This chapter focuses on the population in Antioch: daily routines, practices, and cultural outlook. The texts of Libanius and John Chrysostom, among others, offer compelling vignettes of city life in Late Roman Antioch.

The non-agricultural economy of the ancient Greek world included crafts, trade, and services. Evidence for such, heavily biased towards Athens, is found via philosophical writing, comedy, forensic speeches, inscriptions, and archaeological finds. Elite attitudes, in which farming was the idealised citizen occupation, also impact the evidence. Nevertheless, at least 230 different terms for non-agricultural roles and occupations can be found in the sources (with many overlaps). Of these, fifty-three are for women. Workshops were generally small, with up to five or six craftsmen of low status, predominantly resident aliens (metics), freedmen or slaves. At least some rich citizens at Athens owned workshops, with a number of slaves perhaps able to live and work independently. Notable trades such as mining, marble-, bronze-, and metalwork, ceramics, and tanning seem to have clustered in common locations within cities and territories. Women’s non-agricultural economic roles seem to have been related mainly to textiles, retail of simple products, and provision of personal services.

In and after 1819, particularly after Peterloo, support for radical change among disfranchised Londoners broadened.The conspirators themselves were ‘ordinary Britons’.In no senses part of the ‘mob’, they were craftsmen with families who were losing craft status and income in the worsening post-war economy. Many had the common disabilities of the poor, but Wivell’s extraordinary prison portraits show their common humanity. Most were shoemakers, a craft that was famously literate, thoughtful, and radical.

This chapter considers the everyday life of urban groups from whom Chaucer drew some of his Canterbury pilgrims: the Merchant, the craftsmen and the Shipman. These offer examples of rich, modest and poorer folk. The chapter first examines the likely variations in their material worlds: in housing, furnishings, meals, food and drink, and clothing. It also looks at the conditions for travel, urban health and cleanliness, and at childhood, education, and marriage.The second part of the chapter looks at the possible structures of the day for the three occupations. Probably all had servants to ease their lives. Merchants were likely to work at least partly outside the home; craftsmen generally work from home; but shipmen were likely to be absent for long periods. All would have opportunities to take part in public life; the merchants in municipal administration, the craftsmen in their gilds, and all within the parish organisation.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.