Voluntary answers: marriage and out-migration
During the nineteenth century the inhabitants of both the Ardennes and the Land of Herve experienced rising pressure due to both population growth and the changing regional economy.
In this context, late marriage and outmigration were the main safety valves for these populations. Both marriage and migrations were voluntary responses, but they took place within the limits of strict demographic and family systems.In the first half of the nineteenth century, out-migration was still a marginal behaviour in Sart, and marriage was the main check on population growth. Short-term variations in nuptiality were negatively associated with changes in the price of rye and positively with changes in the price of oats. We saw the opposite above: an increase in the price of rye was a good sign for the inhabitants of Sart, lowering their mortality and increasing their fertility. Evidently, young, unmarried adults had a different perspective. We hypothesize that they viewed the world as wage earners and consumers, not as producers or subsistence farmers. For wage earners, an increase in the price of rye signalled a decrease in the real wage. Rye prices clearly mattered to workers in Verviers, the most frequent urban destination from Sart, and variations in the migration stream would have conveyed this effect to real wages in rural areas as well.
The attenuation of links between short-term fluctuations in prices and demographic responses after 1847 also applies to the marriage and out-migration of young single adults. In the Land of Herve the demographic system was continuously under pressure, and throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, it remained very difficult for young couples to start a family. We cannot find traces of any specific marriage behaviour consistent with responses to annual price fluctuations (see Table 15.3).7 A rise in butter prices (an increase of Hervian potential incomes) did tend to reduce migration but not to a statistically significant extent.
The strongest response was for unmarried people, especially women who were 7% less likely to move when the cost of living rose 10% above the trend.Unlike the migration pattern of the unmarried, married adults were indifferent to short-term price fluctuations. When they out-migrated, 78% stayed within the borders of the Land of Herve; only 18—19% left for the industrial agglomerations of Verviers and Liege or for the adjacent Dutch (Maastricht) and German (Aachen, Koln) towns. In contrast, urban and industrial destinations attracted 50% of young adults leaving the parental home. For married adults, moving was not changing their economic roles, and their mobility was determined by socio-economic and familial characteristics—like moving from farm to farm in a society of tenants—not
by short-term stress, which did not vary within the rural environment. The same was true for old people (55—90) whose out-migration depended on their age, sex, marital status, position in their household, presence of children, etc., but not on variations in prices (for a specific study about the determinants of old age migrations, see Neven 2003).
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