Some future lust killers had an early identifiable traumatic experience. By the time they become adult, the experience has been relabeled with some positive qualities and forms a target of desire. This appears to be something like fetishes and partialisms linked to objects. Harold Shipman witnessed the death of his mother in association with a medical injection of morphine. Later he sought to repeat the experience on his patients. Shipman is included here as an example of necrophilia, even though we don’t know that he had physical sexual contact. Albert Fish was witness to severe corporal punishment as a child and later inflicted this on others. Anatoly Slivko witnessed a police officer killing a dog and getting blood on his shoes. He also witnessed blood from a boy, a Young Pioneer, killed in a traffic accident. Later he killed a series of boys dressed in the uniform of Young Pioneers.

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.