Britain was very safe before the Pale Wars. Oh, there was the occasional murder here and there, like in any society, but even that was uncommon. People mostly couldn't even own firearms and even the police walked around with just a stick for a weapon. People were a little bit afraid of terrorist attacks, but they rarely amounted to much from what I remember.

The last time there had been any really major number of civilian deaths on the island was probably...[He pauses and puffs out a breath as he does the calculation]...eighty years before the Pale War, the blitz during the Second World War. That's four generations of peace and relative safety.