county versus region? migrational connections in the east midlands, 1700–1830

Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 291e312www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

County versus region? Migrational connections in theEast Midlands, 1700e1830

Claire Townsend

Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK

Abstract

Much literature on the industrial revolution has argued for the emergence of distinct, economicallyspecialised regions during the eighteenth century. Large towns are thought to have played a vital part indrawing these industrial regions together, economically, socially and culturally. However, using theexample of the East Midlands, this paper highlights the fact that neither industrialisation nor regionaldevelopment was a uniform process. The East Midlands was significantly affected by industrialisation, butunlike ‘classic industrial regions’ such as the North-west or West Midlands, it did not experiencea concomitant growth in regional integration and identity. Data on migration to Leicester, Nottingham andDerby in the period 1700e1830 are used to examine the nature and extent of social and economic linkagesbetween these towns and their hinterlands and thus to explore the nature of urban-centred spatialintegration in the East Midlands. It is argued that the apparent lack of region-wide integration can beexplained, firstly, by the unusual dominance of the three county towns at the head of weak county urbannetworks, and secondly, by the persistence of a proto-industrial structure in the East Midlands’ staplehosiery industry.� 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Migration; England; Regions; Hosiery; Apprenticeship; Marriage

Introduction

It has now been demonstrated convincingly that, far from being a uniform process,industrialisation in Britain varied spatially in its nature, timing, causes and consequences.National indicators of industrial change mask the unevenness of development between different

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292 C. Townsend / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 291e312

regions. Indeed, it has been argued that a regional perspective is crucial to understanding theindustrial period, with regions being not merely passive ‘containers’ for economic and socialprocesses, but actively shaping industrial and economic development.1 Much recent literature onthe industrial revolution has argued for the emergence during the eighteenth century of distinct,internally integrated and economically specialised regions, such as North-west England,dominated by cotton textile production, or the West Riding of Yorkshire with its woollenindustry.2 Places within these regions were connected through intra-regional capital and labourmarkets, trade and transport linkages, credit and social networks. One of the driving forcesbehind this integration was the role of large towns acting as the centres of regional spaceeconomies.3 Far from the region being an abstract concept, divorced from its inhabitants’ ownlived experience, a picture emerges of people’s everyday lives being organised on a regional basis.It has recently been claimed that regions ‘represented the spatial and functional scale at whichmany aspects of life operated in pre- and early-industrial England: they were the reality for mostpeople and businesses’.4

However, this picture does not appear to hold true for the East Midlands. The area wassignificantly affected by industrialisation, but unlike the North-west or the West Midlands it didnot experience a concomitant growth in regional integration and identity. Instead, it has beensuggested, more localised spatial structures were of greater importance here.5 The purpose of thispaper is to test this contention, that the county, or indeed the county town, was a more significantentity than the region for the organisation of social and economic life in the East Midlands. Indoing so, some explanations will be offered for the unusual lack of regional coherence in this areaof England.

The paper uses data on migration into the three largest towns in the East Midlands e Leicester,Nottingham and Derby e in order to assess the extent of these towns’ spheres of influence, andthe nature of their connections with other settlements in the county, the rest of the East Midlands,and beyond. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, industrialising towns in Englandwere connected to their hinterlands through industrial linkages, administrative ties, and social andcultural functions. My focus is on migration, since the movement of people underlay most of theseconnections between towns and their hinterlands, but remains surprisingly little studied,particularly for the period from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.6 Most studieshave focussed on the description of national-scale, aggregate trends, or have concentrated on theperiod after 1850 when census data are available. Using migration as a means of analysing therelationship between towns and their hinterlands, I aim to shed further light on the role of urbancentres in spatial integration.7

After outlining the East Midlands’ unusual experience of ‘regional’ development, the paper isstructured into three parts. The first relates to a large sample of the East Midlands population,using marriage registers to discuss the spatial extent of social connections between Leicester,Nottingham and Derby and their respective hinterlands. The emphasis shifts to economicconnections in the second part, as the migration fields for hosiery apprentices are analysed inorder to assess the degree to which the East Midlands acted as an integrated industrial region. Inthe third part, the focus is narrowed still further, as individual migration histories are traced usingsettlement examinations. All these data are used to assess the relative importance of county-,region- and national-level linkages in order to draw some conclusions about the relationshipbetween urban centres and wider spatial integration in the East Midlands.

293C. Townsend / Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006) 291e312

Urban centres and regional integration

Much evidence has been put forward to support the notion of coherent, internally connectedregions as a feature of the industrialisation period in England. Economic activity tended to beorganised at a regional scale, with industrialists obtaining most finance through localisedcommercial and social networks.8 Many regional industrial agglomerations grew up aroundnetworks of towns involved in manufacturing the same class of product, such as the metal-working district of the West Midlands, comprising the towns of Dudley, Stourbridge, Walsall,Bilston and Wolverhampton.9 New transport links fostered intra-regional connections, with manyindustrial regions being integrated by networks of canals.10 Most pressure groups, including thefactory reform movement and the Anti-Corn Law League, were regionally based. Trade unionsalso tended to be fragmented, as a reflection of the specific working conditions in differentregions.11

Large urban centres were one of the key drivers of this integration within regions, yet regionalgeography has paid surprisingly little attention to the role of towns within regions. Considerationof cities did not fit the remit of traditional regional geography, with its emphasis on the study ofthe natural and morphological aspects of regions.12 The later notion of the ‘functional region’,though, was more city-oriented. Such a region was defined by connections between a city and itshinterland.13 However, as a reaction against this older regional geography, founded on a notionof regions as bounded spaces and containers into which masses of descriptive material could beplaced, new regional geography emphasises the fluidity, ambiguity and subjectivity of regions, andanalyses them in terms of their relationship to wider spatial structures and social practices.14 Inthis conception, there seems to be little room for discussion of specific spaces, such as cities, withinregions. As Paasi has argued, regions are increasingly being understood by geographers as‘processes that are performed, limited, symbolised and institutionalised through numerouspractices and discourses that are not inevitably bound to a specific scale’.15

I would argue, however, that in order to understand the historical development of regions,16 weshould return to ‘first principles’ and consider the important role of large urban centres (which bydefinition represented concentrations of population, capital and power within eighteenth-centuryEnglish society) in ‘articulating’ the regional space around them. Such an approach takes upMurphy’s call for more examination of why and how regions came to be as they are, rather thantreating them merely as backdrops for our analysis of regional and social change.17 The history ofa region reflects and is part of the history of the wider society in which it is situated, but a regionalso evolves and is produced through social practices taking place within it.18 These practicesinclude the socio-economic connections between towns and their hinterlands. As Massey haspointed out, cities have always been open and hybrid spaces, sites of cultural mixing andconnections to the outside world, through trade, politics and migration.19 Models of urbansystems in geography stress the role of certain key centres in the processes of spatial integration.Central place theory accords most importance to settlements at the top of the urban hierarchy,which offered high-order functions and services to a wide hinterland. Vance’s model states that‘gateway cities’ were the key centres, while Lepetit claims that this role was performed by placesthat dominated diffusion networks.20 Major production locations are the key centres in industrialspecialisation models. Indeed, most industrial regions had an urban hub, which acted as a centrefor marketing, a trading entrepot, and a source of finance and labour e all essential factors for


industrial success. Using empirical data to test these models in the North-west, Stobart founda complex system of interaction centred on the ‘gateway cities’ of Liverpool, Manchester andChester, which drew the region together economically and linked it to wider economic, social andcultural systems in the country as a whole.21 Alan Everitt has also viewed an urban focus ascrucial to the development of a region, arguing that certain towns were important in fosteringboth economic integration and a regional society and culture. So-called ‘entrepreneurial towns’played a key role in the development of occupational regions during the eighteenth century, eachof which specialised in a particular industry, such as glovemaking or lace manufacture, and had itsown traditions, identity and culture.22 However, this picture of whole regions drawn together bythe centripetal pull of their towns seems less applicable to the East Midlands.

