According to its advocates, legal titling promises to improve investment (both public and private) and prospects for political order. A persistent puzzle is why its actual impact is often ambiguous or even harmful. Our theory suggests the answer lies in the qualities relating to government: when the state enjoys a monopoly on coercion and administrative capacity, when political decision makers face constraints, and when there are inclusive institutions linking communities to the state, legal titling can improve economic and political well-being. Since these political preconditions for successful legal titling are likely to be absent in conflict-affected states, it is unlikely that legal titling will be effective in such states. The evidence from Afghanistan supports our theory. The legal-titling projects in the country have not worked well, for the reasons just listed. Yet community-based recording of landownership – donor-assisted, community-initiated programs that partner with communities, not the state, to document who owns what land, buildings, and commons – have improved household land-tenure security. These community-based programs illustrate how working with customary governance institutions improves the impact of development assistance.

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.