The trade was innovative from the off. John Rastell, one of the first to work from within the churchyard, published a translation from the Italian by his brother-in-law Thomas More of the life of the Italian philosopher Gianfrancesco Pico. His own morality play, The Nature of the Four Elements, included a three-part song that was the first attempt to print a musical score. His contemporary Richard Pynson was the first printer in England to adopt Roman or “white letter” typefaces, more legible than Gothic type.

The Reformation raised the stakes, literally and metaphorically. The Protestant writer John Foxe believed that print technology was part of God’s providential design, writing that Lord used “printing, writing and reading to convince darkness by light, error by truth, ignorance by learning”. He had good cause to believe so. The reformist printer John Day, having lain low during the reign of the Catholic Mary Tudor, celebrated the return of a Protestant monarch, Elizabeth I, by collaborating with Foxe on his Actes and Monuments, better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a grim, compendium of the ordeals of men and women – and there were 300 or so – burnt at the stake during Mary’s reign. First published in 1563, it ran to more than 1,800 highly illustrated pages, and became the touchstone of English providentialism for generations, selling 28,000 unabridged copies between 1563 and 1616.

St Paul’s Churchyard witnessed its own executions when it was chosen in 1606 as the site for the dispatch of five men implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. The decision was not without controversy; one critic protested at the use of this “place of happy memory” as a charnel house. “Noxious chaos”, as Willes puts it, returned during the Civil Wars, when the very survival of England’s cathedrals came into question. On one occasion, parliamentary soldiers baptised a foal in the font and smashed stain glass, though the statue of John Donne, poet and former dean, was left intact.

The fire that began on the morning of September 2 1666 in Pudding Lane – named for produce akin to black pudding – allowed Wren’s Phoenix to rise from the flames, though he would be 76 by the time the dome was completed in 1708. Its churchyard remained a haven of the book trade, though unlike the cathedral, much of it was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. “Simpkins, Whitaker’s, Longman’s, Hutchinson’s … are gutted shells”, noted one observer on that September morn in 1940. The last of them, Routledge & Kegan Paul, upped sticks in 1976, driven out by rent rises rather than incendiaries. The churchyard is much diminished, the cathedral endures.

In the Shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral by Margaret Willes is published by Yale at £25. To order your copy for £19.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books