By Jack the Good Knight Who was the greatest knight who ever lived? According to Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, it was William Marshal (1147-1219). His biography has Langton saying so at the funeral in 1219, and as the most senior churchman in England he wasn’t given to idle flattery. Over eight hundred years later and you'd be hard pressed to find a contender as strong as William Marshal. A Hostage at Five! William was born around 1147, the younger son of a minor

Because medieval London, the London of knights and sieges and plague and enormous political drama, is not gone. It is not buried under glass offices and coffee shops, lost entirely to the Great Fire of 1666 and the Blitz and two thousand years of continuous rebuilding. It is hiding in plain sight. In churches, in ruins, in underground rooms, in a meadow beside the Thames, in two giant wooden statues paraded through the City every November.