A detailed history of the economic, educational, and religious life of Chippenham, Orwell and Willingham.

Attention has increasingly turned in recent years from the economic and agricultural framework of the life of the English villager in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to his or her social and mental world. Margaret Spufford's interest in literacy, and particularly in the ability to read, which laid the villager open to all sorts of external influences other than those coming from the pulpit and the manor house, has led her in this book to examine both the spread of reading ability, and one of the principal forms of cheap print available in the late seventeenth century at a price within...

There has been dispute among social historians about whether only the more prosperous in village society were involved in religious practice. By examining the taxation records of sufficiently large groups of dissenters and church wardens, this book presents a factual solution. It also uses economic sources, and information on communications and population mobility, in essays that are not normally grouped with ecclesiastical material. This is a book that breaks new ground, offering fresh material for ecclesiastical, cultural, demographic and economic historians of the early modern period.

Margaret Spufford has written as detailed an account of the lives and activities of the chapmen as there is likely to be, given the widely-spread and fragmented evidence. She shows where and when they were active, and in particular their rise in the seventeenth century, their ranks and their typical careers, the variety of the cloths and other wares they carried, and the attitude of authority towards them.