Between the Black Death of 1348–9 and the end of the sixteenth century, residents of English communities experienced profound changes in local demographic, economic, and social structures and in the broader legal, political, ideological, and religious world around them. Because many of the disruptions and the new patterns that emerged from them threatened familiar social relationships and traditional economic interactions, they were likely to create problems with misbehavior – either increasing the amount of actual wrongdoing or at least raising concern among respectable people about whatever misconduct did occur. While in many cases wrongdoing must have been handled in informal and hence undocumented ways, village and town leaders sometimes decided to report offenders to local or intermediate-level courts, where they could be publicly named and punished. The surviving records of those courts permit historical study of social regulation, revealing the changing patterns of concern with misconduct in later medieval and early modern England. As was seen in the Introduction, the decades around 1300 witnessed active attention to certain kinds of wrongdoing in both church and manorial courts. Anxiety had dropped by around 1330 and remained low during the central and later decades of the fourteenth century. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the number of reports of misbehavior submitted to legal bodies rose once more, reaching a peak in the decades around 1600. Throughout this extended period, social regulation changed gradually over time because it was organically related to the particular circumstances of individual communities as well as to broader developments.