Sanitation in Urban Britain, 1560-1700

Leona J. Skelton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317217893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Popular belief holds that throwing the contents of a chamber pot into the street was a common occurrence during the early modern period. This book challenges this deeply entrenched stereotypical image as the majority of urban inhabitants and their local governors alike valued clean outdoor public spaces, vesting interest in keeping the areas in which they lived and worked clean.

Taking an extensive tour of over thirty towns and cities across early modern Britain, focusing on Edinburgh and York as in-depth case studies, this book sheds light on the complex relationship between how governors organised street cleaning, managed waste disposal and regulated the cleanliness of the outdoor environment, top-down, and how typical urban inhabitants self-regulated their neighbourhoods, bottom-up. The urban-rural manure trade, sanitation infrastructure, waste-disposal technology, plague epidemics, contemporary understandings of malodours and miasmatic disease transmission and urban agriculture are also analysed.

This book will enable undergraduates, postgraduates and established academics to deepen their understanding of daily life and sensory experiences in the early modern British town. This innovative work will appeal to social, cultural and legal historians as well as researchers of history of medicine and public health.

1 The character of the environmental challenge

Introduction

Throughout the period 1560 to 1700, early modern urban governors faced distinctly different, and arguably larger, sanitation and environmental challenges than those faced by town councils today. Malodours emanating from soap-boiling, slaughterhouses, candle-making, tanners’ and dyers’ vats, open sewers, dunghills, stables and pig sties characterized pre-modern, urban streets. Not a few contemporaries were engaged in a combination of domestic, industrial and agricultural activities in the same neighbourhoods, streets and even within the bounds of one property. Craftsmen’s workshops were commonly situated above, below or behind their homes, to facilitate economic familial survival. Small agricultural outbuildings, such as pig sties, hen houses or stables, were common features of the areas of land behind houses (backlands).¹ Indeed, some Aberdonians even shared their homes with their livestock.² Urban dwellers relied on their landward counterparts for some foodstuffs, and, as important market centres, towns provided their rural hinterlands with a variable degree of urban services; but urban centres were not exclusively manufacturing settlements, which exchanged urban wares for rurally grown food, as some later became. It is important to remain mindful that early modern urban landscapes differed markedly from those of the industrial epoch. In the period 1560 to 1700, they were largely tripartite patchworks of residential, industrial and agricultural buildings. It is crucial to consider the sources of urban dirt within such aesthetically and practically chaotic scenes.

This chapter is split into five sections. The first explains the sources and disposal of domestic waste, how the drainage systems for liquid waste functioned and how such systems were shaped by the built infrastructure. The second section discusses privies and chamber pots and analyses the invention, in 1596, of Sir John Harrington’s water closet. The third section explains perceptions of malodorous trades and the fourth contextualizes the meaning of smell in the early modern mind in relation to health and plague. The fifth and final section discusses urban agriculture and the urban-rural manure trade. The chapter draws from qualitative evidence in relation to a variety of British towns, providing a wider, national context for the much heavier focus on the major case study cities of Edinburgh and York in subsequent chapters.

Domestic waste, drainage systems and the built infrastructure

In the context of urban agriculture, which produced substantial volumes of manure, domestic waste actually constituted a proportionately small amount of a town’s total waste. Of course, domestic waste included human excrement and urine, but it also included: dirty water from cooking, cleaning and washing; food waste and bones; hearth ashes; building waste, such as rubble and broken stones; and small amounts of non-organic material such as glass and metal. Most contemporaries recycled food waste, by feeding it to livestock, and they sold unwanted possessions, especially clothes, out of necessity, which limited how much waste was produced.³ Unwanted materials which were intended to be removed from properties were supposed to be piled on forefronts, in backlands or on communal dunghills, also known as middens and in south-west England as mixons, until inhabitants or local governors transported, or paid a carrier to transport, such materials out of town. Rubbish and manure was usually hauled using pack horses or in horse-drawn carts or sledges, the former to be buried in the surrounding countryside and the latter to be sold to farmers to be used as fertilizer. In 1586, when Carlisle Castle was repaired at Queen Elizabeth I’s expense, 7s 8d was paid each day to ‘Martine Bone and James Tompson for leadinge the rubbishe and broken stones from the gait house for themselffes and their nages’.⁴ Perhaps there was a proper location, officially set aside for waste disposal, to which these men travelled, but the document does not allude to one. Where there was sufficient space, rubbish pits could be dug on one’s own land, obviating the transportation of rubbish out of town. When some building work was undertaken on Sheffield Parish Church, in 1622, the Church Burgesses paid a labourer 7d for ‘making a pitt & removing of plankes & Rubbish’; whereas in 1691, they chose instead to pay 1s 2d ‘for carriage of Rubbish’.⁵ Perhaps, by this point, the Church Burgesses had run out of open space in which to dig rubbish pits.

