Since such a high proportion of the district's residents worked for wages, the local labour market's structures were significant features of the rural economy, but they also bore major implications for demography and social structure. It was a labour market that had not developed into full proletarianisation: money wages were merely one component of most workers' overall standard of living. Available sources for reconstructing structures of hiring are mostly oblique and partial. For example, the Statute of Labourers (1351) and its subsequent reenactments and enlargements, notably the Statute of Cambridge (1388), attempted to restrain wage-rate increases and regulate terms of employment, but recorded indictments under its terms present only one particular, problematic perspective upon hiring.

The district's labour force comprised both servants and labourers. Servants were largely young, unmarried, and resident in employers' households, and they received a major portion of their remuneration in the form of bed and board. They were highly mobile, often changing employers annually. For many in the district, servanthood was what came after early adolescence and before marriage.

Labourers, on the other hand, largely occupied their own households, though less likely to be married than contemporary agriculturalists. They too were mobile, likely to change residence further through the course of their lives than other occupational groups, and especially moving about on a short-term basis during harvest season. Their pay was much more exclusively in money, but their work patterns were highly seasonal and discontinuous.

The rural population of Essex achieved a remarkable period of equilibrium at low absolute levels for most of the time from the end of the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century. Emphasis here is upon ‘equilibrium’, because population adapted itself to its biological, economic and social-structural environment in such a way that mortality and fertility balanced each other out over an extended period of time. Such is clear from the Essex tithing data. But to move beyond mere aggregates in order to consider the components of demographic equilibrium makes much more serious demands upon available empirical evidence. At present it seems unlikely that there will ever be anything like precise measures of broadly based mortality or fertility levels from medieval English sources, or indeed absolute consensus regarding relationships between the two variables. And yet, as the case of Essex demonstrates, that does not necessarily mean that tentative inferences are wholly impossible.

The relative importance of mortality and fertility in defining the course of later-medieval population raises issues that extend far beyond the period's demography narrowly defined. To decipher this equilibrium makes it necessary to understand the social-structural and economic underpinnings of household formation as a process over time. Ultimately, these questions raise the more basic issue of how far later-medieval England's demographic system differed from or resembled the country's population regime in the post-medieval centuries.

A traditional, and still probably the majority, view of the late-medieval English population would place mortality at centre-stage. In this view, an already unfavourable economic climate resulting from population growth extending into the early 1300s was transformed by the arrival of plague in the country during the Black Death of 1348–9.

This appendix summarises documentary references to the Essex fulling mills known to have been in existence between the later thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries and mapped and discussed in Chapter 3. It makes no pretence at being comprehensive. In particular, because of the sporadic nature of some of the sources involved (such as inquisitions post mortem) and the sporadic survival of references to mills in others (such as manorial court rolls and accounts), one must not presume that the earliest recorded reference to any single mill coincided at all with its construction, nor that one isolated reference, or even two references separated by many years, imply that a given mill was continually in operation throughout the period. The author here gratefully acknowledges references to fulling mills in Britnell, Growth and decline in Colchester, pp. 14, 76, 157, 185, 229, from which several of these references were taken.

Only a minority of rural people in late-medieval Essex spent their entire lives in the same community. In one respect, migration was the means by which people found places in the local economy to fit into. Despite the variegated economic complexion of the Essex countryside, persons who were of a certain age and possessed certain skills could not necessarily always find positions that would yield them a livelihood within their own communities; few rural places in the district would have afforded viable livelihoods to an unlimited number of carpenters or tailors, for example.

In addition to being an economic phenomenon, migration was also a demographic experience that, like marriage, differed among different social groups. And besides occupation, age was an extremely important influence upon geographical mobility. Movement from parish to parish was in part a function of the life cycle, since Essex country people were most likely to migrate in their teens and early twenties and to settle down in their late twenties. This last point is of considerable importance for understanding household formation also, because if a person typically achieved a place in the local economy and so tended to attain stable geographical settlement only towards the end of his third decade in life, this was also the time when the means to marry most likely either had been secured or were expected in the near future.

