The district was the centre of a deeply rooted strain of anti-authoritarianism during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which manifested itself both in rural revolts and uprisings and in a persistent subculture of religious nonconformity. In both these respects, once again, late-medieval Essex foreshadowed the county's predispositions towards dissent from that time on to the Civil War. Civil unrest and religious unorthodoxy were inextricably linked with each other, and with the social structure in which they flourished.

The great revolt of 1381, which convulsed much of southeastern England, began in Essex, and the district's countryfolk participated in other large-scale revolts in 1413–14, 1450 and 1471. But quite apart from these relatively well-known events there were many more, smaller-scale episodes against local and national authority. It would be misguided to claim one distinct pattern of motivation, target, or participants for all uprisings in the district during this period: political, economic, religious and seigneurial factors, and pre-existing personal or local enmities, contributed to revolts in different permutations. Each rising was multi-layered, with different patterns of motive, clientele and target at local, regional and extra-regional levels.

Nevertheless, two patterns of continuity formed a constant refrain through the unrest of the period. Large-scale revolts grew to significant proportions when they were able to co-opt participants with diverse immediate aims and allow them to coalesce under a unifying rubric. And each uprising drew upon a local culture of anti-authoritarianism, for which religious nonconformity was a contributory ingredient.