The East Midlands e an exception to the norm?

For the purpose of this study, I have defined the East Midlands as the counties ofLeicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. There is a certain artificiality in imposingregional structure on an area which seemed to lack regional coherence, but county borders arebeing used in this context simply as a convenient spatial framework in which to situate andstructure the research.23 My focus is on three adjacent counties that possessed some linkagesrelated to their common involvement with the hosiery industry, and which also shared a similarexperience of urbanisation.24 It is these two factors e the nature of industrial development in theEast Midlands, and its particular pattern of urbanisation e which I would argue are crucial toexplaining its limited region-wide integration.

The consensus in the literature seems to be that the East Midlands has always lacked a coherentand consistent identity as a region. Beckett argues that it cannot be classed as a formal region (onebased on recognised boundaries). Few formal links have ever existed between the counties, andthe East Midlands has always lacked a capital city around which a unified region could develop25

(in contrast to Birmingham in the West Midlands). Indeed, the East Midlands was onlyconstructed as a spatial entity by planners, geographers and historians in the twentieth century,being defined initially as the North Midlands in 1939, and not renamed the East Midlands until1965.26 The physical geography of the East Midlands, characterised by geological heterogeneity,a mixture of relief and variety of soils, is too diverse for it to be considered as Beckett’s secondtype of region e the natural region.27 Beckett’s third regional type is the functional region, basedon politics, economics, trade, industry and agriculture. He concludes that the East Midlandslacked political and administrative coherence, although some important intra-regional economicconnections did exist, as exemplified by the exchange of goods along the river Trent until well intothe nineteenth century.28

As might be expected, this lack of physical, administrative and functional unity did little topromote a sense of shared identity in the East Midlands. Although the concept of regional identityis by definition a subjective one, tangible evidence can be used to reconstruct something of theconceptual shape of the East Midlands. For instance, the geography of social and industrialprotest in the early nineteenth century suggests a lack of region-wide solidarity. Although stockingmakers in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire faced similar problems of underemployment,poverty and hardship caused by changes in fashion and the loss of overseas and domestic markets,


Luddism was largely confined to Nottinghamshire. More generally, the East Midlands never hada particular label or title, unlike the ‘Black Country’ or ‘the Potteries’. Hutton’s early nineteenthcentury phrase ‘the stocking country’ was not widely adopted by the populace.29

Like the North-west, the East Midlands contained three large urban centres which hadsignificant influence over their hinterlands e Leicester, Nottingham and Derby e but thedominance of these towns seems to have had different consequences for spatial integration thanwas the case in the North-west and other industrial regions in this period. Leicester, Nottinghamand Derby were unusual amongst English county towns in continuing to grow rapidly throughoutthe eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, increasing their dominance within their respectivecounties and being the only county capitals to rise up the rankings of the largest provincial townsbetween 1700 and 1841. The population of most county towns doubled or trebled in this period,but Leicester, Nottingham and Derby grew by up to 16 times.30 In ‘classic industrial regions’ suchas the West Midlands, the fastest growing towns were new industrial centres located on or nearcoalfields, whereas urban growth in the East Midlands was mainly accounted for by county townsthat had been pre-eminent in the region before industrialisation.31

It seems reasonable to suggest that if towns were often important drivers of regional integrationthey could also foster disunity or lack of integration in some regional spaces. Is it possible, then,that the nature of the urban system in the East Midlands, marked by the sustained dominance ofLeicester, Nottingham and Derby within their counties, meant that regional integration, so typicalelsewhere in industrialising Britain, could not be achieved? The East Midlands was a polycentricspace, which lacked a single dominant centre around which a region could coalesce. AlthoughNottingham may be a contender for ‘regional capital’, its close proximity to Leicester and Derby,both of which experienced similar growth patterns, meant that no one town could dominate. Theprimacy of the county towns remained unchallenged because of a lack of local rivals. Nottinghamand Leicester, particularly, stood at the head of weak county urban networks.32 Table 1demonstrates the prominent position occupied by the county towns in the East Midlands urbanhierarchy. In Nottinghamshire, the next largest town after Nottingham (Newark) was only aboutone-fifth the size of the county capital, while in Leicestershire, Hinckley was just over one quarterof the size of Leicester, and in Derbyshire Chesterfield was around one-third the size of Derby.The relatively weak urbanisation of the area outside the county towns is clear when comparing theEast Midlands with other regions. Even the lowest ranked town in the West Midlands list waslarger than all but three of the towns in the East Midlands (outside the county capitals). In theNorth-west, even though there were two dominant urban centres (Liverpool and Manchester) theregion’s urban system included a number of sizeable towns lower down the hierarchy, such asBolton, Chester and Preston. Eight of these towns were larger than Derby.

In order to assess the impact of county town dominance on spatial integration in the EastMidlands, data on migration have been used to explore the connections between the three countytowns and their hinterlands. By considering the relative importance of localised, county-levellinkages, intra-regional connections, and national-scale ties, I offer new evidence as to whether theEast Midlands was, indeed, orientated around three distinct counties or whether it was in anysense an integrated region. Spatial integration can be difficult to define and measure, but there areseveral ways in which it can be reconstructed. Stobart has looked at two of these, providinga useful assessment of transport links and industrial connections across the whole of the EastMidlands (including Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire).33 However, he focussed only on the


period 1780e1840 and made little mention of social processes, including interaction betweenindividuals. I intend to address this with an analysis of migration, which, though it could bemotivated by economic factors, was nevertheless an inherently social, human-scale activity, almostalways involving links between individuals in different places. Clearly, to offer a full assessment ofthe relationship between urbanisation patterns and regional integration would require a studyencompassing all the towns and their hinterlands in the East Midlands. Unfortunately, this isimpractical because of the constraints of time and space, as well as a lack of readily available,comprehensive data sources for the smaller towns. My concern is to address the specific andinteresting question of whether there was a link between the unusual, prolonged dominance of thecounty towns and the apparent lack of regional integration in the East Midlands.

Sources

In this paper, migration patterns are traced from marriage registers for Leicester, Nottinghamand Derby,34 apprenticeship registers for Nottingham and Leicester,35 and settlementexaminations for Leicester and Derby.36 These documents were not designed to record migrationspecifically, and thus can only shed light on it incidentally and incompletely. Because it is notpossible to reconstruct definitely all moves into these towns during this time, the emphasis is onhighlighting significant trends, and dealing more with proportions than absolute numbers.

