This collection of essays has at least two sources of inspiration. The initial impetus was the First London Chaucer Conference, organised by Alcuin Blamires and myself in April 2002, on the topic of ‘Cities, Courts, Provinces’. Seven of the contributors spoke at this conference; of this number, five have revised and developed their papers to address the more particular title chosen for this volume, two have written new essays, and a further five essays were specially commissioned. In a sense, though, the topic of this book had deeper roots in the popular undergraduate course on London in Literature, co-taught in the Department of English, UCL. The experience of lecturing since 1997 on a course that crossed all periods and media from medieval to contemporary London was central to my sense that an approach to Chaucer was needed that spoke to his importance both for our understanding of fourteenth-century London and for our present apprehension of the city. The vivid interest in this course taken by students and the unstoppably original work they have produced have been a constant source of energy and illumination.

My thanks also go to the contributors for their enthusiasm and support, to Derek Brewer and Caroline Palmer for their encouragement to publish, to Kathleen Goodwin for her calm and heroically efficient help at the eleventh hour in preparing the manuscript for publication, to Jennifer Fellows for expert advice, to Brian Cummings for conversation and much else, including taking me to revisit Rome, and to Thomas and Daniel Cummings, both true Londoners, for their help respectively with computer queries and for their company on walks up the Monument and around many corners of this great city.