Sanitation in Plantagenet and Tudor times.
Along with all those means, having the object of stopping the spread of infection, the Elizabethan policy did not neglect what we should now consider the more radical means of sanitation. It is usual to bring a sweeping charge of neglect of public hygiene against all old times; there was so much plague in those times, and so high an average death-rate, that it is commonly assumed that our ancestors must have been wanting in the rudimentary instincts of cleanliness. But, in the first place, one might expect to find that all old periods were not alike; and more generally it is worth inquiring how far nuisances injurious to the public health were tolerated. This inquiry will have to be as brief as possible; but it will take us back to the period of plague covered by a former chapter.
Nuisances certainly existed in medieval London, but it is equally certain that they were not tolerated without limit. I have collected in a note the instances reported in a visitation of 17 Edward III. (1343), and in a perambulation of the ground outside the walls in 26 Edward III. (1352). The former related only to the alleys leading down to the river, which were likely enough places for nuisance, then as now[623].
There are several orders of Edward III. relating to the removal of laystalls and to keeping the town ditch clean, which show, of course, that there was neglect, but at the same time the disposition to correct it. It is farther obvious that the connexion between nuisances and the public health was clearly apprehended. The sanitary doctrines of modern times were undreamt of; nor did the circumstances altogether call for them. The sewers of those days were banked-up water courses, or “shores” as the word was pronounced, which ran uncovered down the various declivities of the city, to the town ditch and to the Thames. They would have sufficed to carry off the refuse of a population of some forty or sixty thousand; they were, at all events, freely open to the greatest of all purifying agents, the oxygen of the air; and they poisoned neither the water of the town ditch (which abounded in excellent fish within John Stow’s memory) nor the waters of Thames. In course of time all the brooks of London were covered in, even the Fleet dyke itself, which used to float barges as far as Holborn bridge; but who shall say that they were more wholesome thereafter, although they were underground? Perhaps the poet of the Earthly Paradise has as true an intuition as any when, in reference to the city in Chaucer’s time, he bids us
“Dream of London, small, and white, and clean;
The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.”
The nuisance that gave most trouble in the medieval and Tudor periods was the blood and offal of the shambles. Several ordinances of Edward III. are directed against it, in one of which (1371) the connexion between putrefying blood soaked into the ground and infectious disease is clearly stated. It is also the principal subject of the first sanitary Act that appears in the Statutes of the Realm, made by the Parliament of Cambridge in the 17th of Richard II. (1388), of which I give the preamble and provisions:
“Item, For that so much Dung and Filth of the Garbage and Intrails as well of Beasts killed as of other Corruptions be cast and put in Ditches, Rivers and other Waters, and also within many other Places within about and nigh unto divers Cities, Boroughs and Towns of the Realm, and the Suburbs of them, that the Air there is greatly corrupt and infect, and many Maladies and other intolerable Diseases do daily happen,” both to the residents and to visitors:—therefore proclamation is to be made in the City of London, as in other cities, boroughs and towns “that all they which do cast and lay all such Annoyances, Dung, Garbages, Intrails and other Ordure in Ditches, Rivers, Waters and other places shall cause them to be removed, avoided and carried away betwixt this and the feast of St Michael next following,” under a penalty of twenty pounds, mayors and bailiffs to compel obedience. Such offences were not to be repeated, and if any did offend he was liable to be called by writ before the Chancellor “at his suit that will complain[624].”
Despite this statute, the shambles in the parish of St Nicholas within Newgate (adjoining the ground now occupied by Christ’s Hospital, and formerly by the Grey Friars) became an established institution of the city. They were a subject of petition to Parliament in 1488-9, and they were still there to give occasion in 1603 to severe remarks by Thomas Lodge, poet and physician, who practised in Warwick Lane, in their immediate neighbourhood. The Act of 1388, it will be observed, was to be set in motion “at his suit that will complain;” so that there was little more in it than the immemorial remedy from a nuisance at common law.
