Like the vast majority of people of his day, Richard Sheale of Tamworth left virtually no trace in official records. This is scarcely surprising. The poorer members of society have always hovered on the edge of anonymity, their activities rarely recorded unless they were the subject of unusual legal intervention. In early modern England, however, the growing problem of vagrancy and increased religious tension led to a massive increase in policing and a system of licences and regular checks. As a result the rolls of the county Quarter Sessions frequently preserve detailed accounts of local misconduct. So, for example, when several parishioners at Abdon, Shropshire borrowed a communion cloth to use as a banner for their Morris dance in 1619, they were the subject of an extensive cross-examination whose records have been carefully preserved. But these accounts are rarely early enough to help us track Sheale or his immediate contemporaries. As a rule, the surviving Quarter Session rolls do not go back before the last few decades of the sixteenth century and many were not preserved at all. The rolls from Staffordshire date from 1581, those from Shropshire date from 1638 and those from Warwickshire have disappeared altogether. Sheale comes just a little too soon. The situation is much the same with regard to parish registers. Although all parishes were required to keep records of weddings, christenings and burials by a royal injunction of 1538, many only began to do so after a second edict was issued in 1559, and others lagged further behind.