travel and migration in 17th and 18th century

Question

Hi

Is it plausible that people would travel between London and Lancashire in the 17th or 18th century to get married or set up home, any reason that may happen?

I'm looking for an ancestral marriage and the only record I can find is in London, the Speakman family was based in Lancashire during later times. As far as I know the Speakman name is mainly found in Lancashire, why would one be down in London?

I know by mtdna that some older relatives lived in south England/France but don't know when the migration to Lancashire took place

Answer 1

What was the occupation? Could be apprenticed, or a servant in a ‘big house’ and after marriage returned home.

Wikipedia talks about industrialisation around that time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Lancashire

Answer 2

Also, are they among the landed gentry, who may have spent the season in London?

Comments

thanks both for replies, no idea about the London side yet, later on in Lancashire the Speakman's were involved in mining. My great grand parents were also miners but lived in the country in their own privately built detached house and had their own transport , leaving the equivalent of 20k in a will.

So despite the image of George Orwell there was money around up north near Wigan

Answer 3

London was the one place where anyone might go for any number of reasons. James Boswell's diaries show him traveling to London any time he could, to mingle with the Great, then dragging himself back home to dreary Scotland.

Answer 4

People involved in business needed to travel in order to arrange for commodities to travel about the place.  The recent episode of Who Do You Think You Are for instance mentioned the cod industry - salted cod was being produced in eastern Canada and shipped internationally to markets, and a young man who was originally involved in the English end of the cod sale business went to live in Canada and become a small producer.  While shipping of goods would have increased dramatically with industrialization and the expansion of the British Empire, trade in goods has been going on since prehistoric times, requiring someone to travel - and sometimes settle somewhere new as a result, as the Amesbury Archer demonstrates.