Both labourers and servants played important roles in the rural workforce of later-medieval Essex. But in comparison with servants, unfortunately, local sources during the period are much more reticent about the qualitative or experiential details of labourers' lives. Litigation in local courts concerning simple daily hiring was rare, doubtless less worthwhile pursuing because of the smaller sums involved than was the case with servants' annual stipends. Debt and contract suits in which short-term employees did appear as plaintiffs in these courts dealt most often with situations where employers hired workers along with their equipment or animals, or where employer and employee were entangled in other financial transactions as well. At Hatfield Broadoak in 1413, for example, William Lancastre sued Johanna atte Watere for 2s. 4d. for two days' ploughing he had done for her (using his implement) plus 4d. for pasturing her animals on his land. The evidential filter of the legal tribunal necessarily emphasises these more complex cases at the expense of ordinary day-labourers' hire.

Nevertheless, previous chapters have outlined a quantitative profile of the district's labourers. Comprising about one-half of local ‘households’, labourers were more mobile, settled later in life, and were less likely to be married than their contemporaries. They were a great deal more likely to dwell in households of their own, in contrast to servants, but this was not universal: John Fuller, a ‘common labourer’, deposed in 1474 that he had lived in Coggeshall with William Oldale and William's father for the past six years, but before that he was in Combs Ford (Suffolk) and ‘lived by himself’ [tenuit familiam per se].