In any highly differentiated rural society, with many individuals and families partly or heavily dependent upon wages earned through working for others, forms and institutions of hiring are obviously of critical importance to the local economy. In late-medieval Essex agriculturalists, craftsmen and even a few labourers took on non-familial workers to augment their own or their families' capacities. Labour forms and institutions had to be flexible enough to adapt to many different circumstances, arising from agrarian regimes and industrial occupations that varied over time and space, from changes in wage and price levels, and from the many other factors that affected the supply and demand of workers.

But labour forms and institutions in this society did not reside solely in the realm of abstract economic forces. On the contrary, they were at the same time products of, and influences upon, social structure and demographic change. They were the means by which employers evened out the cyclical disparities between their own intrinsic labour reserves – those of their own biological families, if such they had residing with them – and the less readily changeable configurations of land resources or workshops' capacities that they possessed. And from the employees' perspectives, accumulating the practical experience and the material wherewithal to establish themselves in life was likely to be much affected by the ways they were deployed within the matrix of familial and non-familial labour.

In the early-modern English rural economy the most fundamental distinction between labour forms was that between labourers and servants. Put most simply, labourers were generally adults, living within their own households, and hired by others on a short-term basis, often by the day.

The foregoing study of late-medieval Essex has drawn heavily and in a number of different ways upon data from the later-fourteenth-century poll-tax returns. These sources pose large obstacles to anyone attempting to see through them some basic, systematic measures of post-Black Death society, economy and demography. A definitive study of all the issues that these sources pose has yet to be written. Nevertheless, the data are by no means entirely impervious to systematic analysis of broad, aggregate patterns, especially when taken at a county-wide level. But any such analysis must take into account a number of factors concerning the collection of these taxes, and particularly the tendencies of relative underenumeration apparent in their returns.

The three successive Parliamentary grants of poll taxes – in 1377, 1379 and 1380–1 – represented an innovative though short-lived experiment in English fiscal policy, compelled by the need to raise new revenues in the face of renewed threat of war with France. In place of the traditional ‘lay subsidy’, a tax of fixed percentage upon moveable goods, the new tax was to be collected on a per capita basis, greatly widening the net of revenue collection by extending it to persons who would have been too poor to pay the older-style subsidy. The first collection, in 1377, was to be levied at a flat rate of 4d. per head upon all males and females aged 14 and older who were neither clerics nor genuinely impoverished. The two later collections, by contrast, were to be paid on a graduated scale (varying by rank or wealth) by lay people aged 16 (in 1379) or 15 (in 1380–1) years and older, with the poor again exempt.

Rural society in Essex at the end of the middle ages stood near the epicentre of many of the period's most spectacular social and agrarian revolts and uprisings. Moreover, in addition to the better-known, larger-scale episodes the period was also punctuated by many more localised and modest eruptions of discontent with authority. In this respect the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provide the backdrop to a heritage of radicalism in the county stretching forward in time to at least the Civil War, when Essex would be the most Puritan and the most Parliamentarian of constituencies. Civil turbulence was the crossroads where a volatile, stratified social structure and local economy merged with an entrenched anti-authoritarian mental culture.

The most serious of these uprisings – especially the great revolt of 1381, which was sparked off in Essex, but also including Oldcastle's revolt (1413–14) and Cade's rebellion (1450), and even Essex participation in Thomas Fauconberg's attempted coup in London (1471) – derived their immediate impetus from a variety of factors, political, fiscal, seigneurial, social and economic, and religious. In this era, common people only extremely rarely left explicit statements in the written record, relayed by relatively unbiased authors, of their personal motivations and aims. And so historians can deduce motives only very cautiously, and only by reconstructing as much as possible of the circumstances, background and individuals in each episode. Even then, only inferences are possible. And even in the larger-scale uprisings of the middle ages that did bequeath to modern eyes articulated programmes or demands, these programmes may have been rallying-calls which managed to impel to action groups holding rather more diverse underlying grievances than the manifestos may imply on the surface.