Thanks, a great link. I have many Essex ancestors but many of them were of Suffolk descent, there seems to be a huge amount of Suffolk people move to Essex, a neighbouring county and nearer to London and the Thames. It is like there was a lot of Italian migration into France and Switzerland in the 1800s, and that is similar to the wave of Suffolk people moving into Essex, particularly south East Essex where many of my ancestors came from, but one of the furthest areas of Essex away from Suffolk.
The link may be handy for other ancestral counties of mine such as Durham and Oxfordshire.
I have an ancestor who lived in Romford in 1728, and he was a brickmaker, and his surname is a Leicestershire/Rutland/Derbyshire surname. Not been able to trace back any further than Joseph Stillington/Stinnington but on the case. He may have been from Middlesex or Essex of Midlands descent. Not found any poor law records for him yet.
I think there were times there were agricultural depressions due to several years of bad harvests due to bad weather or disease or pest outbreaks, so you probably had people moving towards towns and cities from the country at that point, or just simply travelling around rather in desperation to find work anywhere they could. You also had some farm mechanisation come in in the late 18th century I think, which continued into the 19th century, meaning there was a lot less work available for agricultural workers. The land enclosures also took away land that was used for grazing for poorer farmers and graziers. All that eventually led to the Swing Riots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swing_Riots It is very interesting to read through the examinations as you get a very good impression of rural life. It seems that the practice of having a contracted service to a farmer was probably more on the rare side, and most work rural people got was by daily or weekly wages. If they did work for a farmer for a year by pre agreed contract, that would give them settlement, but only if there was a contract, i.e. if the farmer just kept paying daily or weekly wages at various times for over a years period, I don't think that person would gain settlement in the parish.
I did eventually find the parish chest records for some Essex parishes on SEAX, but finding them is nowhere near as simple as the familysearch method, you have to search for the parish name and keywords for something that might be in parish chest records such as removal, settlement, vestry etc. Vestry may be better as it avoids finding quarter sessions or other parish records if you use removal. Here's a few I found, you can see that the survival of various parts of the parish chest, like overseers accounts, poor rates, church rates, bastardy records, apprenticeship, settlement examinations and removals vary greatly with some with just a few years or examples of each type of record, none of these are on Familysearch so you would have to go to Essex Record Office to view:
Epping
https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/ViewCatalogue.aspx?ID=15046Hornchurch
https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/ViewCatalogue.aspx?ID=39911Kelvedon
https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/ViewCatalogue.aspx?ID=26940North Ockendon
https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/ViewCatalogue.aspx?ID=15479Romford
https://www.essexarchivesonline.co.uk/ViewCatalogue.aspx?ID=49416