Emigration Stories

There are many compelling reasons for emigration: poverty, dissent, the hope of gaining wealth or land, missionary zeal, adventure, freedom. Hook Norton illustrates all these. It is a prime example of an open village where the largest landholders in the 18th century were the Lord of the Manor and the Bishop of Oxford, which meant that no single landowner controlled the village (unlike Great Tew, for example). Open villages were places where dissenters flourished; where there was no unifying building plan and where (subject to the Poor Laws) there was more movement of labour.

The Open and Common Fields of Hook Norton were enclosed in 1774 and while the beneficiaries of the Act acquired workable farms, and in the case of the Church compensation for tithes, the poor who had relied on subsistence farming and their Common rights found themselves worse off, facing the bill for compulsory quick set hedges and a contribution to the costs of Enclosure. Some of them had to sell the little land they had to meet those costs and became dependent on working for others. The following years saw a rapid increase in poor relief payments and the redundant workhouse was reinstituted.

The village also had vigorous communities of Dissenters: Baptists, Quakers (two local men died in prison in Oxford in 1679: their crime was not paying their tithes) and later Methodists, Roman Catholics and smaller breakaway sects flourished.

As the nineteenth century brought the Napoleonic Wars, agricultural depression and labour unrest, it is not surprising that both national and local organisations and individuals looked to radical ways to combat poverty. Agents for overseas territories became active in recruiting new settlers with promises of great opportunities in countries as disparate as Brazil and New Zealand. Skilled workers were in great demand – and so were marriageable women. Thousands of people with no real knowledge of the world beyond their villages and towns launched themselves into the unknown.

Here are some of the stories of those who left Hook Norton for new lives in new worlds: the Baptist minister and his family; the Hook Norton born wife of a Methodist minister; the impoverished agricultural labourers; younger sons seeking their fortune who returned to Europe to die in the First World War.

Gill Geering
26/09/15