This book is a contribution to both national and local history. Coventry is taken as a richly-documented case-study of the more general urban 'desolation' and crisis which marked the end of the medieval period for many substantial towns. This is a community study in which social structure is analysed dynamically and in its cultural contexts. The complexity of a late medieval urban society is thus laid bare for the first time, and the manner in which this social fabric was distorted under merciless demographic pressures is traced in unexpectedly intimate detail. Coventry, then a leading city, lay at the centre of a provincial urban network. Its demographic and economic decline is followed from the fifteenth century to a dramatic period of a short-term crisis between 1518 and 1525. Attention is then focused on the traditional structure of the community.