High Street, Hull.
Showing the ancient King’s Head Inn, now pulled down.
Streets in mediæval times were astonishingly narrow. The ‘High Street’ of Hull has changed little during the last five hundred years, and to-day there are portions in which two carts cannot pass each other. The extreme width of the western half of Grimsby Lane, one of the by-streets connecting High Street and the Market Place, named after Simon de Grymesby, Mayor of Hull in 1391, is only nine feet. So also the main street in Beverley now barely allows two vehicles to pass each other, and some of the side lanes entering it, such as Laundress Lane and Tindall Lane, are even narrower than the Grimsby Lane just mentioned.
In all these cases the roadway has remained practically the same width for a space of five centuries. But five centuries ago the condition of the road and the amount of air-space above it were very different from what they are to-day. Mediæval houses were built of thick beams of timber, with the intervening spaces filled in with brick and plaster, and security of the floors was obtained by making the second story project a foot or two beyond the first, and the third project similarly beyond the second. The result was a very firmly built house, but a very narrowly confined roadway.
Sections of a Mediæval and a Modern Street.
The difference between the mediæval and the modern style of road planning is shown in the above diagram, which gives to scale the building-lines of High Street and King Edward Street—the oldest and the newest business streets in the city of Hull.
Mediæval streets were paved with round cobble stones—such stones as still form the pavement of the market-places of Beverley and Hedon. It is on record that in the year 1400 two Dutch ships brought into Hull cargoes of these stones amounting to 56,000 in number. But the method of drainage was then exactly the opposite of what it is to-day; for the middle of the road was the gutter, or kennel. If we imagine that there were then no ‘dust-carts,’ and that each householder got rid of refuse by the simple process of casting it out into the kennel for the next shower of rain to wash away, we shall come to some idea of the general condition of the streets in a mediæval town.
Little wonder that in mediæval towns were bred foul diseases that broke out at intervals and sometimes carried off half the population in the course of a few months. In 1349—the year of the ‘Black Death’—1361, 1369, and 1451 the Plague visited the East Riding, and there are to be seen in the chancel floor of Holy Trinity Church, Hull, the tombstone and brasses of a merchant named Richard Byll, who was one of its victims in the last-mentioned year.