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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.

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 discusses village conflicts and control in Terling. In the fluid society of 16th- and 17th-century Terling, neighbourliness was a crucial social bond. However, the village was riddled with petty conflicts. Not all neighbours were ‘good’. Some, indeed, were downright disorderly. The villagers of Terling can be said to have made use of the local institutions of church and state in two essentially different ways. On the one hand they used them defensively, seeking to preserve their property, the public peace, and conventional norms of sexual behaviour. On the other hand, the courts could be used offensively to promote new standards, new conceptions of order.

In 1630, Terling was witnessing a period of consolidation in a process of cultural change that had begun in the last years of the 16th century, gathered momentum in the 1610s and 1620s, and was to enter a new phase in the 1630s and 1640s. Evidence has been shown for shifts in social attitudes reflected in presentments to the courts. This chapter takes up other elements of change in popular education and in religious affairs, which together promoted a significant expansion of the cultural horizons of the villagers — or some of them.

Social change in Terling was the outcome of two convergences. One was chronological: the peaking within the early decades of the 17th century of forces of demographic, economic, cultural, and administrative change. The other was sociological: the peculiar involvement as the beneficiaries of these changes of the upper and middling ranks of village society, of the yeomanry, the more substantial husbandmen and craftsmen of Terling, the ‘principal inhabitants’ or ‘better sort’ as they sometimes described themselves. This chapter examines these processes in more detail.

This book was first completed in October 1977. This postscript provides a reappraisal of some of the arguments advanced since then in the light of the discussion that they have subsequently provoked. This is worth doing because whatever its limitations and deficiencies, the Terling study has influenced the discussion of English society in the later 16th and 17th centuries. Two sets of arguments in particular have been repeatedly singled out. The first relates to a specific social-structural question: the role of kinship in the structuring of social relationships in the village. The second encompasses a larger range of issues arising from what is sometimes referred to as the ‘Terling thesis’: the interpretation of the interaction of demographic, economic, social, and cultural change that runs throughout the study, and above all that part of the argument relating to the impact of religious change on social relations.