While describing Sheffield, this surveyor of the poor could have been rehearsing the inhabitants of any early modern English community: ratepayers, pensioners, and those in the middle who neither paid the rate nor received it. The neither-rich-nor-destitute survived through a precarious balance of resources and resided on the knife's edge of self-sufficiency. Economic depression, harvest failure, or even ‘the storme of one fortnights sickness’ could hurl such households into the hands of the overseers and on to the charity of their neighbours. Such an existence left precious little extra to be saved for old age. The poor, wrote Thomas More in Utopia, were ‘ground down by unrewarding toil in the present … [and] worried to death by the prospect of a poverty-stricken old age – since their daily wages aren't enough to support them for one day, let alone leave anything over to be saved up when they're old’.

The delicate position of the marginally poor resulted from a variety of causes, but two stand out as the primary culprits of economic insecurity. The first was the growing reliance upon waged labour that occurred throughout England during these years. As certain householders were driven to depend more heavily on earned income instead of more traditional forms of selfemployment, they opened themselves up to the tumultuous upheavals and sudden pitfalls of a fledging cash economy.