Waste liquids, such as dirty water from domestic cooking and cleaning, butchery blood and urine, were supposed to be deposited carefully into proximal drainage channels. Where they existed, they were usually shared by at least two households or businesses, sometimes by many more. These channels were known as watergaits, gutters, ditches, watercourses, watergangs, cundiths, sinks, gouts, conduits and channels when they were open and they were known as syvers, syres or sewers when they were covered or they ran underneath buildings. Grooves were often carved into stone paving slabs in yards and in front of buildings, specifically to aid and direct the drainage paths of rainwater. As long as blockages did not impede their flow, which could and did occur, narrow secondary channels near to dwellings directed liquid waste and rainwater into wider, primary channels running down either the crown or both sides of main causeways. That Edinburgh’s High Street drains were ‘verye conveniently contrived on both sides of the street: soe as there is none in the middle’ impressed Sir William Brereton in 1635.⁶ Major drains then usually fed waste into rivers or the sea.⁷ However, landlocked towns or those which lacked convenient access to rivers directed their waste into large cess pits such as Edinburgh’s North Loch or Stirling’s Meikle Dub.⁸

Whereas cooking pots and dishes tended to be scoured with sand, soap and water within the home, clothes tended to be washed outside. In England, clothes were usually washed by women in large tubs of water on riverbanks or in the streets; the resultant dirty water was supposed to be poured carefully into rivers or into open sewers leading to rivers. However, some householders washed clothes indoors, as an Elizabethan Chancery case confirmed that Godfrey Bradshaw and his family, who lived above a woollen goods shop in the London parish of St Augustine, near ‘Powles Gate’ in the ward of Bread Street, performed ‘househoald works as washing clothes and other necessaries done and exercised in the said kitching’.⁹ Notably, in Scottish towns, clothes were washed in tubs of soapy water under women’s pounding feet, usually on riverbanks, but sometimes in the streets or other public areas. This characteristically Scottish method of washing clothes captured foreigners’ attention. John Ray visited Dunbar in 1662 and noted Scottish women’s ‘way of washing their linen is to tuck up their coats, and tread them with their feet in a tub’.¹⁰

Dirty water from food preparation and cooking, washing dishes, domestic cleaning and washing clothes could threaten the purity of drinking water supplies. Although most women disposed of dirty water carefully into sewers or large rivers, some townswomen washed clothes and cleaned other items in or near to wells, which was expressly forbidden. In 1612, for example, Darlington’s inhabitants were warned under the threat of a fine of 6s 8d that ‘none shall wash cloathes fish or suchlike thinges at the tubbwell to putrifie the same’.¹¹ At Scarborough’s Sheriffs’ Tourn, in April 1631, Mr Francis Tomson was presented ‘for his maide washinge clothes at the cundith [i.e. sewer]’.¹² And at Sheffield’s Great Court Leet, in April 1609, inhabitants were warned under the threat of a fine of 3s 4d,

That no person or persons shall at any time hereafter wash any clothes, calfe heads, calfe meates or … other things within three yarde of the Towne Head Well, New Hall Well, Burtland Well or any other common well in and about the same towne for corruptinge the said wells.¹³

