ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a survey of Southwark in John Gower's day, and will then investigate when Gower might have moved to Southwark, and where his house there might have been. Founded, like London itself, by the Romans, the settlement at Southwark grew up around the southern end of London Bridge, where its topographical development was shaped by the marshy character of the terrain. Southwark was not a unified municipality with a central government, but rather a patchwork of five separate manors. A great deal about Southwark's adolescent and adult population can be learned from its one surviving poll tax return: a reassessment made early in 1381. The poll tax reassessment of 1381 is also the richest single source of information on occupations and relative wealth in late fourteenth-century Southwark. Medieval Southwark, like other medieval towns, would have had a very vivid sensory environment that veered from the splendid to the squalid.
