The streets were filthy without, the houses were filthy within. The rooms of the poor were more like pig-styes than human habitations, unventilated, and strewn with rushes, which were seldom changed; and the wretched inhabitants closely packed in these miserable hovels must have become very prone to suffer from infection of all kinds. Another great cause of unhealthiness was the diet, which amongst the poor was composed largely of salt meat and fish, and with an absence of fresh vegetables, so that many of the inhabitants must have been on the verge of scurvy. The potato was not imported till the end of the sixteenth century, and the eighteenth was well advanced before it became a common article of diet. Much of the improvement in public health of late years is due to this wholesome and easily stored vegetable. In the days of Elizabeth the children of Christ’s Hospital were often ill from scurvy, and it was not till 1767 that the potato was introduced into the dietary of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital.
A most important factor in the causation of disease was the moral condition of the population, which was very low, and marked by superstition, ignorance, and brutality. An age when even the better classes crowded into Smithfield to see some poor wretch burnt; when the most brutal punishments were inflicted for comparatively slight offences; when kings beheaded their subjects and even their wives, almost as a matter of course; when the ghastly heads of executed persons stared from the city gates; when religious-minded Puritans could do nothing with a misguided king but behead him; and when restored “monarchy” exhumed the dead bodies of political offenders in order that it might wreak an unmeaning vengeance on a corpse; and when even ladies in good positions in society flocked to see these sickening exhibitions,[A] was not an age in which the nobler feelings of Christianity were easily evoked; and without these feelings, measures for securing public health, which cannot be fostered except in connection with public decency, found no place among the ideas of governors or governed.
[A] “To my Lady Batten’s; where my wife and she are lately come back again from being abroad, and seeing of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw hanged and buried at Tyburne.”—“Pepys’s Diary,” Jan. 31, 1660–61.
The public amusements were many of them brutal and cruel. Tournaments were less brutal than bear-baiting, bull-baiting, and cock-fighting, because they fostered animal courage; but animal courage it most distinctly was.
Fitz-Stephen mentions the drunkenness of the population in the 12th century, and there can be little doubt that when beer was the only drink—the drink which Queen Elizabeth took for breakfast—a state of fuddle from drink must have been exceedingly common. From Chamberlayne’s “Present State of England,” I gather that in the year after the Fire, 452,563 barrels of strong beer, at 12s. 6d. the barrel; 580,420 barrels of ale, at 16s. the barrel; and 489,797 barrels of small beer, at 6s. 6d. the barrel, were consumed in London, which (if we take the population at that time at 500,000) allows about three barrels, or 108 gallons, or some 1,440 pints per head per annum.
Again, Chamberlayne, speaking of the causes of the Great Fire, mentions: 1. “The drunkenness and supine negligence of the baker and his servants in whose house it began. 2. The dead time of night wherein it began, when some were wearied with working, others filled with drink, and all in a dead sleep.”
The brutality of the people’s amusements continued down to the end of the last century, and later. Thus in Pink’s “History of Clerkenwell,” I find the following advertisement culled from a journal of 1716:—
“At the Bear-garden at Hockley-in-the-Hole, at the request of several persons of quality, on Monday the 4th of this instant of June, is one of the largest and most mischievous bears that ever was seen in England to be baited to death, with other variety of bull-baiting, and bear-baiting; as also a wild bull to be turned loose in the Game Place, with fireworks all over him. To begin exactly at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, because the sport continues long.”
Close by, in Spa Fields, female prize fights were held, and there is a lively account of one of these encounters in which “Bruising Peg” terribly damaged her antagonist. In such a time, of course, foot-pads abounded, and it was not without danger that persons crossed Spa Fields after dark; and those who were invited to Sadler’s Wells, to see a man eat a live cock, feathers and all, for a wager of £5, were informed that the New Road and City Road would be patrolled, and that the return home would be without danger.
Such facts as these, which I could multiply to any extent, show the rough moral condition of the populace, and I believe that, with such a state of moral feeling, any real improvement in public health was impossible.