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.