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This chapter discusses the elements of the social structure in Terling, which illustrates the fluidity and unboundedness of a community constantly changing in composition as a result of geographical mobility. The most fundamental relationships that gave structure and stability to the community were those between members of the same nuclear family household. In the household, children were reared until such time as they could be set forth independently to make their own way in the world, taking with them whatever advantages of wealth and education their parents were able to provide. Beyond the household were those ties that held together the community as an association of households; ties of kinship, of friendship, and of neighbourliness. Influencing all these relationships were the overarching structures of the distributions of wealth, status, and power among the villagers.

This chapter begins by presenting the rationale behind the decision to study a single village and its people, in an attempt to discern the manner in which national and local development intersected in a period in which the evolution of English society was peculiarly influenced by the nature of their interaction. It argues that uncovering the processes of change at work in the smaller worlds of county and village will provide an understanding of the convergence of forces that shaped the nation in the later 16th and the 17th centuries. The chapter then discusses the two major developments in English rural society — the significant weakening of the localism of provincial society and the emergence of a new complexity in the social differentiation of rural communities — which can be attributed to the demographic, economic, political, social, and cultural changes in the century and a half between the Reformation and the 1688 Revolution.

This chapter discusses the economy of the village of Terling in Essex. In the course of the later 16th and 17th centuries, the development of the village economy, like that of the county of Essex generally, was shaped by four basic factors. First there were the simple facts of topography and soil type; second, the agricultural technology available to the villagers and the practice of husbandry associated with it; third, the system of landholding inherited from the medieval past; and, finally, the influence of market opportunities.

This chapter examines the demographic structure of the village of Terling, which was vital to both the emergence of the greatly expanded labouring class and its continuance as a permanent feature of village society. The study of the population of Terling was conducted by applying the technique of ‘family reconstitution’ to the entries of baptisms, burials, and marriages recorded in the parish register between its inception in 1538 and the middle of the 18th century. It is shown that in Terling, the age at marriage and fertility, and not mortality were the prime agents of demographic control. While the short-run implications of epidemic mortality were of real consequence, they were of little importance in the long run.

The appearance for the first time of resident gentry in villages that had previously lacked them was a widespread phenomenon in the century after 1540 whose implications have barely been considered. These gentry disturbed settled patterns of self-government. As they sought to increase the profitability of their manors, they sometimes alienated their tenants and neighbours, who had formerly enjoyed the first pick of the profits of the manor in the form of cheap leases, under-valued copyholds, and largely unrestricted access to the resources of the manor, including its timber and commons. Incoming lords could also bring with them their own concepts of ideal social behaviour, which might engender another form of conflict within the village. This chapter reviews three areas of contact, and in some cases conflict, between the lords and the tenants. The first section describes the antagonisms prompted by the attempt to remould timber rights to the lord's advantage; the second the lords' intervention in the affairs of individual copyhold families; and the third the attempt to use the court leet to instil moral discipline into the inhabitants of the village. All need to be read against the long and protracted decline of the seigniorial interest in Earls Colne and English villages generally.

This chapter summarises the preceding discussions and presents some concluding thoughts from the authors. Earls Colne was situated within one of the most commercially developed areas of late medieval England. It was on the fringes of London, which in turn implies a regionally specific historical experience. The arrival of a resident landlord in a village was a common experience in the century after 1540. Where this occurred, personal supervision replaced power structures that had relied on monastic, aristocratic or crown stewards. In Earls Colne, this change disturbed a situation in which the village had sometimes taken liberties over its rights or lapsed into self-government. The Harlakendens remained a presence in the village for most of the following century, but the landlord interest in Earls Colne did not develop beyond the limits established then. Earls Colne never had a great nineteenth-century house or park, or model arable farms staffed by day labourers, nor was it incorporated into a great estate. It remained a parish of variegated holdings, with landowners both large and small, because it failed to follow the developmental paths taken by some of the other English villages that have been the subject of exhaustive historical study.