Plague and the City

Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson, Christos Lynteris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138590670
• eBook ISBN: 9780429832499
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Plague and the City uncovers discourses of plague and anti-plague measures in the city during the medieval, early modern and modern periods, and explores the connection between plague and urban environments including attempts by professional bodies to prevent or limit the outbreak of epidemic disease.

Bringing together leading scholars of plague working across different historical periods, this book provides an inter-disciplinary study of plague in the city across time and space. The chapters cover a wide range of periods, geographical locations and disciplinary approaches but all seek to answer significant questions, including whether common motives can be identified, and how far knowledge about plague was based on an understanding of the urban space. It also examines how maps and photographs contribute to understanding plague in the city through exploring the ways in which the relationship between plague and the urban environment has been visualised, from the poisoned darts of plague winging their way towards their victims in the votive pictures from the Renaissance, to the mapping of the spread of disease in late nineteenth-century Bombay and photographing Honolulu's great plague fire in 1900.

Containing a series of studies that illuminate plague's urban connection as a key social and political concern throughout history, Plague and the City is ideal for students of early modern history, and of the early modern city and plague more specifically.

1

‘GREAT STENCHES, HORRIBLE SIGHTS, AND DEADLY ABOMINATIONS’

Butchery and the battle against plague in late medieval English towns

Carole Rawcliffe

In early January 1350 as the people of Norwich were counting the cost of their first devastating experience of bubonic plague, the bailiffs’ court, then the most important judicial body in the city, resumed its hearings. Not surprisingly, given the recent level of disruption and scale of mortality, few individuals then faced prosecution, but one case, in particular, attracts attention, not least for the severity of the sentence. It concerns a local butcher named William Brok, who was found guilty of selling ‘meat of oxen and sheep measly, bad and putrid through age’ (succematas corruptas et pro vetustate putridas). The offending wares were to be burnt, while Brok himself was to be imprisoned at the court’s pleasure, but only after spending an unspecified time in the public pillory.¹ We do not know if, as was already the case in London, the rotting meat was actually burnt beneath him as he endured this very public humiliation, but at a slightly later date corrupt foodstuffs were customarily destroyed on a bonfire in the middle of Norwich market, right next to the pillory.²

It was certainly appropriate that one whose merchandise had polluted the environment and endangered the lives of his fellow citizens should be obliged to inhale the noxious fumes of contaminated meat. For, in the context of a community recently ravaged by pestilence, Brok’s conduct must have seemed little short of homicidal, as other contemporary urban records confirm. One of the very first measures instituted by the rulers of Venice when plague struck in 1348 was to order the incineration of infected pork, ‘which creates a great stench and attendant putrefaction that corrupts the air’.³ Ordinances passed by the mayor and aldermen of London in the aftermath of the second great national epidemic of 1361–1362 specifically warned victuallers against retaining foodstuffs until they became ‘corrupt and stinking’, upon pain of the draconian punishment just described.⁴

This chapter will explore the ways in which a steadily growing body of regulations for the control of butchers and butchery in late medieval English towns can illuminate and develop our knowledge of urban responses to epidemic disease. Having established the extent to which the populace at large acquired a working knowledge of relatively sophisticated and complex theories about human physiology, it will concentrate upon the impact of these ideas upon the built environment. We can detect a close relationship between the fear of plague and the creation of purpose-built slaughterhouses and meat markets, the introduction of designated refuse-disposal systems and the practical steps taken to safeguard water supplies from contamination by blood and offal. Systematic attempts were also made to oversee the quality of the urban meat supply through the more stringent inspection of markets and introduction of byelaws designed to eliminate insanitary practices.

A few scholars have already drawn specific attention to some of these initiatives: one of the three pioneering articles on public health in fourteenth-century London published in the 1930s by Ernest Sabine focused upon the city’s butchers. Although he did not attempt to place the measures that he described within the wider context of contemporary medical beliefs, Sabine was convinced that there must have been ‘some correlation’ between them and ‘the ravages of the Black Death’. He also felt it important to document the efforts made by the civic authorities to curb pollution and protect the community as a whole.⁵ Both Philip Jones and David Carr have reiterated this message, the former in an official history of the Butchers’ Company of London in which he approvingly documents various early campaigns ‘to improve sanitary conditions’. He does not, however, consider why ‘the dangers of contamination and contagion’ came to be so closely associated with unregulated butchery, or explore any possible connections between fear of infection and the imposition of tighter controls.⁶ Carr’s brief survey of the ways in which late medieval English towns dealt with their butchers resorts to similar generalisations. While maintaining that magistrates were primarily motived by a ‘simple desire to have a more pleasant, more “respectable” urban environment’, he nevertheless concedes – without further elaboration – that a contemporary ‘myth’ attributing the spread of disease to airborne miasmas may also have gained ‘broad acceptance’.⁷

