Strangers and Neighbours: Rural Migration in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy by Jeremy Hayhoe (review)

This book is the second one that Hayhoe has devoted to the history of Burgundy in the eighteenth century. In the prior one, he scrutinized the seigneurial courts of justice, whereas in this one, he launches an inquiry into the mobility of villagers and into the ways in which communities of Northern Burgundy—currently the department of Côte d’Or—dealt with the issues created by migrations.¹

Hayhoe engages with the work of the entire community of historians focusing on migration, such as Croix, Collins, and especially Poussou, who defended the idea of a micro-mobile pattern—with distances shorter than 10 km—to characterize the nature of migration in old regime France.² Yet, Hayhoe provides a wide range of evidence that this society’s mobility was extensive in some sense. For instance, he underlines that two-fifths of the adult residents of rural communities did not live in their birthplace, and thanks to a few shrewd connections between sources, he estimates that nearly 5 percent of the adult population of villages moved to another community in any given year. Therefore, native-born dwellers generally formed only a slight majority in village communities. But Hayhoe also acknowledges that the numerous relocations that he detected, in the range of 10 to 15 km, are in line with Poussou’s distances.

By tempering the pattern of micro-mobile society, Hayhoe reshapes our understanding of village communities as social organisms open to the outside world and exposed “each year [to] the arrival of countless temporary and seasonal migrants” (184). His is definitely not the picture of a “village immobile,” with the exception of the small group that controlled the economic and political life of the community.

Another cornerstone of the book’s design—as revealed through sophisticated statistical analysis in the first two chapters and detailed discussions in the next five—is Hayhoe’s understanding of migration not as an isolated demographic fact but as a social phenomenon inextricably connected to other issues: exogamy; economic motivation; social class and gender of the migrant population; migrants’ geographical preferences; and the migratory policies implemented by local and provincial authorities, mainly through the prism of local taxes and access to common land. Thus, Hayhoe’s book represents the attempt to tell a complete story, even if, as he points out himself, he leaves aside “the issues of lineage and inheritance.”

Hayhoe’s creativity in this book should not go unnoticed. Like other historians, he had to face source materials with serious gaps—namely, the first census, dated as 1796. Yet he was able to link that census to an impressive database of 12,874 statements extracted from fifty-eight seigneurial courts between 1700 and 1790, supplying such essential information as places of residence and of birth. He also consulted sixty-nine records of guardianship assemblies, estate auctions, the Napoleonic inquiry of 1810, tax rolls, and parish registers—including the singular registers of departure from the city of Dijon, called “renonciations à l’incolat”—as well as such traditional administrative sources as the registers of Parliament and those of the General Estates of Burgundy. Hayhoe is always circumspect about the samples that he constructed from this “network of sources,” and he compares his results with other European data to place Burgundy in a wider context.

One of the main achievements of Hayhoe’s research is the timely reminder that migrations were hardly rare in people’s daily lives; they were, in Croix’s words, a “brilliant fact.” Furthermore, his finding that no local policies prohibited migrations and that provincial authorities attempted to make them as orderly as possible highlights the use of history to create a better understanding of the present.