This thesis explores the political, economic and social fortunes of London's drapers in the Late Middle Ages, and the city's developing role in both the domestic and export trades in cloth. The first section considers the early development of the drapers' guild in the context of political and economic pressures. The city-wide ramifications of collaboration among drapers intent on protecting mutual economic interests are discussed with particular reference to John of Northampton, draper, who was politically-active in late fourteenth century London. An exploration of the identity or identities of London drapers sets the guild's significance in the wider context of other networks of association based on residence, kinship, apprenticeship, property-holding and parish-based brotherhoods. The next section discusses London's emerging role as the distributive centre of an expanding trade in English cloth. The role of cloth consumers (particularly noble and gentle households) in increasing London's magnetism is considered through an analysis of the purchase accounts of the Great Wardrobe. Aspects of investment in the domestic production of cloth, and the relationship between drapers, London clothworkers and provincial clothiers, is brought to light by a study of particulars of ulnage accounts, and of debt and Chancery cases involving drapers. The final section, based on particular accounts of custom and subsidy, supplements what is known of London's expanding role in the cloth export trade with an analysis of the various mercantile interests behind these exports. In addition, the drapers' path from the export of wool and import of Flemish cloth in the early fourteenth century, to the export of cloth from the late fourteenth century, to a diversity in both imports and exports which was born of growing economic confidence by the end of the fifteenth century, is discussed alongside the growing competition faced by drapers as domestic suppliers and retailers of cloth.