Agricultural History Review, Volume 43 Part 2 (1995), pp. 139–159

This article examines the procedures under the settlement laws which produced the eighteenth-century settlement documents now in parish archives. The article uses the evidence of procedure in the application of the settlement laws to argue that parish officers applied these laws in order to regulate and monitor immigration to their parish. So, this article argues against the hypothesis that the settlement laws were applied just to the unemployed and those in need of poor relief. Indeed, it presents evidence that, before 1795, parish officers applied the settlement laws to many men just because they were living in a parish which was not their parish of settlement. 

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