Studies of the medieval village land market have revealed a kaleidoscopic pattern of change in the methods of land transference, as first one and then another of the means, encapsulated in the nineteenth-century adage concerning rustic advancement, ‘patrimony, matrimony and parsimony’, came to the fore, in changing economic and social circumstances, as the principal modes of property transference. Gradually the chronology and form of these changes are being charted, and although the indicators are fewer and more widely dispersed for the later middle ages than for the century and a half before the catastrophic collapse of population in the 1380s, the broad outlines of change seem to be slowly emerging. Irresistibly, the increasing importance of the cash nexus seems to be revealed as the dominant theme pervading the rustic land market during the years 1380–1520. Yet, whilst the changing pattern of land transfer – the shift from a non-monetary system, dominated by marital–inheritance transactions, to a commercial one – is slowly revealed, less attention has been paid to the mechanisms utilized by the peasant in his market operations. We know little of how the unendowed son or landless man courted the young heiress or ageing widow and how he overcame the stigma associated with his position, in order to make the contacts necessary to establish himself on the path to that tryst which would be consummated over the scrivener's table.