The reign of Henry V. appears to have been marked by care for the public health, perhaps not greater than in Edward III.’s time, but exceptional, in the records at least, under the later Plantagenets and until the accession of the Tudor dynasty. Among other evidences (some of which may be gathered from Stow’s Survey) is the ordinance of 1415 (3 Hen. V.) against a nuisance in the Moor, beyond the wall and the ditch on the Finsbury side. The Moor was, in Fitzstephen’s words, “a great fen, which watereth the walls on the north side.” In 1415 there was a “common latrine” in it, and “sicknesses arose from the horrible, corrupt, and infected atmosphere,” issuing therefrom[625]. Its removal was ordered, and in the same year (1415) chaussées were built across the fen, one to Hoxton and another to Islington. The ditch all the way round from the Tower to Blackfriars had been cleansed the year before (1414).
Another statute, 3 Henry VII. (1488-9) cap. 3, may be quoted to show that the slaughter-houses were the chief nuisance, that their effects on health were perceived (as in Edward III.’s time), and that it was necessary to appeal to the king’s personal interest in the matter as a motive for redress.
Petition to the King from the parishioners of St Faiths and St Gregories in London, near St Pauls.
“That it was soo that grete concourse of peple, as well of his Roial persone as of other grete Lordes and astates wyth other hys true subgettes often tymes was had unto the said Cathedrall Chirche, and for the moost part through oute the parisshe aforesaide, the whiche often tymes ben gretly ennoyed and invenemed by corrupt eires, engendered in the said parisshes by occasion of bloode and other fowler thynges, by occasion of the slaughter of bestes and scaldyng of swyne had and doon in the bocherie of Seynt Nicholas Flesshamls, whos corrupcion by violence of unclene and putrified waters is borne down thrugh the said parishes and compasseth two partes of the Palays where the Kynges most Roiall persone is wonte to abide when he cometh to the Cathedrall Chirche for ony acte there to be doon, to the Jubardouse [jeopardous] abydyng of his most noble persone and to ouer grete ennoysaunce of the parisshens there, and of other the Kyngis subgettes and straungers that passe by the same;
Compleynte whereof at dyverse and many seasons almost by the space of xvi yeres contynuelly, as well by the Chanons and petty Chanons of the said Cathedrall Chirche, londlordes there ... made to Mayor and aldermen of the city; and noo remedie had ne founden.
... Considering that in few noble cities or towns or none within Christendom, where as travellyng men have labored, that the comen slaughter hous of bestys sholde be kept in ony speciall parte within the walle of the same lest it myght engender Siknesse to the destruccion of the peple.”
The King etc. “ordeyned and stablished that no Bocher shall sley within the said house called the Scaldinghouse or within the walls of London.”
And the same “in eny citte, Burghe and Towne walled within the Realm of Englonde and in the Towne of Cambridge, the Townes of Berwyk and Carlile only except and forprised.”
The popular knowledge of and belief in a high doctrine of contagion are curiously shown by the terms of the Act touching Upholsterers in 1495 (II Hen. VII. cap. 19).
The Act was intended to prevent beds, feather-beds, bolsters and pillows from being sold in market outside London, “beyond control of the Craft of Upholders.” Outside the craft an inferior article was apt to be offered, which was at once a lowering of a good and worthy standard and a danger to health. There were two kinds of corrupt bed-stuffs “contagious for mannys body to lye on,” firstly, scalded feathers and dry pulled feathers together; and secondly, flocks and feathers together. Besides these, quilts, mattresses and cushions stuffed with horse hair, fen down, neat’s hair, deer’s hair and goat’s hair, “which is wrought in lyme fattes,” give out by the heat of man’s body, a savour and taste so abominable and contagious that many of the King’s subjects thereby have been destroyed. These corrupt and unlawful stuffs and wares might indeed be made by any person or persons for their own proper use in their houses, so they be not offered for sale in fairs or markets.
