Prologue: a well-trodden field -- Ways of seeing and remembering God's landscape -- In the footsteps of antiquarians: Earls Colne -- Amyce's plot in 1598 -- God's landscape: St. Andrew's Church and beyond -- Death's posthumous hand -- Inhabiting the lord's landscape -- Pews: "may sit to pray" -- The "concession to erect seats" -- Populating the pews: ship money -- Voices from the pews: petitions -- "My body to the earth": burial nominations -- What the dead have to say for themselves -- Perpetual memorials -- What the burial registers have to say about the dead -- Inclusions and exclusions -- Scratched into history -- Remembering, forgetting and claiming the landscape -- Re-membering the priory -- The diabolical in Earls Colne -- From Cross Gate Road to Coggeshall Road -- Quaker's landscape -- Epilogue: signatures in the landscape
Summary
The Essex village of Earls Colne, one of the most studied parishes in England, has been the subject of an ongoing research project to collate its collection of historical documents. This book offers a fresh approach to the village's early modern cultural and political world by focussing on the social relationships that bound the community together within its mental and physical landscape. MacKinnon reconstructs the dynamics of Earls Colne by examining how spaces within society were generated, gendered and governed, and how this was documented in the records, names and monuments of the parish
