Mobility

A central issue that defined the activity of our middling groups was the way they engaged with the movement of things, ideas, skills and people. The middling were a surprisingly mobile group, often closely involved with internal migration, around England, and increasingly with the trade and colonial journeys that were made across the world. In this section, you will discover more about how middling men and women themselves moved around, why they might have done so and how this different for different middling groups – professional and mercantile, for example. There is also information about the role that middling skills played in these movements – how rare and valuable some skills were in this period, the appetite for growing the kind of skills that were available in England at the time, and the role of both continental politics and elite families in driving the mobility of skilled individuals.

A key impact of middling groups was on the creation and movement of the kind of goods that were changing the nature of the early modern domestic environment (tapestry, glass etc) – as craftspeople, merchants and as consumers, their choices and talents fundamentally shaped the material culture of early modern England. There is also information here about how things and people moved – the modes of transport that were available to them, including horses and ships, which allowed them to travel further and faster. But these commercial imperatives also had a very dark side, in the forced movement of people around the world.