The Last Ordinary Generation

It is just before dawn in the London of 1340, the largest city in England — and not one of the tens of thousands waking inside its old Roman walls has ever seen a clock. This is the last ordinary generation before the Black Death, and tonight we walk it slowly, and quietly, until sleep takes you.

A long, unhurried sleep documentary through the everyday world of medieval London in the 1340s: the trades and the worst of the work, the taverns and cookshops, courtship and marriage, crime and rough justice, the hundred parish bells, the river, and the long turn of the year toward winter. It is built from the city’s own surviving records — coroners’ rolls, court cases, household accounts — and read in a low, calm voice, made equally for the curious mind that wants to step inside a vanished city and the tired one that only wants to fall asleep in it.