In 1432, poet John Lydgate was commissioned to commemorate the triumphal entry of Henry VI to London. Setting the scene, Lydgate wrote of ‘this Citee with laude, pris, and glorie/For joye moustred lyke the sonne beem’.1 He described the participants in this civic muster in terms of their clothing: the mayor in red velvet, the sheriffs and aldermen in scarlet furred cloaks and ‘the citizenis echoon [each one] of the Citee’ wearing a white livery and ranked in their crafts.2 Lydgate paused also ‘forto remembre of other alyens’,3 naming the great merchants of Genoa, Florence, Venice and the ‘Esterlings’ (of the Hanseatic League) who joined the procession to meet the king outside the city at Blackheath. This was an orderly image of the city, represented by its body politic and its wealthy international traders. This was the London that dominated not only ceremonial occasions like the one Lydgate commemorated but also the records of the civic government. It was the city as represented by, in the language of the time, ‘the more sufficient’, ‘the more wise and discrete’ or the trustworthy men (probi homines). Because of its prominence in the civic records, it is also the version of the city that looms largest in histories of late medieval London. This book looks past the ranked citizens and officers in white and red to the crowds who thronged the route in 1432 and yet whom Lydgate’s poem, much like the civic records, pays little regard.In order to look past the urban body politic, this history of late medieval London puts at its heart places on the city’s fringe which are similarly absent from its contemporary and modern representations.