In the opening passage of The Door in the Wall, ten-year-old Robin de Bureford pulls the coverlet on his bed tightly about his ears in a futile attempt to block out the clamoring bells of London's churches. In the year 1348, London is a relatively small city by modern standards, but it is a bustling, noisy city with more than one hundred churches packed within its medieval walls. England is experiencing its first taste of the Black Death, the deadly form of bubonic plague that arrived from continental Europe in August 1348. Mercifully, Angeli does not detail the physical effects of bubonic plague, which killed onethird of England's population. But its formidable presence contributes to the setting for her narrative, which provides glimpses of the many and varied aspects of life in fourteenth-century England.