How did the ’peasantry’ of early modern England react to the Reformation and to subsequent changes in their churches? Were they involved in founding dissenting churches? Could they even read? And if so, what was available for them? This volume brings together a key set of papers on such subjects by one of the foremost recent English social historians. Margaret Spufford has been a pioneer, in the particular social ’landscape’ of early modern England, of the techniques of ’total history’, and her work has helped shift the historical understanding of seventeenth-century commoners away from merely economic models and toward a perspective in which religious, cultural, educational and geographical factors are also seen as integral parts of the environment of the past.