The reign of Henry VIII. is not marked by any ordinances or Acts for the restraint of plague or the like sickness by other than quarantine measures. The common ditch between Aldgate and the postern of the Tower was cleansed in 1519 at the charges of the city; in 1540 the Moor ditch was cleansed: and, not long before, the ditch from the Tower to Aldgate. In 1549 the ditch was again cleansed at the charges of the City Companies[626]. In April, 1552, John Shakespeare, the poet’s father, a citizen of Stratford-on-Avon in good circumstances and afterwards mayor of the town, was fined twelve pence (eight to ten shillings present value) for not removing the heap of household dirt and refuse that had accumulated in front of his own door[627]. In the records of the borough of Ipswich[628], scavengers are mentioned in the 32nd of Henry VIII. (1540): they were elected in every parish, and the gatherings of refuse ordered to be carried and laid at four places, namely: Warwick Pitts, College Yard, behind the Ditches next John Herne, and the Dikes in the Marsh. When queen Elizabeth visited Ipswich (in 1561, 1565 and 1577), she rated not only the clergy on the laxity of their behaviour, but also the civic authorities upon the filthy condition of the streets. “A marked improvement,” says the borough historian, “certainly took place in Ipswich at this period, as is incontestably shown by the constant exhortations and promulgations of laws for the preservation of cleanliness.”
In the Description and Account of the City of Exeter, written by John Vowell, or Hoker, chamberlain of the city and member of Parliament for it in the reign of Elizabeth[629], we find the following about the offices and duties of scavengers “as of old.”
They are “necessary officers who cannot be wanting in any well-governed city or town, because by them and their service all things noisome to the health of man, and hurtful to the state of the body of the commonwealth, are advertised unto the magistrate, and so they be the means of the redress thereof. And therefore they be called Scavengers, as who saith Shewers or Advertisers, for so the word soundeth.” Among other duties they had the oversight of pavements, that they were swept weekly, of slaughter-houses, dunghills and the like, of dangerous buildings and of encroachments upon the streets, of chimneys, and of precautions against fires (tubs of water to be in readiness at the doors to quench fires and cleanse the streets); and on Sundays they had to attend the mayor of Exeter to the church of St Peter’s.
These officers of the municipality discharged their duties, says the Elizabethan writer, “as of old;” from which we may conclude that some such regulation had existed from quite early times. The scavengers are mentioned by Stow at the end of his account of each City ward along with other officers. We have already seen, from the court rolls of the manor of Castle Combe under the year 1427, that villagers were fined or admonished for creating nuisances. A sudden revival of zeal in that way at Castle Combe in the year 1590 may have been due to the vigorous sanitary policy of Elizabeth’s government:
“And that the inhabitants of the West Strete doe remove the donge or fylth at John Davis house ende before the feaste of Seynct Andrew th’apostell next, and that they lay no more there within x foote of the wey, sub poena iii s iiii d.
“And that none shall lay any duste or any other fylth in the wey or pitte belowe Cristopher Besas house, sub poena pro quolibet tempore xii d.
“And that none shall soyle in the church yerde nor in any of our stretes, for every defaulte to lose xii d.
“And that the glover shall not washe any skynes, nor cast any other fylth or soyle in the water runnynge by his house, sub poena x s[630].”
There is an interval of a century and a half between the two instances of sanitary vigour adduced from the Castle Combe manor court; but there is no reason to believe that the tradition of common cleanliness ever lapsed altogether, in that or in any other village or town of the country.
Some part of the rather unfair opinion as to the foulness of English life in former times may be traced to a well-known letter by Erasmus to the physician of cardinal Wolsey. There are grounds for believing that Erasmus must have judged from somewhat unfavourable instances.
