24 Aug 2026
By the mid-fourteenth century, London was the largest city in England, home to perhaps 40,000 people packed within a stone wall the Romans had raised over a thousand years earlier. Time was told by church bells, since almost no one owned a clock, and each night a curfew ordered every hearth fire covered against the ever-present danger of fire in a city built of timber and straw. Streets ran narrow, made narrower by jettying, where upper storeys projected outward until they nearly touched overhead. Most craftsmen lived above their workshops and sold through a ground-floor window, so home, workshop, and shop were one building. Trade was governed by guilds that set standards, settled disputes, and helped run the city. Water was hauled from fountains or bought from carriers, and because it was rarely safe to drink, weak ale was the common drink at every meal, even for children.

England was still shaped by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which left the ruling class speaking French while common people spoke English and records were kept in Latin. Kings held land across the sea in France, and the rivalry this bred erupted in 1337 into the Hundred Years’ War, funded by heavy taxes of the kind that had earlier forced Magna Carta upon the crown in 1215. The fighting paused in 1348 when the bubonic plague arrived aboard trading ships and spread across the continent, reducing Europe’s population by between a third and a half. So few labourers remained that survivors could demand higher wages, alarming landowners enough that the king tried to force pay back down. Sanitation stayed crude, with no sewers and waste carted off by hired rakers, while London governed much of its own affairs under royal charters that protected the ancient rights of its citizens.

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