Though historians have come to acknowledge the mobility of rural populations in early modern Europe, few books demonstrate the intensity and importance of short-distance migrations as definitively as Strangers and Neighbours. Marshalling an incredible range of evidence that includes judicial records, tax records, parish registers, and the census of 1796, Jeremy Hayhoe reconstructs the migration profiles of more than 70,000 individuals from eighteenth-century northern Burgundy.

In this book, Hayhoe paints a picture of a surprisingly mobile and dynamic rural population. More than three quarters of villagers would move at least once in their lifetime; most of those who moved would do so more than once, in many cases staying only briefly in each community. Combining statistical analysis with an extensive discussion of witness depositions, he brings the experiences and motivations of these many migrants to life, creating a virtuoso reconceptualization of the rural demography of the ancien régime.

Jeremy Hayhoe is an associate professor in the Department of History and Geography at the Université de Moncton.

Jeremy Hayhoe's profile page

‘Hayhoe’s creativity in this book should not go unnoticed… 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.’

Journal of Interdisciplinary History vol 47:04:2016

"Hayhoe does more than simply document mobility…he explains why peasants moved to certain villages rather than others."

The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, 1 February 2018

"Jeremy Hayhoe’s excellent new study of rural migration in eighteenth-century northern Burgundy makes an important contribution towards renewing our understanding of the social life of the early modern French countryside…This is a model study, whose claims for a high degree of rural mobility in early modern France are convincing and important and whose broader claims about the consequences of this fact for rethinking social life and cultural identity are suggestively thought-provoking. Hayhoe’s book merits an important place in the historiography of mobility and early modern rural life."

University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018