“We read of a city,” says Erasmus, “which was freed from continual pestilence by changes made in its buildings on the advice of a philosopher. Unless I am mistaken, England may be freed in like manner.” He then proceeds to go over the defects of English houses, and to suggest improvements. The houses were built with too little regard to the aspect of their doors and windows towards the sun. Again, they have a great part of their walls filled with panes of glass, admitting light in such wise as to keep out the wind, and yet letting in at chinks of the windows the air as if strained or percolated, and so much the more pestilential by being long stagnant. These defects he would remedy by having two or three sides of a house exposed to the sky, and all glazed windows so made that they should open wholly or shut wholly, and so shut that there might be no access of noxious winds through gaping seams; for if it be sometimes wholesome to admit the air, it is sometimes wholesome to keep it out. Inside the houses Erasmus professes to have seen a shocking state of things—the floors covered with rushes piled, the new upon the old, for twenty years without a clearance, befouled with all manner of filth, with spillings of beer and the remains of fish, with expectoration and vomit, with excrement and urine[631]. Here we have clearly to do with the intelligent foreigner. On the other hand, as far back as the reign of Richard I., Englishmen would appear to have contrasted their own personal habits with those of other nations, much as the summer tourist does now. English youths, it has been said, go through Europe with one phrase on their lips: “Foreigners don’t wash.” Richard of Devizes implies somewhat the same. A Frankish youth is being advised where to settle in England, Winchester being chosen by excluding the other towns one by one. Bristol, for example, was wholly given over to soap-boilers: everyone in Bristol was either a soap-boiler or a retired soap-boiler; “and the Franks love soap as much as they love scavengers[632].” We may cry quits, then, with Erasmus over the rush-strewn floors. It is clear, also, that the glazed fronts of English houses, which he took exception to, are the very feature of them that Sir Thomas More prided himself upon; in that as in other external things the London of his day seemed to him to leave little to be desired as the capital of Utopia, his chief subjects of remark being the shambles and the want of hospitals for the sick[633].
Thus, when we attempt to clear the sense of our rather mixed notions on the unwholesome life of former times, we must feel constrained to withdraw a great part of the accusation as to nuisances tolerated or scavenging neglected. Most of all was the government of Elizabeth marked by vigour in its attempts to restrain plague, not only by quarantine measures, but also by radical sanitation.
Queen Elizabeth and her Council were baffled by the persistence of plague in London in 1581-82-83; the infection pursued its own course despite all efforts to “stamp it out,” so that the letters from the lords of the Council to the mayor begin to assume a somewhat querulous and impatient tone[634]. To a letter of remonstrance, 21st September, 1581, the mayor replied next day that every precaution had been taken. On the 22nd March, 1582, the mayor retorted upon the Court that an artificer in leather, dwelling near Fleet Bridge, had the plague in his house, that his house had been shut up, and he restrained from going out; nevertheless he had access to the Court in the things of his art, both for the queen and her household. On the 1st September, 1582, the plague having greatly increased as appeared by certificate of the number of the dead during the last week, the Privy Council informed the mayor that this was in part “by negligence in not keeping the streets and other places about the city clean, and partly through not shutting up of the houses where the sickness had been found, and setting marks upon the doors; but principally through not observing orders for prevention of the infection heretofore sent to them by the Council.” The mayor sent answer the same day that every care had been taken: the streets had been cleansed every other day; the parish clerks had been appointed to see to the shutting up of infected houses, and putting papers upon the doors; he had also appointed some of his own officers to go up and down the city to view and inform him whether these things had been done.
So much did the Council believe, or affect to believe, that the mayor could control the plague if he carried out their orders, that they used the adjournment of the law courts as a threat to the city. On the 15th October, the Term was announced to be held at Hertford, and all persons from infected London houses were forbidden to repair thither with merchandise, victual, &c.[635]. Then follow in January, 1583, letters touching an impracticable attempt of the Privy Council to have a list printed of all inns and taverns that had been infected within the last two months. The mayor made a catalogue which was pronounced too long. On 21st April, 1583, the infection had much increased, and the lords of the Council again urged upon the mayor to have infected houses shut up, and provision made for feeding and maintaining the inmates thereof. They desired to express her majesty’s surprise that no house or hospital had been built without the city, in some remote place, to which the infected people might be removed, although other cities of less antiquity, fame, wealth, and reputation had provided themselves with such places, whereby the lives of the inhabitants had been in all times of infection chiefly preserved. The mayor, on 3rd May, wrote that the Court of Aldermen had published orders for the stay of the plague; but that they were comparatively powerless so long as crowds of the worst sort of people resorted to see plays, bear-baiting, fencers, and profane spectacles at the theatre, and Curtain, and other the like places.
The plague pursued its own course, wholly unaffected, so far as one can see, by everything that was tried. One thing that was not touched by the sanitary policy, was probably more relevant than all else to the continuance of plague—the disposal of the dead. The theoretical importance attached to that as an original cause of plague has been avowed in the chapter on the Black Death. We have here to see how the theory of it as a favouring thing for the continuance of the infection squares with the facts in such a city as London under the Plantagenets and Tudors.