Rural society in Essex at the end of the middle ages stood near the epicentre of many of the period's most spectacular social and agrarian revolts and uprisings. Moreover, in addition to the better-known, larger-scale episodes the period was also punctuated by many more localised and modest eruptions of discontent with authority. In this respect the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provide the backdrop to a heritage of radicalism in the county stretching forward in time to at least the Civil War, when Essex would be the most Puritan and the most Parliamentarian of constituencies. Civil turbulence was the crossroads where a volatile, stratified social structure and local economy merged with an entrenched anti-authoritarian mental culture.

The most serious of these uprisings – especially the great revolt of 1381, which was sparked off in Essex, but also including Oldcastle's revolt (1413–14) and Cade's rebellion (1450), and even Essex participation in Thomas Fauconberg's attempted coup in London (1471) – derived their immediate impetus from a variety of factors, political, fiscal, seigneurial, social and economic, and religious. In this era, common people only extremely rarely left explicit statements in the written record, relayed by relatively unbiased authors, of their personal motivations and aims. And so historians can deduce motives only very cautiously, and only by reconstructing as much as possible of the circumstances, background and individuals in each episode. Even then, only inferences are possible. And even in the larger-scale uprisings of the middle ages that did bequeath to modern eyes articulated programmes or demands, these programmes may have been rallying-calls which managed to impel to action groups holding rather more diverse underlying grievances than the manifestos may imply on the surface.