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

Jeremy Hayhoe's excellent new study of rural migration in eighteenthcentury northern Burgundy makes an important contribution towards renewing our understanding of the social life of the early modern French countryside. With this work, he joins a growing number of scholars, including Daniel Roche and Alain Croix, who argue that early modern French society was no less mobile than modern France. Based on meticulous research in the judicial, legal, fiscal, and village-level archives housed in the Archives Départementales de la CÔte d'Or, Hayhoe makes a forceful case for a rural world in constant movement, one in which"mobility was ubiquitous.… A substantial majority of villagers change the community of their residence at least once, and many did so repeatedly during the course of their life."

Hayhoe uses a diverse source base in order to build a detailed, quantitative (and statistically significant) snapshot of mobility through space, time, and social position: witness depositions taken in seigneurial courts in which deponents' place of residence are noted, parish records and tax rolls that provide information on inhabitants of particular villages, and legal sources that speak to regulatory regimes on geographical mobility. Having studied northern Burgundy and many of the same local institutions in his first book, Enlightened Feudalism: Seigneurial Justice and Village Society in Eighteenth-Century Northern Burgundy, Hayhoe is very much at home in the region and its archives.

Chapter one traces a synchronic snapshot of how extensively mobility marked communities at a given time. To this end, Hayhoe uses marriage records to measure marital exogamy, taking it to represent a good proxy for mobility more broadly. Hayhoe goes further, however, using marriage to map the "espace de vie," the geographical space within which people regularly circulated and met potential spouses. His research shows that half of the inhabitants of a given community were non-native born, though three-quarters lived within fifteen kilometres of their place of birth; people in non-agricultural trades were more likely to move than agricultural labourers.

In chapter two, Hayhoe moves to the diachronic dimension, seeking to calculate annual migration rates. His remarkable findings underscore just how profoundly mobility structured rural life. Every year on average, 5 per cent of people in northern Burgundy moved to a new community. Over the course of their lives, the likelihood that individuals would move proved extraordinarily high: "Virtually everyone in the province's villages had a non-negligible risk of migrating at all stages of life … as little as 15 per cent of adults may have remained in the same community for their entire life."

Chapter three returns to the concept of "espace de vie" in order to draft a more detailed map of its boundaries and byways. For Hayhoe, the capacity to walk to and from one's home within a day – for work, sociability, or legal affairs – determined the frontiers of the space (a roughly ten-kilometre radius around one's home in his reckoning). In light of this, Hayhoe argues, even moves of twenty kilometres should be considered significant.

Chapter four turns to seasonal and temporary migration. Between journeymen artisans, sawyers, and seasonal agricultural labourers, temporary migration was, as historians have long known and as Hayhoe confirms here, a significant factor in early modern social life. Chapters five and six examine the reasons that led individuals and families to move – that is, the push and pull factors that drove mobility.

Chapter seven, finally, considers the legal, institutional, and local efforts to regulate and control migration. Interestingly, Hayhoe argues that early modern French communities were resolutely open to strangers and organized village societies in ways that made them relatively easy to join and integrate. In an inward-oriented corollary to this outward-turned disposition, the wealthier, more integrated elites who controlled village life – sitting on village councils, for example – and who tended to be less mobile, having more at stake in the local territory, worked hard to exclude newcomers from...