London became a divided city, home to both pleasure seekers & Puritans. The growing city experienced death & disaster: from the execution of King Charles I in 1649, to plague in 1665 & the Great Fire of 1666.

Your doctor might have prescribed you a stone from a sheep's stomach. Bezoars form in the stomachs of some animals, and were believed to have magical powers to cure melancholy and poison.

What we mean when we say someone is on tenter-hooks? It means they're being held in suspense. Cloth was stretched on to drying frames with a tenter-hook, and maps of 17th century London show tenterfields just north of the city wall.

Wigs - for men and women - were a new fashion in the 1660s. The diarist Samuel Pepys was worried about wearing a wig ‘for nobody will dare to buy any haire for fear of infection – that it had been cut off of the heads of people dead of the plague.’