Following the tumult of the closing decades of the fourteenth century, the governing elite of London, as well as the caste of professional and semi-professional clerks who supported them, sought to reassert their authority and control over the mechanisms of government within their city. Efforts to preserve certain civic rituals, such as the punishment of wrongdoers in the court of the common council and regal entry ceremonies, in civic documents, such as the Liber Albus and the city's Letter-Books, helped ensure that the governors of London managed the dissemination of its central messages. Such messages, however, were not to be constrained by the walls of the archive of the London Guildhall, nor the pages of the volumes within. The men who governed, and those who supported them, understood the value of inscribing their deeds on far broader canvases, in more enduring media. The rituals, themselves lost to us, imagined the city as a parchment upon which the values of these governors might be written. Urban renewal could be an opportunity for circulating important concepts of governance. But one message that has received minimal attention is that which resonated within the worshipful spaces of London: the city's churches.

One of the most prominent monuments in old St Paul's Cathedral recognised Bishop William the Norman (d.1075), bishop of London and chaplain to Edward the Confessor. Although Bishop William died in the eleventh century, a memorial was commissioned much later. From the information provided by Sir William Dugdale in The History of St Paul's Cathedral in London (1658), however, it is not possible to satisfactorily date the monument. Dugdale recorded two epitaphs. One was written in 1622 by the Lord Mayor of London, Edward Barkham. The other we cannot date; however, it is pre-Reformation. Henry Holland in the second, expanded, edition of his Ecclesia Sancti Pauli Illustrata (1633) tells us that the monument was in brass and that it lay in the central aisle of the nave. It appears to have been one of the monuments furthest west in the nave, and may have been the first monument to be encountered by those entering through the great western door. Situated between the chapel of St Gregory and the Court of Convocation, the monument occupied a highly visible and well-trafficked location within the cathedral.