Within any given community, a variety of factors must have affected both the extent and nature of misbehavior and the decisions made by middling-level families about how to respond to it. These influences included legal and political considerations, geographic, demographic, and economic features, and the ideological and religious context within which wrongdoing was defined and addressed. While these factors will be separated for purposes of analysis in the following chapters, we must remember that they were closely interwoven in practice. The artificial nature of the division is perhaps most visible with respect to ideological and religious issues, which played an essential role though they will be considered last. Nor does the exclusion of other considerations from this discussion indicate that they have been dismissed as unimportant. It is likely, for example, that cultural and educational factors affected social regulation, especially during the later sixteenth century when contrasts between local officeholders and the poor widened in many communities. Such issues are not discussed in detail here because the kinds of sources used for this project provided little information about them. Only with respect to the tension seen in responses to poverty and divergent reactions to bowling did we encounter suggestions of cultural differentiation.

Because the influences that affected social regulation operated in different ways, diverse approaches will be used in assessing their probable impact. The legal and political changes that shaped how control was implemented, as discussed in Chapter 1, and the ideological and religious stances to be considered in Chapter 8 presumably had consequences for the country as a whole and therefore are considered in general terms.