Marriage registers for urban parishes have received relatively little attention from researchers,despite being a particularly fruitful source of information on migration, since they cover

Table 1The urban hierarchies of the East Midlands, West Midlands and North-west in 1801

East Midlands Population West Midlands Population North-west Population

Nottingham 28,801 Birmingham 70,670 Liverpool 82,295

Leicester 17,005 Wolverhampton 30,584 Manchester 76,788

Derby 10,832 Coventry 16,034 Bolton 17,966

Newark 6730 Shrewsbury 14,739 Oldham 15,476

Mansfield 5641 Worcester 11,460 Chester 15,052

Hinckley 5070 Walsall 10,399 Stockport 14,830

Loughborough 4420 Dudley 10,107 Salford 13,611

Chesterfield 4267 Hereford 7411 Preston 12,174

Chapel en le Frith 2507 Hanley 7039 Blackburn 11,980

Southwell 2305 Bilston 6914 Wigan 10,989

Ashbourne 2252 Kidderminster 6623 Macclesfield 10,613

Wirksworth 1998 Warwick 5607 Bury 9452

East Retford 1948 Burslem 5146 Lancaster 9030

Ashby de la Zouch 1768 Rowley Regis 5070 Rochdale 8542

Melton Mowbray 1749 Broseley 4832 Ashton under Lyne 6391

Market Harborough 1716 Madeley 4758 Congleton 4314

Oakham 1535 Newcastle under Lyne 4729 Prescot 4007

Uppingham 1393 Lichfield 4612 Burnley 3918

Bakewell 1341 Burton-on-Trent 4550 St Helens 3787

Sources: Langton, Town growth and urbanisation, 16e17. Figures for the North-west were taken from a databasecompiled by Jack Langton using the 1801 census. I am grateful to Andrew Hann for supplying me with these.


a substantial proportion of the population, and record the parish of residence of the groom and ofthe bride on the eve of their marriage. Thus, this source is one of the few which records the originsof females as well as males. It has been argued elsewhere that marriage registers cannot provide anaccurate picture of migration since they give no indication of how long partners had been living intheir respective parishes prior to marriage, nor whether they remained in their parish of marriageafter the wedding.37 Nevertheless, even those who urge caution acknowledge that we should notrush to dismiss such an extensive and amenable source. Moreover, my concern is to use marriagehorizons as evidence of social connections, rather than to undertake a detailed reconstruction ofthe migratory behaviour of marriage partners.

The second type of document consulted was apprenticeship registers, which include the place ofresidence and occupation of each apprentice’s father, making it possible to calculate theproportion of apprentices who had migrated to each town, as well as gaining some sense of thetown’s spatial and socio-economic connections with other settlements. Although apprenticesrepresented only one specific group of those moving to Leicester and Nottingham, they werea substantial one. During the early modern period young people constituted the most mobilesection of the population,38 and so data from apprenticeship registers should be fairlyrepresentative of the migratory behaviour of economically active migrants staying for a significantlength of time in their new home. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that apprenticeshipregisters mostly relate to the more respectable trades,39 and that the apprenticeship systemdeclined in the eighteenth century, so the proportion of all migrants picked up by the registers willtend to drop.

The third category of document used for this study is settlement examinations, in which a paupergave a potted biography, including where they were born and the moves they had undertaken intheir lives, in order to determine their parish of settlement, which was the parish responsible for thepoor relief of that person.40 These documents provide a rare opportunity to study individualmigration histories, which gives an interesting qualitative perspective on mobility, as a contrast tothe large-scale quantitative data drawn from marriage or apprenticeship registers. However, as inmost places, only a relatively small number of examinations survive for the three East Midlandstowns. This study uses 21 examinations from Leicester parishes, dating between 1700 and 1837,and 26 from All Saints’ parish in Derby, covering the period 1748e1785. Nonetheless, even thissmall sample can provide some insight into the multiple moves commonly undertaken in anindividual’s lifetime, which can be overlooked when focussing on the single moves recorded inmarriage or apprenticeship registers. Settlement documents also enable the movements of the poorto be analysed. This social group tends to be excluded from the other records used here.

The importance of migration to Leicester, Nottingham and Derby, 1700e1840

Using data from marriage registers, Fig. 1 illustrates the importance of migration to Leicester,Nottingham and Derby during this period of urban and industrial growth. In all three towns, theproportion of marriages involving partners who originated outside their parish of marriage washigh for the first half of the eighteenth century, before declining gradually. The most likely reasonfor the decline is that the substantial population growth within urban parishes increased thechances of people meeting and marrying a partner within their home parish. Other evidence


confirms the importance of migration to Leicester, Nottingham and Derby, particularly in theearlier eighteenth century. In Nottingham, burials outnumbered baptisms in the period 1712e1739, yet the population almost doubled, from about 5500 to 10,100 people. That populationgrowth was maintained must have been due entirely to in-migration, and indeed the estimated totalnumber of new arrivals in Nottingham in this period was 5420.41 Chambers has calculated that inthe period 1739e1759, 66% of the population increase in Nottingham was due to migration, whilethe figure was 50% between 1779 and 1801.42 A similar picture was evident for Leicester andDerby.

Social connections

Having established that a significant proportion of marriage partners in East Midlands countytowns had lived outside their parish of marriage, the next stage is to consider where these migrantscame from, thus shedding light on the extent of the social connections of these towns. Fig. 2demonstrates clearly that in all three towns, a very high proportion of migrant marriage partnershad moved only a short distance. About one-third had been residing in another parish within thesame town before marriage, while about half of all individuals had moved to each town fromwithin its county. Leicester exhibited the highest proportion of short-distance migrants, with 39%of migrant marriage partners having originated in another parish within the town, and a total of85% moving from within either Leicester or its county.

It could be argued that people who moved between parishes within a town should not strictlybe termed migrants, since they may have been moving less far than some couples marrying withintheir home parish e perhaps just across the street in some cases. However, the fact that so manyindividuals moved within such a localised area serves to reinforce the argument that people’s dailylives were played out at a relatively restricted spatial scale, with region-wide or even county-wideconnections being of little importance to them.43 Although marriage is not representative of allsocial connections, it seems reasonable to assume that the vast majority of urban dwellers’everyday human relationships and interactions (including the courting of future spouses) tookplace at a very localised, often intra-urban scale.

Since the majority of migration for marriage seems to have taken place at an intra-urban or anintra-county level, the proportions of migrant marriage partners from beyond county boundaries

0

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1700 1720 1740 1760 1780 1800 1820

Percen

tag

e o

f to

tal m

arriag

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to

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Leicester

Nottingham

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Fig. 1. Proportions of marriages in which one or both partners originated outside their parish of marriage, 1700e1837.


were correspondingly low. Nevertheless, marked differences between the three towns are evidentwhen the proportions of marriage partners from the East and West Midlands are considered. Itseems that intra-regional links were of more significance for Nottingham and Leicester than forDerby. In Nottingham, the proportion of migrants from other counties in the East Midlands wasdouble that for Derby (16% compared to 8%), while in Derby, the proportion of migrantsoriginating from the West Midlands (principally Staffordshire) was almost the same as thepercentage from other counties in the East Midlands. In Nottingham, by contrast, just 1% ofpeople originated from the West Midlands. These findings could be explained in part by thesimple fact that Derbyshire was closer to the West Midlands, sharing a border with Staffordshire.Indeed, the geographical position of Derbyshire means that it effectively straddles three regions(the West Midlands, North-west and East Midlands.)

