In 1502 in the Essex parish of Walthamstow, a labourer named Richard Gamone drew up his last will and testament. As did virtually every other testator of his time and place, Gamone began by commending his soul to God and all the saints, and his body to Walthamstow churchyard. He went on to leave a cow to the churchwardens for them to rent out to parishioners, and he asked them to apply the proceeds to various ‘lights’ in the church: lamps to Our Lady, St Katherine, the Trinity, and others. Hopeful of the lasting nature of his gift, he added, ‘This money to be payde to the seid ligchts yerly whylys the Worlde last’. Gamone could not know that, in one very important way, the world he was speaking of would last barely a generation after his death, when the English Reformation would render unacceptable these conventional Catholic pieties. But it is less easy to speak with confidence about how long the rest of the world Gamone knew as his would last.

English history from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century has often been regarded as a transitional era, a phrase historians commonly employ to indicate that they understand what had gone before and what came after much better than what was going on in between. If a recent survey of British history can claim that ‘the later Middle Ages now appear as an age of turbulence and complexity’, the social, economic and demographic characteristics and evolutions that the era witnessed are particularly difficult to schematise.