‘Where do you come from?’ must be one of the most frequent opening conversational lines in English. It can be interpreted in a number of ways, yet it always produces a reply and reciprocal interest, and its answer often appears to be confirmed by accent, personality, and appearance. It may establish rapport, but occasionally arouses distrust. Each place, and the many ways in which a person may be attached to it, has different cultural and subjective connotations. These indicate the crucial importance of ideas of belonging, or the wish for it, even in the modern world. Similarly, the search for ‘roots’, for one's genealogy, fills record offices with people, inspires much local historical research, and manifests the same interest.

In many other areas of culture we also witness the desire for belonging and attachment to place. We hear this in popular song, from nostalgic nineteenth-century emigration songs, like ‘The leaving of Liverpool’, and earlier ballads like ‘Loch Lomond’, to ‘It's a long way to Tipperary’, ‘Show me the way to go home’, ‘Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner’, through to the more recent lyrics of ‘The green, green grass of home’, ‘I'm going home’, ‘Going to my home town’, ‘Clare to here’, and so on. Geordie oil workers, returning from the Scottish rigs, roar in deafening crescendo ‘I'm coming home Newcastle, wish I'd never been away’, as the train approaches their destination.

Marriage choices reveal a great deal about local horizons, and where people felt that they belonged. In this chapter, I wish to explore features of marriage, and to track changes in parochial endogamy and exogamy. By those terms I respectively mean marriage with both partners from the parish, and marriage to someone from outside the parish. Despite the huge growth of demographic studies in England over recent decades – something that has been less true of Wales – little attention has been paid to these aspects of marital behaviour.

The Webbs referred to the new poor law of 1834 as ‘the strangulation of the parish’, a view endorsed as dramatic but not unjust by W. E. Tate in his The Parish Chest. Tate took the view that ‘Eventually … the old parochial system was wound up by the Act of 1834.’ So he ended his well-known book at that date. The parish chest, it would seem, remained permanently padlocked and redundant from then on, eventually to be opened by local historians. It might have appeared, to a long-buried Thomas Gray, that 1834 was a curfew which tolled the knell of parting days for the parish.

Anyone who looks at gravestones in church or chapel burial grounds will observe a very frequent feature. It was once extremely common to add to the name of the deceased further details about where they were ‘of’ or ‘from’. Very frequently the phrase used was ‘of this parish’. One typical inscription reads: ‘Here lieth the Body of joan the wife of walter Williams of Baddon in the Parish of Brideftow’, to take an example dated 1774 from Lydford in west Dartmoor. Other inscriptions may take the form of ‘In Memory of [name], of this parish’, or ‘of the parish of …’. The wording can vary in a number of ways. Sometimes one finds the person, or his or her spouse or parents, being ascribed to a certain place rather than ‘this parish’, a place that may be a small settlement or even a house address, through to a large city. Assuming that the memorials have not suffered much erosion (which is often the case where limestone or sandstone monuments predominate), one will find such mention of place following many deceased people's names in most areas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

INTRODUCTION

The Revd Anthony Huxtable was rector of Sutton Waldron, near Shaftesbury in Dorset. He was a poor law guardian, one of the more regular attendants at board meetings. He was also a farmer, with a farm of about 100 acres on the high chalk downland, bordering upon the Vale of Blackmore. In May 1847 he was called before the Select Committee on Settlement and Poor Removal. His evidence underlined the importance of the laws of settlement to the poor, and also discussed people's local attachments in Dorset.

For their help or advice with various parts of this book, I am most grateful to Rod Ambler, John Barrell, Mandy de Belin, Liz Bellamy, Bob Bushaway, Alasdair Crockett, Nick Cull, Ros Davies, Ian Dyck, Christopher Dyer, Angie Edmunds, Paul Ell, David Feldman, Harold Fox, Ian Gregory, Harriet Guest, George Harrison, Cyril Hart, David Hey, Derek Hirst, Jane Humphries, Anna Huppert, Joanna Innes, Prashant Kidambi, Robert Lee, Alan Macfarlane, Dennis Mills, John Morrill, Avner Offer, Brian Outhwaite, David Parry, Charles Phythian-Adams, Sylvia Pinches, Sidney Pollard, Dave Postles, Eileen Power, Barry Reay, Ruth Richardson, Richard Rodger, Julie Rugg, Richard Smith, Peter Solar, Julie-Marie Strange, Rosemary Sweet, Simon Szreter, Sarah Tarlow, James Stephen Taylor, Pat Thane, Mike Thompson, Hiroko Tomida, Margery Tranter, Christine Vialls, Tom Williamson, Sir Tony Wrigley, and to many students at the Centre for English Local History, University of Leicester. I am particularly grateful to Steve Hindle and Steve King, in their capacity as outstanding historians of welfare, for the stimulus of their own writing, and for their comments on some of these chapters. Robert Colls has advised me at many points and I am most thankful for his persistently thoughtful and probing comments. I also acknowledge with gratitude a grant from the British Academy, allowing the Clergy List for 1896 to be computerised. Earlier versions of chapters 2, 4 and 8 were respectively published in Social History, the Economic History Review, and Past and Present, and I am most grateful to the editors and referees of those journals for their excellent advice.