Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand.

Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time.

From startups to scaleups, online, in, and on the go. Shopify is made for

entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.

It's a Tuesday morning in 1543 and Margaret, a mercer's wife in London, she knows things.

She knows there's been some kind of trouble at court, though the details are a little fuzzy.

She knows the price of wool is up because her husband told her what he heard at the Guild.

She also knows that a woman in Norwich murdered her husband with a poker because there was a ballot about it last week that she heard sung outside the market, and she's been

thinking about it ever since. She's pretty sure there's going to be a bad harvest because the

almanac said so, and the almanac is like basically never wrong. And she's heard, although she can't

confirm, that a monstrous calf was born in Kent with two heads,

which everybody agrees is some kind of a sign of something, though nobody really can agree what.

Some of what Margaret knows is true.

Some of it is also wildly distorted.

One thing is totally and completely made up, and she has absolutely

no way to tell which is which. Here is what is remarkable about Margaret, though, the fact that

she knows anything at all, that she has opinions about court politics and market prices,

and crime in other cities, and agricultural forecasting.

Because a generation before her, a woman in her position would have had like none of that.

The information just wasn't moving, it wasn't accessible, it wasn't cheap.

The tutor period is the first time in English history that information stopped being a luxury just for the powerful.

...