Closer inspection of the origins of marriage partners from beyond the Midlands reveals that thesphere of influence of Derby was the most limited, probably because it was the smallest of thethree towns. Only a tiny proportion of migrant marriage partners moved to Derby from London,whereas the numbers from the capital were more significant in Leicester and Nottingham. Inaddition, migrants to Derby came from a smaller range of counties, whereas in Leicester andNottingham almost all English counties were represented by at least one individual over the wholeperiod. A broad pattern emerges, whereby the majority of migrants to Derby and Nottinghamwho originated outside the Midlands came from northern counties (Yorkshire and Lancashire,especially) while in Leicester there was a bias towards southern counties. Over the period 1737e1837, 167 migrant marriage partners moved to Nottingham from counties in the North andNorth-west, whereas less than half that number (78) came from southern counties. Leicester, bycontrast, received significant concentrations of migrants from Surrey, Huntingdonshire andCambridgeshire, for example e places which sent few if any migrants to Derby or Nottingham.

There are several possible reasons for the differing orientations of the three towns. They couldbe explained by geographical position, in that Leicestershire was the most southerly of the threecounties and, therefore, was more likely to have connections with southern counties, as they were

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

Nottingham

Derby

Leicester

Proportion of migrant marriage partners

Within same town

Elsewhere in county

Elsewhere in E.Mids.

West Midlands

Further afield

Fig. 2. Origins of those married in Leicester, Derby and Nottingham between 1737 and 1837 who had been living outside the parish in

which they were married.


a shorter distance away. Indeed, since most migratory moves in this period were over shortdistances, it is not surprising that, aside from migrants from their own counties, each town hadmost connections with bordering counties. However, the distinct pattern of migrants’ origins wasalso a reflection of the differing industrial bases of the three towns. The fact that more migrants toLeicester and Nottingham came from within the East Midlands can probably be explained by thedominance of hosiery in the two counties, such that there would inevitably be some migration ofworkers and trading links between the two. Many of Derby’s links with Staffordshire were relatedto the town’s porcelain manufacturing industry. Indeed, one of the founders of the Derby ChinaFactory in 1750 was William Duesbury from Longton in the Staffordshire potteries.44

Nottingham’s cotton industry encouraged more links with Yorkshire and Lancashire than wasthe case in Leicester, a town without any significant textile industries besides hosiery. The cottonindustry was established in Nottinghamshire in 1768 with the introduction of Arkwright’sspinning frame at Hockley, and in the 1770s another Lancastrian, James Hargreaves, builta factory in Nottingham for twisting and spinning cotton. By 1794, there were eight cotton mills inNottingham itself, and several more in parishes towards the western side of the county, reflectingthe importance of proximity to the cotton manufacturing centres of Lancashire.45 To gaina clearer picture of the nature and extent of these towns’ economic connections, though, it isnecessary to consider data on the migration of those whose occupations are recorded e namelyapprentices.

Economic connections

It has been claimed that the East Midlands could only be described as a region in an industrialsense46; indeed, one of the most common ways in which the area has been distinguished byhistorians is as a hosiery manufacturing district. There was significant overlap between the‘hosiery hinterlands’ of Leicester, Nottingham and Derby. For instance, the framework knitters ofKegworth in Leicestershire were employed by firms in Nottingham rather than in Leicester.47

Brettles, the large firm of hosiers in Belper, forged production linkages across the East Midlandswhen their own framework knitters in South Derbyshire could not keep pace with rising demandin the nineteenth century. Accounts for the period 1816e1822 show that the firm’s main supplierswere 30 hosiers in Leicester, 12 in Nottingham, six each in Loughborough and Hinckley, four inDerby and one or two firms in Chesterfield, Mansfield and Earl Shilton.48 The principal marketfor Derbyshire silk and cotton thread was the East Midlands hosiery industry, and indeed one ofthe most prominent hosiers in mid-eighteenth century Nottingham, Samuel Need, went intopartnership with Jedediah Strutt of Derby, following the latter’s invention of ‘Derby rib’ stockingswhich proved very profitable.49

It would seem, then, that the East Midlands could be described as one of Everitt’s ‘occupationalregions’, integrated through the role of three ‘entrepreneurial towns’ acting as centres of regionalindustrial activity. One of the principal reasons for the sustained growth of Leicester, Nottinghamand Derby was that these towns, which were already the political, administrative and socialcapitals of their counties, also became the main industrial centres.50 Could it be that, in anindustrial sense at least, these county towns were acting as complementary centres of a region,rather than merely serving their own counties? Data on the origins of apprentices who moved to


Leicester and Nottingham to work for masters in hosiery can be used to gauge the extent ofspatial integration within the East Midlands hosiery industry. An average of 36% of migrantapprentices in Leicester and 52% in Nottingham in any one decade between 1720 and 1840 wereemployed in the hosiery industry, suggesting that these towns were part of a significant hosierydistrict.51

The apprenticeship registers suggest that individual migratory moves were often the result ofconnections within the industry. A number of apprentices’ fathers were employed in the hosierytrade, and so were likely to have sent their sons to be apprenticed in Leicester or Nottingham aftermaking connections with hosiery masters based in these towns. For instance, in 1729, a boy fromCossington in Leicestershire, whose father was listed as a framework knitter, was bound asapprentice to another framework knitter in Nottingham, while in 1784 a Nottingham sinkermakertook on a hosier’s son from Leicester as an apprentice.52 Sometimes these apparently economiclinkages were in fact based on family ties. For instance, in 1752, Andrew Miller moved fromIreland to Nottingham to be apprenticed to a framework knitter named John Miller.53 Theidentical surnames are unlikely to be merely a coincidence; such a long-distance move is probablyexplained by the fact that the apprentice’s new master was a relative.

Fig. 3 shows that the vast majority of apprentices moving to Leicester and Nottingham hadcome from the East Midlands. In part this may be explained by geographical proximity, but it alsoreflects the dominance of hosiery manufacture in the area, and adds weight to the argument thatthe East Midlands was a coherent and distinct region in an industrial sense. Intra-regionalconnections were most dominant in Nottingham, where almost 80% of hosiery apprentices fromoutside Nottinghamshire had originated in other counties within the East Midlands, while just 4%had come from the West Midlands. Leicester’s industrial linkages were also quite geographicallyspecific. Only very small proportions of migrant apprentices moved from the north and north-west e areas which specialised in the manufacture of woollen and cotton textiles.

It might be expected that there would be strong intra-regional linkages within the EastMidlands hosiery industry, partly because similar skills and technologies were required for theproduction of hose across the ‘region’, and, therefore, supplies of labour and machinery were nottied to any particular location. For instance, larger numbers of people moving to Nottingham forapprenticeships in hosiery had come from Derbyshire than from Leicestershire, even though thelatter county is conventionally seen as having stronger ties to Nottingham through hosieryproduction. However, working against these inter-county linkages was the fact that the differentcounties in the East Midlands specialised in the production of different varieties of stockings,which required different raw materials. Leicestershire focussed on the production of woollen hose,while silk hose was manufactured in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, with the latter countyspecialising in cotton hose from the 1780s, when the price of spun cotton fell markedly.54

Therefore, merchants and producers in the different counties were tied into separate supplynetworks, which meant that each county was likely to have as many connections to places outsidethe East Midlands as within it. For instance, Nottingham’s specialism in cotton hose linked it tothe cotton industry in Lancashire. James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright came to the townfrom Lancashire in 1769 partly because the experience of the local labour force in producingcotton hose meant that they were used to operating textile machinery.55 Silk makers in Derbywere part of an industrial agglomeration that included the silk manufacturing centres ofCoventry, Nuneaton, Leek, Macclesfield and Congleton.56 Leicestershire’s emphasis on the


production of woollen stockings meant that it was more likely to look towards the wool-producing districts of the South Midlands and East Anglia. The large hosiery firm Pares ofLeicester, for example, had a partnership with a worsted spinning mill near Bromsgrove inWorcestershire.57

