A detailed account of how communities developed, grew and declined during a period of intense religious and economic change. The book looks at three contrasting communities in eastern England from 1525 to 1700, dismissing the notion that, prior to the educational reforms of the 19th century, ordinary people did not think or debate. Margaret Spufford looks at the greatest single piece of evidence that the mass of common folk in the countryside did not live by bread alone - the fact that the parish church and sometimes the dissenting chapel are, with the manor house, the monuments that dominate the village layout. Far from being mere counters in a game of economic statistics, the people of the Cambridgeshire parishes who form the subject of the study emerge as three-dimensional human beings.