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by roryirvine 6 days ago
The average person may well have lived all their lives in one village, but the minority who didn't has always been substantial, often very substantial.

Since the Anglo-Saxons, we've had numerous intense bursts of migration driven by the first and second Viking periods, the Normans, the Hundred Years War, Black Death, Border Wars, Plantations, Thirty Years War / Wars of the Three Kingdoms / the Huguenots, Plantations, Colonialism, Inclosure, Clearances, Industrial Revolution, Famine, New Colonialism, World Wars, and the Commonwealth.

Yes, the Brexit migration wave was particularly sharp, but the movements in the 1850s-60s were proportionately greater (albeit spread over a dozen years rather than just five).