It seems, then, that although there was some evidence of regional integration in the EastMidlands related to the hosiery industry, the area also looked outwards, sourcing raw materialsand trading products with other areas of the country. These wider connections evident in the EastMidlands resonate with an important debate amongst historians and historical geographers. Asa counter to the argument for the emergence of distinct regions during the industrial period, it hasbeen claimed that the industrial revolution encouraged greater national integration, asimprovements in transport and communications helped to break down barriers between regions,thus creating an integrated English space-economy centred on London. Several strands ofevidence have been put forward in support of this claim. Firstly, it has been argued that the latereighteenth century witnessed the emergence of national capital markets, as capital, credit andcommercial information flowed between London and provincial industries.58 Secondly, a nationalinformation network began to develop, as mail was transported across the country59 and Londonnewspapers extended their area of circulation. Thirdly, and more subjectively, it is argued thata greater sense of national identity emerged from about 1750, fostered in part by communicationsimprovements, allowing easier and faster access to information about the rest of the country, andin part by patriotic feeling inspired by the French wars.60

Although a full assessment of these arguments is beyond the scope of this paper, there isevidence that the East Midlands county towns were integrated into a national space-economythrough the hosiery industry. Leicester and Nottingham both attracted sizeable proportions ofmigrants from London (see Fig. 3), reflecting both towns’ long-standing links with the capitalthrough the hosiery trade. Hosiery manufacture originated in Leicester when industries weredriven out of London by high wage costs, and moved along main routes to the nearest source ofcheap labour.61 The expansion of the hosiery industry in Nottingham was fuelled by the transferof 800 frames from London to Nottingham between 1732 and 1750, as London hosiers sought toescape the stringent regulations of the Framework Knitters’ Company, as well as being attracted

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Fig. 3. Proportions of migrant apprentices employed in the hosiery industry in Leicester and Nottingham in the period 1700e1840

originating from different areas of the country.


by the lower wages and food prices in Nottingham.62 A number of leading hosiers in Leicester andNottingham had direct trading connections with London by the first half of the eighteenthcentury. Many of them lodged at inns off Cheapside, which by the 1760s had been turned intostockrooms, and acted as a market where hosiery manufacturers bargained with London dealersand retailers.63 Leicester served as a collecting and distributing point for trade with London,64

while the chief market for Nottingham’s silk hose was London, and many of the town’s 149master hosiers (in 1799) had warehouses in the capital.65 A few firms had a partner permanentlyresident in London. Hall, Hardwick and Northage, for example, took on a partner at theirAldermanbury warehouse in 1773. The success of many East Midlands firms was founded on themigration of men with capital and entrepreneurial skills from London. Samuel Fellows, forexample, moved to Nottingham after his father’s death in the early eighteenth century, and usedhis experience in London to build up one of the most successful silk hosiery businesses inNottingham.66 Derby’s leading industries also depended on migrants from London. In 1764,William Duesbury (who had set up the Derby China Factory the previous decade) bought thebankrupt Chelsea pottery, prompting the movement of significant numbers of skilled workers toDerby. Their expertise was drawn upon in order to produce better quality goods there.67 Theestablishment of the Derby silk mill also depended on migration of entrepreneurs from London.The mill was originally built by Thomas Cotchett, ‘a citizen and merchant tailor of London’. Hewent bankrupt in 1713, so the mill was taken over and rebuilt by Cotchett’s friend John Lombe,who already owned silk throwing machines in London.68

Ties to a national economy were clearly important, not least because the East Midlands was thecountry’s leading centre of hosiery production, with its products sold nationwide and exportedabroad.69 Nevertheless, the day-to-day production of hosiery relied upon connections at a muchsmaller scale e within individual counties. Linkages between both Nottingham and Leicester andtheir own counties are clearly evident from data on the migration of hosiery apprentices. Fig. 4indicates that approximately two-thirds of the parishes in Leicestershire sent apprentices toLeicester in the period 1700e1840. The importance of intra-county links can be explained by theparticular way in which the hosiery industry was organised in this period e namely under thedomestic system. Hosiers (merchant employers) owned and rented out frames to individualhosiery operatives, both in the county towns themselves, and in the industrialising villages andsmall towns in their hinterlands. Yarn was issued to stockingers at the beginning of a week, andthe finished articles were received and paid for by the hosiers at the end of the week.70 Thus, thenature of hosiery production meant that county towns were closely tied to their immediatehinterlands through a localised web of linkages. Indeed, Deering noted in 1751 that 60% ofstocking frames directly employed by Nottingham manufacturers were located ‘in the Villagesabout, who buy their Provisions and other Necessaries in this Town’.71

This essentially proto-industrial structure of the East Midlands textile industry accords with thelate arrival of the industrial revolution in the area. It has been convincingly demonstrated that incontrast to the ‘classic’ industrial heartlands of the North-west, for example, the East Midlandsdid not undergo full-scale industrialisation and the significant changes in mechanisationassociated with it until after 1850, as the arrival of the railway helped to open up this previouslylandlocked region.72 Prior to this, the established East Midlands’ industries e coal and leadmining, and iron-working e continued to be characterised by small-scale production, largelyrestricted to local markets, and limited technological innovation. Newer industries like framework


knitting did become more sophisticated over the century from 1750, but rather than maturing intofull industrialisation, it has been argued that instead they experienced a second stage of proto-industrialisation.73 Two key developments in this period served to cement the dominance ofurbaneindustrial centres in the East Midlands. Firstly, manufacturing concerns became larger, asmerchant entrepreneurs based in the larger towns set up their own establishments. In 1740, therewere around 50 merchant houses in Nottingham employing knitters directly. The number ofmerchant houses had doubled by 1770 and again by 1800. The large size of these firms meant thatthey were concentrated in towns, where there was a plentiful supply of capital and cheap labour.By 1813 one Nottingham hosier had £24,000 invested in frames and another employed 300workers. By 1824 several hosiers owned more than 1000 frames each. Leicester was slower todevelop such large firms, but by 1750 there were 10 principal manufacturers in the town, and 85firms by 1794. These firms were very often based in large workshops e ‘proto-factories’ e builtacross the upper floors of three-storey houses or in long yards behind town houses.74 Secondly,the hosiery industry became concentrated into fewer settlements. These included not only thecounty towns, however, but also smaller settlements, which were transformed into industrialvillages. Shepshed in Leicestershire, for instance, was dominated by framework knitting,

Fig. 4. Origins of apprentices who had migrated to Leicester from within its county in the period 1700e1840 for employment in the

hosiery industry.


becoming an urbaneindustrial centre during the eighteenth century.75 Ruddington inNottinghamshire experienced a similar situation in the early nineteenth century.76 It seems clear,then, that the hosiery industry required urban foci, to act as centres of finance, marketing andfinishing for county- or in some cases region-wide production.

