cutting of ties, 119 − definition, 6 − disruption of life, 119–20, 180 − distance, 12, 25, 30–1, 78–9, 125, 179 (see also gravity model and intervening opportunity model); compared to distances in espace de vie, 78–9; Corgengoux, 54; Dividing line between short- and long-distance migration, 29–31, 105–6; eighteenth and nineteenth centuries compared, 38–9; economic opportunity, 106, 125; and literacy, 105–6; long distance, 26–7, 31, 134; northern Burgundy compared to other regions, 59–64; and occupation, 26–9; and population size, 126; perception of, 78–9, 213n39; prevalence of short-distance moves, 25, 29, 179; to previous place of residence, 26; recruitment basin, 128–34; servants, 90; wealth, 104–6 − and farm animals, 139–40 − gravity model, 125–6, 179 − historiography, 4–6 (see also micro-mobility) − in-migration, 5, 38, 42, 57–8, 88, 139 (see also regulation of migration) − intervening opportunities model, 125, 179, 223–4n4 − married couples, 18–20, 47, 57–8, 182 − micro-mobility, 4, 59, 64, 194n16, 222n41, 226n22 − mid-scale work, need for, 4 − motivations, 101, 123, 125, 147, 181; adventure, 122, 223n56; economic opportunity, 118,

137–40; family responsibility, 113, 121; health, 113; leasing terms, 5; life course, 120–1, 123; marriage, 19–20, 117–8; move in with family member, 113; old age, 113; poverty, 108, 114, 123; taxes, 114–5 − networks, migratory, 135–6 − old-age, 50–1, 207n29 − out-migration, 28–40, 42–3, 52, 108–10 (see also seasonal migration); in Corgengoux, 57; from mountain regions, 62; and taxation, 142–5 − rates, annual, 12, 19, 42–53, 64, 179; comparison of northern Burgundy to other regions, 59– 64; Corgengoux, 58; exclusion of multiple moves in 1 year, 44–5; exclusion of return migration, 44; household vs. individual rates, 58; need for accurate and detailed data, 43; preferable to native proportions, 42, 52; and village tax rates, 144 − regulation, 148–62, 175; in cities, 185–6, 230n1; effectiveness, 160–2; informal vs. formal, 162 − return migration, 10, 44, 54, 115; in seventeenth-century England, 45; in nineteenthcentury Switzerland, 45 − seasonal, 8–9, 13, 136, 214n3; chimney-sweeps, 86; hemp carders, 90–1; integration of, 99; masons, 81–4; merchants, 84; peddlers, 85–6; performers, 85; pitsawyers, 83–4, 215n19; chimney-sweeps, 86 − sources used by historians, 16, 101, 111, 178, 182, 198n37, 220n1

Index 273  − subsistence migration, 109 − temporary, 98–9, 136, 179 (see servants, forest workers); carters, 94; harvest workers, 91–3; journeymen, 87–9, 217n44; out-migrants, 93–5; short distance, 90–4; threshers, 91–2 − topography, influence of, 126; escarpment, 128; rivers, 128 − urban-to-rural, 111–12, 115; distances, 112; and literacy, 113 − women, 26, 31, 41, 181–3; and literacy, 102–3; long-distance, 31; Ravenstein, Ernst Georg, 26, 49, 182; similarity to men, 46, 181–3; unmarried, 36; widows, 36 − See also farmers, ploughmen, vignerons, cottagers, artisans mobility, social, 107–10 mobility transition, 34 Moch, Leslie Page, 6, 34, 135 Morvan, 91, 94, 97, 218n61 mountain regions, 62, 80–4, 109, 146, 164–5. See also seasonal migration name-recognition, 102, 207n30, 220n4 native proportions. See non-native proportion non-native proportions : in 1872 census, 38–9; census sample compared to depositions, 25; changes, 36–7; in cities, 27; and common land, 141; correlation to mail received, 139; in Corgengoux, 55; definition, 14; and economic opportunity, 137–40; and exogamy, 19, 21; and land ownership, 106; and mainmorte, 145–6; of married vs. unmarried people, 47; and migration rates, 51–2; northern

