ABSTRACT

The Essex village of Earls Colne boasts one of the most comprehensive collections of historical documents in Britain, and has been the subject of an intensive and ongoing research project to collate and computerise the surviving records. As such, Earls Colne is undoubtedly one of the most studied parishes in England. Yet whilst much is now known about the village and its inhabitants, little work has been done on the social relationships that bound the community together within its mental and physical landscape. As such, scholars will welcome Dr MacKinnon’s investigation into the social, political and cultural world of early modern England as represented by Earls Colne. The book provides a fresh approach to the study of the landscape of a seventeenth-century village by focussing on the relationships between political power and cultural artefacts. It examines how private, public and communal spaces within society were generated, gendered and governed, and how this was recorded and perpetuated in the records, names, and monuments of the parish and surrounding landscape. Yet whilst the ’elites’ tried to represent a select social landscape through their control of the local records and documents, these attempts were always counterbalanced by the less powerful members of the community who occupied and contested these spaces. By reconstructing the dynamics of Earls Colne through a careful reading and cross-referencing of the surviving documents, buildings and place names, this book offers a fascinating insight into how the sights and sounds of early modern society were imbued with the social relations of parish politics. As well as deepening our understanding of Earls Colne itself, the book offers historians the potential to revisit other local studies from a fresh perspective.

chapter 1|20 pages

Prologue

A Well-trodden Field

part I|65 pages

Ways of Seeing and Remembering God's Landscape

chapter 2|14 pages

In the Footsteps of Antiquarians

Earls Colne

chapter 3|23 pages

Amyce's Plot in 1598

chapter 4|18 pages

God's Landscape

St Andrew's Church and Beyond

chapter 5|8 pages

Death's Posthumous Hand

part II|141 pages

Inhabiting the Lord's Landscape

chapter 6|10 pages

Pews

‘May sit to pray'

chapter 7|14 pages

The ‘concession to erect seats'

chapter 8|10 pages

Populating the Pews

Ship Money

chapter 9|16 pages

Voices from the Pews

Petitions

chapter 10|10 pages

‘My body to the earth'

Burial Nominations

chapter 11|10 pages

What the Dead have to say for Themselves

chapter 12|38 pages

Perpetual Memorials

chapter 14|12 pages

Inclusions and Exclusions

chapter 15|6 pages

Scratched into History

part III|63 pages

Remembering, Forgetting and Claiming the Landscape

chapter 16|18 pages

Re-membering the Priory

chapter 17|14 pages

The Diabolical in Earls Colne

chapter 18|8 pages

From Cross Gate Road to Coggeshall Road

chapter 19|14 pages

The Quaker's Landscape

chapter 20|8 pages

Epilogue

Signatures in the Landscape