If we narrow our focus to an even smaller scale, the very localised nature of urban spheres ofinfluence becomes evident, suggesting that region-wide linkages were of limited importance.Withinindividual counties, there were noticeable concentrations of hosiery migrants from particularareas. In Leicestershire, two principal tendencies are evident from Fig. 4. Firstly, a majority ofmigrant apprentices seems to have originated from the central portion of the county e the areaaround Leicester itself. The physical location of Leicester at the centre of its county is likely to haveexerted a strong influence on this spatial pattern. It could also be explained by the fact that stockingmakers would have had to walk to the nearest town to receive raw materials and deliver finishedgoods, so most rural hosiery parishes were likely to be located no more than 8e10 miles from anurban hosiery centre like Leicester, as this was the farthest that could be walked in a single day.77

Secondly, a larger number of migrants seemed to originate from the west of the county than theeast. This corresponds well with the uneven distribution of industrial activity in the county: theeastern side remained predominantly agricultural, while industry flourished in the west. Thisreinforces the point that migration was often the result of pre-existing connections within an industry.

Nottinghamshire’s industrial district was also spatially concentrated, as Fig. 5 demonstratesstarkly. The vast majority of apprentice hosiery workers came from the southern half of thecounty (except for small concentrations around Tuxford and in Worksop), with particularlysizeable numbers from the parishes around Nottingham itself. This distribution pattern in partreflects Nottingham’s geographical position in the south-west corner of its county, and thereforecould simply be the outcome of a distance-decay effect. However, the pattern also correspondswith the geographical spread of the county’s textile district, which only reached as far north asMansfield, while towns in the north and east of the county were more closely linked to theagricultural economy of Lincolnshire and trade along the Great North Road.78 Similarly, it hasbeen argued that Derbyshire could be divided into separate economies, often with strongerconnections to other counties. The North-west Derbyshire towns of Glossop and New Mills, forinstance, formed part of the cotton textile region of North-west England, while remaining isolatedfrom the rest of the county by the High Peak. Meanwhile, Chesterfield was part of Sheffield’shinterland.79 This evidence would seem to cast further doubt on the idea of the East Midlands asa self-contained industrial region.

Individual migration histories

As a complement to the mass of data on the movements of marriage partners and apprentices,which can do little more than reveal aggregate patterns and allows only inferences to be made asto the motives for and experiences of migration, the movements of individuals can bereconstructed from settlement examinations. The information they provide complicates thepicture of the East Midlands, and seems to conflict, at least in part, with the notion that ratherthan forming an integrated region, the East Midlands consisted of three separate counties, eachgiven internal coherence by the centralising tendencies of its county town. The documents suggest


that, for the poor and unemployed, movement over relatively long distances, and across the‘region’, was quite common. Over half the surviving examinations for Leicester concernedindividuals who had been born outside Leicestershire, in places as far afield as London,Yorkshire, Manchester and Devon. Although fewer people in the Derby sample had been bornoutside the county, those who had included three people born in Lancashire, one in Surrey andone in Middlesex. Those who had not been born in such distant places very often originated inadjacent counties within the East Midlands. This corroborates the predominance of short-distance movement suggested by the other data presented here.

Fig. 5. Origins of apprentices who had migrated to Nottingham from within its county in the period 1700e1840 for employment in the

hosiery industry.


Even if the distances over which people moved were not always particularly large, what isperhaps more illuminating for this study of spatial integration is the frequency with which peoplemoved. Looking at combinations of moves, rather than the single, ‘snapshot’ movement recordedin marriage and apprenticeship registers enables us to reconstruct with more certainty the spatialscale over which people operated during the course of their lives. Of those people examined atLeicester, the average number of moves mentioned was three, while in Derby the number variedbetween one and five. Some people had moved home many more times than this, however.William Thorp, for example, had made a total of eight moves up to the point at which he wasexamined by officials in St Nicholas’s parish, Leicester in 1770. He had been born in the parish ofSt Martin’s in Leicester and lived there for 20 years with his family. He then spent 3 months inTamworth living with one Joseph Knight, before lodging with a butcher (by whom he wasemployed) in Derby for 9 months. He then moved to London, where he spent 9 months witha butcher in Wapping, followed by 6 months in Spitalfields. His next move was back to Leicester,where he lived with his brother for a month in St Martin’s parish, only to return to London fora month, before moving back to his brother’s residence in Leicester. He then married and spent 6months in Uppingham, Rutland as a train driver.80 This is an unusual example, but it givesa flavour of the frequent moves back and forth which characterised the lives of many of thosestruggling to make ends meet in this period. It also highlights how commonly employmentopportunities or marriage prompted movement.81

The majority of people who made repeated moves did so within a relatively restricted spatialarea. John Barton, examined at All Saints in Derby in 1778, was born in Kirk Langley,Derbyshire, then made three further moves within the county to serve apprenticeships, beforejoining the Derbyshire militia.82 There are numerous other instances of people moving frequently,but remaining within their own county, or even within the same town, as in the case of JamesCockster, a framework knitter examined in Derby in 1780. He was born in St Werburgh’s parish,then worked for the apothecary John Cantwell in All Saints for two and a half years from the ageof 13. He was then apprenticed to Job Day of St Werburgh for 2 years, before moving with hismaster to St Michael’s parish for one and a half years. He was then employed by his father back inSt Werburgh.83 A significant proportion of people, though, (about one-third) did move betweencounties in the East Midlands, which makes the notion that movement was structured by distinct,bounded counties seem somewhat artificial. On the other hand, this does not prove the existenceof an integrated region either, but simply reinforces the point that connections betweenindividuals could exist at a variety of scales.

In sum, the evidence from settlement examinations demonstrates that aggregate patterns canmiss the reality of everyday mobility. The frequency of movement, in particular, is oftenconcealed. Nevertheless, it should be borne in mind that settlement examinations relate toa particularly mobile section of the population. Those who found themselves destitute orunemployed were more likely to travel in search of employment or poor relief. Despite thefrequency of movement, the documents do tend to reinforce the relatively restricted spatialpatterns of activity evident from the other sources on migration. This glimpse into the movementof individuals also highlights the need for further studies at this small scale. Although Pooley andTurnbull’s84 extensive study of mobility was based on thousands of individual life histories, sucha huge dataset covering the whole of the country necessitates the drawing of fairly broadconclusions. Studies at a more local scale are still valuable, especially as they can shed further light


on the processes of spatial integration within regions, which, as we have seen, varied markedlyfrom place to place.

Conclusion

The process of spatial integration, though difficult to reconstruct and measure, is crucial tounderstanding the different ways in which regions developed during the industrial period inEngland. Its importance is highlighted by the long-running debate over what form this integrationtook. Some authors have argued for the emergence of distinct, internally integrated regions duringthe eighteenth century, while others have claimed that the same period witnessed greater nationalintegration, with barriers between regions breaking down under the influence of a transport andcommunications revolution. This study of the East Midlands, whilst acknowledging that it is notpossible to offer a full assessment of the development of any one region, has shed new light on thisrather polarised debate, refining the picture.

The focus has been on the important role of large towns in spatial integration. It isconventionally argued that these towns played a vital part in drawing industrial regions together,economically, socially and culturally. However, the nature of urban development in the EastMidlands suggests that this was not always the case. The dominance of three county towns at thehead of a weak urban network, alongside a lack of regional coherence in the East Midlands wassurely more than coincidence. Using data on migration into these three towns, this paper hassuggested that the structure of the urban system in the East Midlands was an important part ofthe explanation for its disunity and incoherence rather than integration. The spheres of influenceof Leicester, Nottingham and Derby (as defined by their migration fields) generally extended onlyas far as their county boundaries, and very often were even more localised than this. The sustaineddominance of these county towns, a result of their unique role as both established social andadministrative centres and industrial nodes, meant that the pre-industrial pattern in whicheconomic and social life was organised on a county basis persisted into the industrial period.There was strong rivalry between the three county towns, and surprisingly little evidence in thedataset of connections between them. If there was limited interaction between the major cities ina ‘region’ this makes it unlikely that that region formed an integrated and coherent entity.

