Some time in the early seventeenth century, the leading parishioners of Birling, in Kent, approached their justices with a complaint. Jane Jacquett, a young woman born nearby, had given birth to an illegitimate child in their parish. That she had done so, and made them responsible for its upkeep, was – they argued – the product of a series of unfortunate circumstances, and of the malice of the neighbouring parishioners of Ryarsh, particularly its women.

The petition traced Jane Jacquett's history from service to orphan-hood and illegitimate motherhood. Jane, once a covenant servant in Ryarsh, was subsequently employed by the parish to nurse her family with the plague; when all of the family died, and the parish (uncharitably, as the Birling petitioners said) gave her no employment, she had ended up a vagrant and turned to ‘a verie loose life’, becoming pregnant. When she went into labour she took refuge in a barn in Ryarsh. According to the petitioners of Birling