Burgundy compared to other regions, 59–64; by occupation, 27–31; and population size, 22; underestimation of repeated moved, 42, 52; variability, 21–2, 127 outside world, 5, 80, 139, 184 parish registers: forest workers, 97–8; as historical source, 4, 16, 22–3, 170, 178; matched to minutes of village assemblies, 172; matched to tax records, 43, 54–9; matched to witness depositions, 53–4; seasonal migration, 95. See also exogamy Parlement of Dijon, 148, 154–5, 158–9, 162, 164 Patronyms, 136–7, 225n16 pays, 98, 118–20, 165–7 persistence, migratory: short-stay migrants, 46, 175–6, 184, 205n3; length of stay, 45–8; married vs. unmarried people, 47–8; women and men, similarity, 46 plaine dijonnaise, 126 ploughmen: definition, 15; distance, 31; and land ownership, 106–7; literacy, 104; migration rate, 48; non-native proportion, 27–8, 137–8; persistence, migratory, 47; and policies toward commons, 139; social mobility, 108–9; whole family migration, 20 Pooley, Colin G., 34, 51, 61–3, 78, 119 poor, altitudes toward, 39, 49, 101, 105–6, 142, 152, 155–63, 175 population registers, 43, 45, 62, 178 proto-industry, 138 postal inquiry of 1847, 138–9 Poussou, Jean-Pierre, 4, 17, 209n56

274 Index Ravenstein, Ernst Georg, 14, 26, 59, 182 residence, 151–2 Rétif, Edme de, 72, 180 réunion de cotes, 150, 231n9 Roche, Daniel, 30, 71, 162 Rosental, Paul-André, 6, 30, 34, 40, 78, 119, 169–70 Rotterdam, 128 rural exodus, 34, 37–8, 40 Savoy, 84 Saône (river), 27, 54, 128–9, 159–60 Saône-et-Loire, 95, 104 Scotland, 23, 59–63, 178 Semur-en-Auxois, 95, 98 servants: effect on village overall migration rate, 137–8; life course, 117, 120–1; link to mobility in adulthood, 183; literacy, 103; migration, 90; persistence, migratory, 47; presence in depositions, 8; short distance of their migrations, 31, 90; wages, 68–9 sex-ratio, 44, 182 Seurre, 27, 82, 169 Snell, Keith, 24, 176 Souden, 45, 60–3, 197n32, 198n34 stranger. See étranger Sweden, 6, 59–63, 90 Switzerland, 89, 165 taille, 55, 77, 102, 106, 149, 158 taille réelle, pays de, 151 taverns, 67, 73–5, 85–6 taxes: absence of temporary residents in rolls, 80; before and after a move, 107–9, 152–4; Burgundy, difference from other regions, 150, 231–2n12; as condition for

acceptance in community, 164, 169, 177; in Corgengoux, 54–9; in Nuits-St.-Georges bailliage, 102, 107–9; lodging of soldiers, 155; matched to parish register, 54–9, 102; motive for migration, 114, 142–4; policies, 142–4; and the poor, 155–7, 169; reassessments, 153, 169; as reason to control in-migration, 148, 163; undertaxation, correlation to mobility, 143, 228n38; use by historians, 16. See also taille Ternant, 129 Tilly, Charles, 78 TRA demographic sample, 195n18 translation de domicile, 108, 150 travel, 70–3, 77–8 unmarried people: highly mobile, 44, 47, 58, 138, 182, 185; literacy, 103–4; persistence, migratory, 52; widows and widowers, 50–1, 138, 206n22, 207n35; Utrecht, 135. See also journeymen, servants vagrants, 97–8 Vassort, Jean, 5, 10, 30 Vignerons: and distance, 31, 33; exogamy, 20; as harvest workers, 91; land-owning, 106–7; literacy, 102; migration and wealth, 104–5; non-native proportions, 28–9; persistence, migratory, 48; social mobility 109–10 Villy-le-Moutier, 53–4, 208n38 Wars, Revolutionary, 43–4, 47, 206n10 Zelinsky, Wilbur, 34