There are many ways to approach the study of an historical rural society. One of the most revealing is to begin by inspecting cross-sections of its economic composition, for doing so can lead to many insights into the nature of that society that are not necessarily obvious at the outset. In this respect the two most revealing indices that late-medieval Essex sources can provide are landholding profiles and occupational structures.

The rural economy of northern and central Essex in the later middle ages was a mixture of farming, crafts or industry, and trading, and the basic unit of production in this economy was the household, with family labour inputs supplemented, at times heavily, with hired workers. And yet households differed widely in their endowments of land or other capital, and at least half of all the families in the district during the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries derived much or most of their income from wages earned from others. Landholding and occupation were therefore intricately intertwined. Later sections of this study will observe that many demographic and other aspects of life in late-medieval Essex differed considerably between different occupational groups, so a first step towards understanding the significance of these experiences is to be quite precise about how the groups were configured.

Within any traditional agrarian society the landholding profile – the distribution of landholdings of different sizes among its population – bears much influence upon the nature of social relationships and economic development.