Despite the appearance of a rapidly growing corpus of publications that explores this ‘myth’ and its impact on late medieval strategies for the preservation of communal health,⁸ the assumption that men and women (and especially English men and women) remained supine in the face of pestilence still persists in some academic circles. As recently as 2012, Ole Benedictow argued that it was not until the sixteenth century that people ceased to accept epidemics ‘fatalistically as a divine punishment for human sin’ and began to regard them as a ‘natural phenomenon . . . that could be prevented, limited or halted by human countermeasures’.⁹ It would be foolish to deny that plague was, ultimately, regarded as an act of divine retribution (which might, significantly, be assuaged through charitable works, such as the provision of refuse-disposal systems), but we need also to recognise that more immediate and potentially more manageable agents seemed also to be involved.¹⁰

Butchery and the transmission of plague

Chief among these agents was corrupt air, which had long been blamed for the spread of epidemics and was frequently associated with the stench arising from butchers’ waste. Indeed, the vernacular plague tracts or concilia which circulated in increasing numbers during the late fourteenth and fifteenth century warned specifically against the threat posed by ‘stynken caryn cast in the water nye to the cytees or townes, as the boles [entrails] of bestes’.¹¹ The reader was consequently urged ‘to eschew halle euyl aers [all evil air], as to say in stabulys, ffyldys & strettys & namely the heer [air] of bestys that soddenly dye & be stynkyng’.¹² Advice manuals of this kind drew heavily on the Canon of Avicenna, which had formed the bedrock of the European medical syllabus since the thirteenth century. An influential passage in book four describes the toxic effect of miasmatic exhalations upon the human body:

Vapours and fumes rise [into the air] and spread in it, and putrefy it with their debilitating warmth. And when air of this kind reaches the heart, it corrupts the complexion of the spirit that dwells within it; and, surrounding the heart, it then putrefies it with humidity. And there arises an unnatural heat; and it spreads throughout the body, as a result of which pestilential fever will occur, and will spread to a multitude of men who likewise have vulnerable dispositions.¹³

Shorn of their theoretical underpinnings, these ideas began to percolate downwards through society at a comparatively early date, their transmission (often through the medium of statutes, royal ordinances, civic proclamations, and local byelaws) being hastened by repeated outbreaks of plague from the 1360s onwards.¹⁴ It is hardly surprising that the University authorities in Cambridge, who knew their Avicenna, should insist in the aftermath of the fourth national pestilence of 1374–1375 that all ‘putrid flesh’ and other noxious waste had to be removed from the butchers’ shops every morning and evening. Even so, their response was far from unusual.¹⁵

Notwithstanding the fact that London’s three major meat markets and slaughterhouses had already been consigned to peripheral areas, including St. Nicholas Shambles at Newgate (see the map in Figure 1.1), we can readily appreciate why Edward III prohibited the butchering of animals anywhere near the city during the second and third great national epidemics of 1361–1362 and 1368–1369. His attempts permanently to remove such activities to Knightsbridge (in the west) and Stratford (in the north-east) nonetheless had unwelcome consequences an...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Plague and the City in History
• 1 ‘Great Stenches, Horrible Sights, and Deadly Abominations’: Butchery and the Battle Against Plague in Late Medieval English Towns
• 2 Plague in Early Modern London: Chronologies, Localities, and Environments
• 3 ‘Filth is the Mother of Corruption’: Plague, the Poor, and the Environment in Early Modern Florence
• 4 Plague Views: Epidemics, Photography, and the Ruined City
• 5 The Disease Map and the City: Desire and Imitation in the Bombay Plague, 1896–1914
• 6 ‘A Source of Sickness’: Photographic Mapping of the Plague in Honolulu in 1900
• 7 Public Culture and the Spectacle of Epidemic Disease in Rabat and Casablanca
• Index