Streams and burns from which inhabitants drew their drinking water could also be contaminated with dirty water. In 1638, Dunfermline’s councillors forbade inhabitants from ‘washing of barrells [of] cloathes … whairby the water may be trublit [i.e. troubled]’.¹⁴ In this case, women were not banned from washing clothes in barrels, but rather from washing so close to the well that the water became contaminated. Similarly, in 1657, Lanark’s councillors banned washing clothes at the ‘Welgait Well’ and ‘at the burne that the filthe goe into the burne’.¹⁵ Here, the councillors were concerned about the purity of the well’s and the burn’s water, which were both sources of drinking water. Moreover, Edinburgh’s inhabitants were prohibited from washing clothes at the Nor’ Loch in 1552.¹⁶ And, in 1668, Inverness’s councillors, ‘considering the great abuse and prejudice the inhabitants … [were] daylie susteaneing be the washers of cloath’, banned washing clothes at the River Ness.¹⁷ Stirling’s council also banned washing ‘ony maner of clais [clothes] at the toune bouirn’ in 1522, and reiterated this ban in 1610 with the added threat of a fine of five pounds Scots and ‘breking of thair [women’s] tubes’.¹⁸ A woman’s washing tub was no mean possession. Urban governors regulated the practice of washing clothes because they were motivated to protect drinking water against pollution to ensure that it did not become dangerous. Berwick’s Bailiffs permitted the disposal of waste water into the River Tweed, but only downstream from the town and thereby into the sea. As Christopher Smout argues, in relation to northern England and Scotland, when river water was commonly used as drinking water, before the construction of large-scale upland reservoirs provided preferable supplies, ensuring the cleanliness of river water, as far as technology and resources allowed, was a serious priority in local government.¹⁹ Smout elaborates that it was only after towns stopped relying on rivers for their water supply, in the modern period, that industries and municipalities then ‘felt free to pour greatly increased quantities of foul water into the rivers without giving the consequences much thought’, by which time the ‘convenience’ of having ‘a river in which to dump waste quickly outweighed complaints’.²⁰ Although significant efforts were made to protect the purity of water which was used for drinking and cooking, protecting water purity for the purposes of maintaining a clean water supply was not always the primary concern. Inverness’s and Stirling’s rivers were not sources of drinking water, but inhabitants were prohibited from corrupting them with perceived harmful liquid and solid waste. During plague epidemics, textiles and furniture were often cleaned in running water because contemporaries across Britain recognized running water’s purifying effects. It is not obvious from the Stirling and Inverness regulations why contamination of their respective rivers was regulated, but generating income from fines and protecting the burghs’ sources of running water for use in times of plague are potentially motivating factors.

Newcastle’s River Tyne was protected from solid, but not from liquid waste. In 1613, Newcastle Corporation passed a bylaw ordering ‘that strangers shall be appointed every week to cleanse the streets in Newcastle of their ashes and other rubbish, to prevent the rain from washing the same into the river through Loadbourn’.²¹ That Newcastle was built on a steep gradient descending to the Tyne surely necessitated this bylaw. Another Newcastle bylaw, also passed in 1613, ensured that all gates in Newcastle’s quayside town walls were locked up and watched every night, ‘except one or two to stand open for the masters and seamen to go too and fro to their shipps, which will prevent servants casting ashes and other rubbish into the river’.²² In Newcastle, liquid waste drained into the Tyne with rainwater through the drainage network of open sewers and tributary streams such as the Loadburn and the Ouseburn. The disposal of solid waste into the Tyne was forbidden to prevent the river from silting up and thereby reducing its efficiency as a navigable river and economic lifeline to the monopolistic Port of Newcastle, some eight miles inland. It was not until several decades after the passing of the 1613 bylaws that domestic water supplies were drawn directly from the Tyne, in 1680, when Cuthbert Dykes installed an engine to draw water directly from the river at Sandgate, Newcastle.²³ Before 1680, the town relied on spring water supplies drawn manually from public water pumps known as ‘pants’.

Harbours were often protected from waste disposal too. Although inhabitants would certainly not have drawn their drinki...