In the years covered by this book, the English population grew from 2.5 million to 5.1 million. Of those people, about one in twenty lived in towns in the middle of sixteenth century; by 1750 the proportion had increased to about one in nine.¹ Although London was undeniably a great eighteenth-century European city, and a dozen or more English towns were significant urban centres in the European perspective, England remained predominantly rural. The majority of its people lived in the countryside, whether in villages or small towns: they lived and breathed the annual cycle of the seasons. Even those who...

Earls Colne lies in north Essex, some sixty miles from London and very much within the market area of the metropolis.¹ The village had a population of perhaps 430 in the early sixteenth century. In common with other English villages, it underwent a rapid expansion in numbers in the late sixteenth century, on one calculation from near 600 in 1560 to over 1,000 by 1610, after which there may have been degree of decline to about 900 in the 1670s.² It had no market,³ but there was a developed retailing and victualling sector by the mid-sixteenth century. The court rolls...

The decisive feature of Earls Colne during the century after 1592 was that it was in the hands of a resident gentry family, the Harlakendens, whose financial and property interests did not extend far beyond its boundaries (see Figure 3.1).¹ As gentry with puritan inclinations, and as JPs, they were members of an elite group of Essex gentry to which they were also connected to marriage. The Harlakendens’ interest in, and integration into, the village meant that after their acquisition of the manors, the relationship between lord and tenants changed. For the earls of Oxford, particularly Edward de Vere, seventeenth...

The consolidated estate that Roger Harlakenden acquired from the Earl of Oxford, his lessees and their various assignees was surveyed and mapped by Israel Amyce in 1598. Although this is a stupendously detailed piece of work, it is possible to demonstrate both minor omissions and a few instances where land was categorised under the wrong tenurial heading. Small discrepancies of this sort apart, the survey reveals that the two manors had a combined area of nearly 3,000 acres. As all previous studies of Earls Colne have focussed on the copyholds of the two manors, it may come as a surprise...

Earlier we suggested that the appearance for the first time of resident gentry in villages which 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. As we shall see, incoming...

For all the richness of English property records, describing the changing possession of land and the operation of early modern land markets is far from easy.¹ The lack of any central registration of land titles or cadastres describing the ownership and occupation of land for taxation purposes deprives historians of systematic records. For these and other reasons historians have come to rely on copyhold land transactions. Here, the manorial court acts as a registry of conveyances, and provides a means of entry into the land market, the acquisition and sale of land by individuals and families and its devolution between...

Whilst impersonal economic forces shaped the land market, it was also the sum of hundreds if not thousands of individual decisions by property owners as to how best to use their land, whether to acquire more or sell what they already had, whether to bequeath all to a single heir or distribute land amongst several children or kin. The logic underpinning these individual decisions is largely lost to us, but by looking at the behaviour of individual copyholders, we can hope to establish something of the rationale underpinning the choices made by these people. We may circle round this larger...

Subtenancy probably causes agrarian historians more anxiety than any other subject. We know that it went on, that the people who tilled the soil were often not those who were named in rentals or surveys as holding the land, whether by copyhold or lease. Its possibility for derailing our work is enormous. As Dr Harrison showed some years ago, the actual possession of land could differ considerably from its ownership or tenancy seen through rentals and surveys.¹ The rent charged subtenants could be marked up considerably from that paid by a head tenant. The duration of ownership could be quite...

Earls Colne was situated within one of the most commercially developed areas of late medieval England. The fabric of the village still reflects its late fifteenth-century prosperity. It was on the fringes of London, which in turn implies a regionally specific historical experience.¹ If anything was decisive in Earls Colne’s history, it was the establishment of a priory in the village in the early twelfth century. In the sixteenth century this was converted into (or became the site of) a sizeable house (twenty-one hearths in the Hearth Tax) possessed of large demesnes.² It was therefore an attractive catch for an...