ABSTRACT
Each individual left an unequal signature in the early modern memory and Earls Colne landscape. Some of these signatures proved durable, while others were not. Sometimes recorded in their own words, but more often recast in official records, maps, place-names and material-culture evidence in the landscape, we glimpse and illuminate only certain aspects of their complex lives. The Harlakendens and their descendants, like the Cressener family, are immortalised in the early modern funeral monuments they erected in the parish church. The Priory Manor house of the Harlakendens has been demolished, but Chandlers, home to the Cressener family, still stands in Holt Street, although now sharing a subdivided block with a new signature in the form of a late twentieth-century dwelling. Cressener’s Charity, however, persisted in the village into the twenty-first century. 1 Although the dwellings of the Josselin and Death families have not survived, the physical evidence of these families on the landscape is still apparent. Yet neither Josselin nor Death were commemorated in any early modern funeral epitaph.
