Chapter Five of Sources and Debates in English History: 1485-1714 is rather properly named with “Masterless Men and the Monstrous Regiment of Women.” The late sixteenth and early seventeenth-centuries were plagued by all sorts of tensions and social unrest. Document 5.1 titled “Anonymous threatening note (1598)” demonstrates the anger felt by the English public about their justice system. The Early Modern English commoner’s sense of justice includes vigilante justice, as depicted in document 5.3, titled “Wiltshire Quarter Sessions, deposition of Thomas Mills, cutler, and his wife Agnes (Spring 1618)”. This document elaborates the parade-like method of vigilante justice, which intended to shame Thomas Mills, and beat his wife, into submission. Whether this was to restore order, or if there were other issues that their neighbors and other villagers were angry about, we cannot definitively prove. We can use this information to explain the dramatic lengths that villagers were incited to, in order to reestablish in their village. No only did they gather, which may have prevented them from performing their work, but based on the large-size of the gathered mob (if the document is not extremely exaggerated) men and women from other villages would have gathered to bring justice to this particular village. It must have taken a large amount of planning, just to get the word out to the other villages. So, this then begs the question that I asked in class: Did the victims of the mob realize that it was coming for them? If so, why did they not leave? Dr. Rabin argued that this family had no other place to live, and that leaving their village would have been traumatic, but if they knew their lives were in danger, would it not have been worth the difficulty of relocating? On the other hand, if the mob had indeed gathered people from other villages, it may have been impossible for them to find another village in which to live. Faced with those odds, I don’t know if I would have attempted escape either.