Nevertheless, the situation within the East Midlands is not a simple case of ‘county versusregion’. There was some evidence for strong linkages between the counties, related to the hosieryindustry (in terms of employment of hosiery workers and recruitment of apprentices), and at thesame time, linkages existed beyond the region, to the industrial heartlands of England such asthe North-west and West Midlands, and to London, the market for many of the East Midlands’products. The position of Derbyshire is particularly difficult to categorise neatly. Derby itself hadas many linkages with places outside the East Midlands e in Staffordshire and Yorkshireparticularly e as within it. Meanwhile, parts of its county were oriented more towards theNorth-west and West Midlands and seemed disconnected from the rest of Derbyshire. Thus,a picture emerges of a ‘region’ whose integrity was being undermined by centrifugal forcespulling it apart.

So, the findings from the East Midlands provide evidence that neither industrialisation norregional development in England was a uniform process; rather they took different forms and


took place at different rates across the country. This investigation also highlights the ambiguity ofthe concepts of region and regionalism. As Royle has argued, the validity of regional boundariesdepends upon their acceptance ‘from below’, by the people who actually lived in then.85 Althoughas historians we may be able to identify intra-regional linkages within the ‘East Midlands’, relatedto the hosiery industry for example, there is little evidence that contemporaries were even awareof, let alone identified with, an ‘East Midlands region’.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Roey Sweet, Andrew Hann and three anonymous referees for theircomments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

1. J. Stobart and N. Raven, Introduction: industrialisation and urbanisation in a regional context, in: J. Stobart and

N. Raven (Eds), Towns, Regions and Industries: Urban and Industrial Change, 1700e1840, Manchester, 2005, 2, 8.2. P. Hudson, Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain, London, 1989; P. Hudson,

The Industrial Revolution, London, 1992; J. Langton, The industrial revolution and the regional geography ofEngland, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 9 (1984) 145e167; S. Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: The

Industrialisation of Europe, 1760e1970, London, 1981; J. Stobart, The First Industrial Region: North-West Englandc.1700e1760, Manchester, 2004; S. King and G. Timmins, Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution, Manchester,2001, ch. 2.

3. Langton, Industrial revolution, 156e157.4. Stobart, First Industrial Region, 3.5. J. Stobart, Regions, localities and industrialisation: evidence from the East Midlands circa 1780e1840, Environment

and Planning A 33 (2001) 1308, 1322, doi: 10.1068/a33221.6. Apart from a recent work, C. Pooley and J. Turnbull, Migration and Mobility in Britain Since the Eighteenth

Century, Manchester, 1998, there have been very few studies of migration in England during the early stages ofindustrialisation since Redford’s work on the movement of labour: A. Redford, Labour Migration in England,

1800e1850, Manchester, 1926.7. Of course, migration is not the only measure of integration, and indeed this paper forms part of a broader study

which will set these findings alongside evidence of urban-based social connections as revealed in testamentary

practices, plus closer investigation of trading linkages and transport networks.8. Hudson, Industrial Revolution, 104.9. N. Raven and T. Hooley, Industrial and urban change in the Midlands: a regional survey, in: Stobart and Raven,

Towns, Regions and Industries, 30.10. Langton, Industrial revolution, 162e163.11. Langton, Industrial revolution, 151e154.

12. See, for example, P. Vidal de la Blache, Principles of Human Geography, (tr. Millicent Todd Bingham) London,1926; A.J. Herbertson, The major natural regions of the world: an essay in systematic geography, GeographicalJournal 25 (1905) 300e312.

13. J.F. Hart, The highest form of the geographer’s art, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 72 (1982)

10e11.14. See, for example N. Thrift, On the determination of social action in space and time, Environment and Planning D:

Society and Space 1 (1983) 23e57; A. Paasi, Deconstructing regions: notes on the scales of spatial life, Environment

and Planning A 23 (1991) 239e54; P.J. Taylor, A theory and practice of regions: the case of Europes, Environmentand Planning D: Society and Space 9 (1991) 183e195; A. Murphy, Regions as social constructs: the gap betweentheory and practice, Progress in Human Geography 15 (1991) 22e35; N. Thrift, Taking aim at the heart of the

region, in: D. Gregory, R. Martin and G. Smith (Eds), Human Geography: Society, Space and Social Science,


London, 1994, 200e231; D. Massey, The conceptualization of place, in: D. Massey and P. Jess (Eds), A Place in the

World, Oxford, 1995, 45e85; J. Allen, D. Massey and A. Cochrane, Rethinking the Region, London, 1998.15. A. Passi, Place and region: regional worlds and words, Progress in Human Geography 26 (2002) 805. This view is

borne out by the recent preference for the more flexible, open term ‘place’ rather than ‘region’.

16. Something which has been neglected in geographical research, as Paasi notes: Deconstructing regions, 242.17. Murphy, Regions as social constructs, 22e35.18. Paasi, Deconstructing regions, 249.19. Massey, The conceptualization of place, 64.

20. K.S.O. Beavon, Central Place Theory: A Re-interpretation, London, 1977; J.E. Vance, The Merchant’s World: TheGeography of Wholesaling, Englewood Cliffs, 1970; B. Lepetit, The Pre-industrial Urban System: France 1740e1840,Cambridge, 1994.

21. Stobart, First Industrial Region, 175e218.22. A. Everitt, Country, county and town: patterns of regional evolution in England, in: P. Borsay (Ed.), The

Eighteenth Century Town, Harlow, 1990, 99.

23. In part reflecting the fact that English archives are organised on a county basis, but also following a long tradition ofwriting county histories. For a consideration of the limitations of using administrative boundaries to delimit regions,see J.D. Marshall, Proving ground or the creation of regional identity? The origins and patterns of regional historyin Britain, in: P. Swan and D. Foster (Eds), Essays in Regional and Local History, Cherry Burton, 1992, 15, 18.

24. The ‘East Midlands’ could also include the counties of Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire, but they werepredominantly agricultural (apart from some shoe manufacture in Northampton) and their county towns did notexperience the strong and prolonged growth seen in Leicester, Nottingham and Derby; thus they had little in

common with these three counties. Their inclusion in this study would simply have reinforced the point that theEast Midlands lacked regional coherence.

25. J.V. Beckett, The East Midlands from AD 1000, Harlow, 1988, 4e5.

26. Stobart, Regions, 1308.27. G.E. Mingay, Nottinghamshire farming in the eighteenth century, in: Nottinghamshire Food and Farming Year

Committee (Ed.), Aspects of Nottinghamshire Agricultural History, Nottingham, 1989.

28. Beckett, East Midlands, 7e8.29. Stobart, Regions, 1317e1319.30. J. Ellis, Regional and county centres, c. 1700-c. 1840, in: P. Clark (Ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain,

Vol. II, Cambridge, 2000, 679; J. Langton, Urban growth and economic change: from the late seventeenth century

to 1841, in: Clark (Ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II, Cambridge, 2000, 473e474.31. J. Langton, Town growth and urbanisation in the Midlands from the 1660s to 1801, in: J. Stobart and P. Lane

(Eds), Urban and Industrial Change in the Midlands, 1700e1840, Leicester, 2000, 23, 39.

