During the early 1980s the newly formed Economic and Social Research Council launched an initiative to support research investigating shifts in living standards since the Middle Ages under the aegis of John Hatcher. Various meetings were convened to chart the way ahead and a number of research proposals were supported: they included my own project, North Eastern Labour Markets 1550 to 1750, which was granted £28,420 and was funded for two years from February 1986. The grant was used chiefly to employ a full-time research assistant capable of coping with the intricacies of sixteenth and seventeenth-century hands. The post was filled for twenty months by Diana O'Hara and for the remaining four months by Ann Bennett. I am extremely grateful to both of them for their great diligence and accuracy. The work of collecting the data took three years: most of the work on the Hull council records was completed by Diana, who also did a great deal of work on the York records and some work at Newcastle. Ann worked mainly on the records of Beverley, Durham, and Chester. Work on the Chester records signalled that the project had begun to change shape to cover the whole of the north of England.