I am writing a collection of short stories focusing on the lives of common people who worked on and lived around the Bristol Cathedral in England. The stories will focus on multiple generations of one family and will begin when the cathedral was first founded as an abbey in the twelfth century. The stories will end during the Protestant Reformation when the abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII and rededicated as a cathedral. While the characters I am creating will be fictional, the stories will be deeply rooted in historical research and study. The main goal of this project is to explore how living under the shadow of an abbey and a cathedral impacted the daily lives of ordinary people. My faculty mentor is Professor Sally Shivnan.