32. A. Dyer, Area surveys 1540e1840: Midlands, in: Clark, The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Vol. II, 108.33. Stobart, Regions.34. Data on the numbers and origins of marriage partners were extracted from marriage registers for each year from

1700 to 1837 for all three parishes in Nottingham (St Mary’s, St Nicolas’ and St Peter’s), for four of the six parishesin Leicester (All Saints’, St Margaret’s, St Martin’s and St Nicholas’) and two of Derby’s five parishes (All Saints’and St Werburgh’s.) Of the remaining parishes in Leicester, no registers survive for St Leonard’s, while the registersin St Mary’s run from 1739e1837. The three remaining parishes in Derby (St Alkmund’s, St Michael’s and

St Peter’s) all have registers for the period 1700e1812.35. These are very comprehensive: data were extracted from the Leicester records for each year from 1700 to 1840,

while in Nottingham the registers covered the period 1723e1840. However, the few apprenticeship records that

survive for Derby relate only to young people apprenticed in their parish of residence, and therefore are of no usefor a study of migration into Derby.

36. These records are held at the Record Office for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (hereafter ROLLR),

Nottinghamshire Archives (hereafter Notts Archives), and Derbyshire Record Office (hereafter DRO).37. A.J. Pain and M.T. Smith, Do marriage horizons accurately measure migration? A test case from Stanhope parish,

County Durham, Local Population Studies 33 (1984) 44e48; K.D.M. Snell, English rural societies and geographical

marital endogamy, Economic History Review LV (2002) 271.


38. J. Patten, Patterns of migration and movement of labour to three pre-industrial East Anglian towns, Journal of

Historical Geography 2 (1976) 114; Pooley and Turnbull,Migration andMobility, 62, 69; A.A. Lovett, I.D.Whyte andK.A. Whyte, Poisson regression analysis and migration fields: the example of the apprenticeship records ofEdinburgh in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 10 (1985)

317.39. I.D. Whyte, Migration and Society in Britian 1550e1830, London, 2000, 20.40. See K.M. Thompson, Settlement papers, in: K.M. Thompson (Ed.), Short Guides to Records, 2nd Series: Guides

25e48, London, 1997, for more information on settlement documents.

41. A. Henstock, S. Dunster and S. Wallwork, Decline and regeneration: social and economic life, in: J. Beckett (Ed.),A Centenary History of Nottingham, Nottingham, 1997, 136.

42. J.D. Chambers, The Vale of Trent 1670e1800: a Regional Study of Economic Change, Economic History Review

Supplement 3, London, 1956, 21.43. Movement between parishes would certainly be included in Lee’s commonly-used definition of migration as

a residential change of a permanent or semi-permanent nature. This encompasses intra-urban, inter-urban, and

rural-urban moves, as well as vagrancy and seasonal movements such as transhumance; see E.S. Lee, A theory ofmigration, in: J.A. Jackson (Ed.), Migration, Cambridge, 1969.

44. E. Lord, Derby Past, Chichester, 1996, 34.45. D. Kaye, A History of Nottinghamshire, Chichester, 1987, 73.

46. Beckett, East Midlands, 3e8, 189.47. VCH Leicestershire, Vol. 3, 3e5.48. S. Chapman,Hosiery and Knitwear: Four Centuries of Small-scale Industry in Britain, c. 1589e2000, Oxford, 2002, 90.

49. Stobart, Regions, 1311; Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear, 67.50. Dyer, Midlands, 102e103; Stobart, Regions, 1321.51. H. Hartopp, Records of the Borough of Leicester, New Series, Vols. 1 and 2, Leicester, 1926; Notts Archives,

Register of Apprentices bound by indenture to the burgesses of Nottingham from 1723.52. Notts Archives, Register of Apprentices 1723 to 1753, M.S. 1553, Vol. 1; 1767 to 1789, M.S. 1555, Vol. 3.53. Notts Archives, Register of Apprentices 1723 to 1753, M.S. 1553, Vol. 1.

54. J. Simmons, Leicester Past and Present: Vol. 1, Ancient Borough to 1860, London, 1974, 97; Chapman, Hosiery andKnitwear, 10.

55. J.V. Beckett and J.E. Heath, When was the industrial revolution in the East Midlands? Midland History 13 (1988)86.

56. Raven and Hooley, Industrial and urban change, 30, 37.57. Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear, 77.58. M. Buchinsky and B. Polak, The emergence of a national capital market in England, 1710e1880, Journal of

Economic History 53 (1993) 1e24; I. Black, Geography, political economy and the circulation of finance capital inearly industrial England, Journal of Historical Geography 15 (1989) 366e384.

59. D. Gregory, The friction of distance? Information circulation and the mails in early nineteenth-century England,

Journal of Historical Geography 13 (1987) 130e154.60. L. Colley, ‘‘Whose nation?’’ Class and national consciousness in Britain, 1750e1830, Past and Present 113 (1986)

100e102.61. Dyer, Midlands, 95.

62. J. Beckett, The Book of Nottingham, Buckingham, 1990, 35.63. Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear, 22e23.64. Dyer, Midlands, 109.

65. Beckett, Book of Nottingham, 55.66. Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear, 19.67. Lord, Derby Past, 34e35.

68. Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear, 21e22.69. Beckett and Heath, When was the industrial revolution in the East Midlands? 83.70. G.A. Chinnery, Eighteenth century Leicester, in: A.E. Brown (Ed.), The Growth of Leicester, Leicester, 1972, 64;

C. Marsden, Nottinghamshire, London, 1953, 36.


71. C. Deering, Nottinghamia Vetus et Nova, or an Historical Account of the Ancient and Present State of the Town of

Nottingham, Nottingham, 1751, 101.72. Beckett and Heath, When was the industrial revolution in the East Midleands? 77e94; Chapman, Hosiery and

Knitwear, ix, xxi.

73. D. Mills, Rural industries and social structure: framework knitters in Leicestershire, 1670e1850, Textile History 13(1982) 183e204; Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear, 52.

74. Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear, 53, 61.75. F.A. Wells, The British Hosiery and Knitwear Industry, Newton Abbot, 1972, 48.

76. Beckett and Heath, When was the industrial revolution in the East Midlands? 84e85.77. A. Everitt, The marketing of agricultural produce, in: J. Thirsk (Ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales,

IV, 1500e1640, Cambridge, 1967, 498.

78. Stobart, Regions, 1314; J. Ellis, Industrial and urban growth in Nottingham, 1680e1840, in: Stobart and Raven,(Eds), Towns, Regions and Industries: Urban and Industrial Change, 1700e1840, Manchester, 2005, 152.

79. Stobart, Regions, 1314.

80. ROLLR, 23 D52/3/1, St Nicholas, Leicester: Settlement and removal papers.81. Settlement examinations do not necessarily cover all moves made by an individual, since they tend only to detail

moves which related to the gaining of a settlement, such as apprenticeship, service or marriage.82. DRO, M609 Vol. 14, D 3372, Derby All Saints, Parish papers e Settlement Examinations.

83. DRO, M609 Vol. 14, D 3372, Derby All Saints, Parish papers e Settlement Examinations.84. Pooley and Turnbull, Migration and Mobility.85. E. Royle, Introduction: regions and identities, in: E. Royle (Ed.), Issues of Regional Identity, Manchester, 1998,

3e4; see also D. Rollison, Exploding England: the dialectics of mobility and settlement in early modern England,Social History 24 (1999) 1e3.

county versus region? migrational connections in the east midlands, 1700–1830

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