Boring History For Sleep By The Snoritorian
Oct 24, 2026 · 2 hr 17 min · 15 segments
Why Medieval Paris Was A Ranked Lobby For Killers | Boring History for Sleep We are live on Spotify Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/0mfM0Csl7Ste2OUsWTD07j YouTube: / @Snoritorian…
To understand why Paris worked the way it did, we first need to understand what kind of place it was, because Paris in the 14th and 15th centuries was not some sleepy medieval town.
In 1328, royal officials drew up a document known as the Etat des Paroisses et des Feux, a survey of parishes and households for tax purposes.
It listed around 61,000 hearths in Paris and the neighbouring suburb of Saint-Marcel.
Historians argue about how many people lived around each hearth, but most estimates land somewhere around 200,000 people, possibly more.
To put that in perspective, London at the same time probably had somewhere between 60 and 80,000.
Paris was enormous.
It was the London, New York and Tokyo of its day rolled into one, at least as far as Western Europe was concerned.
Then came the disasters.
The Black Death arrived in 1348 and killed perhaps a third or more of the population.
The Hundred Years' War with England dragged on for generations, bringing taxes, sieges, refugees and plunder.
Plague came back again and again.
By the early 15th century, Paris had shrunk dramatically.
perhaps to around 100,000 people by the time of our murder in 1407, and lower still by the 1420s.
But even shrunk, it was still huge by the standards of the age, and it was still the political, religious and intellectual heart of the French kingdom.
Think of the city as a map with three main zones, because that is literally how medieval Parisians thought of it.
This was the old core of Paris.
On one end stood Notre-Dame Cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of Paris.
On the other end stood the old Royal Palace, which by this period was mostly occupied by the Parliament of Paris, the Kingdom's Supreme Court, along with the Saint-Chapelle and a huge complex of government offices.
If Paris was a game server, the island was where the admins sat.
On the left bank of the Seine, to the south, was the Université, the University District.
This was where tens of thousands of students and teachers lived.
studied, drank, argued and occasionally fought, in colleges, lodging houses and taverns crammed onto the slopes of the Montagne Saint Geneviève.
It was the Latin Quarter, named because Latin was the language of the schools.
To understand why Paris worked the way it did, we first need to understand what kind of place it was, because Paris in the 14th and 15th centuries was not some sleepy medieval town.
In 1328, royal officials drew up a document known as the Etat des Paroisses et des Feux, a survey of parishes and households for tax purposes.
It listed around 61,000 hearths in Paris and the neighbouring suburb of Saint-Marcel.
Historians argue about how many people lived around each hearth, but most estimates land somewhere around 200,000 people, possibly more.
To put that in perspective, London at the same time probably had somewhere between 60 and 80,000.
Paris was enormous.
It was the London, New York and Tokyo of its day rolled into one, at least as far as Western Europe was concerned.
Then came the disasters.
The Black Death arrived in 1348 and killed perhaps a third or more of the population.
The Hundred Years' War with England dragged on for generations, bringing taxes, sieges, refugees and plunder.
Plague came back again and again.
By the early 15th century, Paris had shrunk dramatically.
perhaps to around 100,000 people by the time of our murder in 1407, and lower still by the 1420s.
But even shrunk, it was still huge by the standards of the age, and it was still the political, religious and intellectual heart of the French kingdom.
Think of the city as a map with three main zones, because that is literally how medieval Parisians thought of it.
This was the old core of Paris.
On one end stood Notre-Dame Cathedral, the seat of the Bishop of Paris.
On the other end stood the old Royal Palace, which by this period was mostly occupied by the Parliament of Paris, the Kingdom's Supreme Court, along with the Saint-Chapelle and a huge complex of government offices.
If Paris was a game server, the island was where the admins sat.
On the left bank of the Seine, to the south, was the Université, the University District.
This was where tens of thousands of students and teachers lived.
studied, drank, argued and occasionally fought, in colleges, lodging houses and taverns crammed onto the slopes of the Montagne Saint Geneviève.
It was the Latin Quarter, named because Latin was the language of the schools.
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