Tom Johnson is a historian at Oriel College, Oxford. His first book, Law in Common: Legal Cultures in Late Medieval England, was published in 2020.
Half of London was dead, and it was time to spend. Between the plague of 1348 and a second wave in 1361, wages rose steeply, and workers couldn’t wait to enjoy the good things in life. ‘There is scarcely a villein today who is satisfied with his lot,’ a sermon writer complained. Oxherds and ploughmen were eating well. Artisans were going about dressed as gentlemen,...
In 1391, 2.3 million sheets of paper arrived at the port of London: a page for every person in England. Most of it was probably low-quality brown paper used as a packing material to protect foodstuffs and ceramics as they juddered along cartways into the city. A small amount, some 3500 sheets, was the ornamental paper used for decorations at feasts and known as papiri depicti (Chaucer...
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