London: The Biography

Those in poorer situations lived in rooms built within tenements which could be found down the narrow alleys between wide thoroughfares. The upper floor of these small houses was known as the “solar,” which protruded into the street itself so that little of the sky could be seen between two overhanging solars. Many of the smaller houses had been built of wood with thatched roofs, still reflecting the appearance of Saxon or early Norman building; London retained in part the atmosphere of a much earlier city, with tribal or territorial connotations. Yet after the many fires that visited the city, particularly a great conflagration in 1212, ordinances compelled householders to build their walls of stone and their roofs of tiles. Broken tiles from this period have been found in cesspits, wells, cellars, rubbish dumps and the foundation stones of roads. So there was a general process of transition, not perfectly managed, in which new stone and old timber stood side by side.

The condition of the streets themselves can be ascertained from the extant documents of the period. In the pleas and memoranda of the Guildhall, for example, we read of the master of Ludgate putting dung into the Fleet to such an extent that the water was stopped in certain places; a common privy is “diffectif” and “the ordur therof rotith the stone wallys.” The taverners of St. Bride’s parish put their empty barrels, and slops, into the street “to nusauns of all folk ther passyng.” There were complaints about defective paving in Hosier Lane, while in Foster Lane the fourteen households had the habit of casting from their windows “ordure amp; vrine, the which annoyet alle the pepol of the warde.” The cooks of Bread Street were indicted for keeping “dung and garbage” under their stalls, while a great stream of “dong and water and other diverse filth” was known to pour down Trinity Lane and Cordwainer Street by Garlickhithe Street, and descend between the shops of John Hatherle and Richard Whitman before discharging itself into the Thames. A dung-hill in Watergate Street beside Bear Lane “is noyowse to all the commune people, kasting out in-to this lane ordour of Prevees and other orrible sightis.” There are reports of stinking fish and bad oysters, of common steps in disrepair and of thoroughfares being blocked up, of areas or “pryue places” where thieves and “money strumpettes” congregate.

But some of the best evidence for the condition of the streets comes in the many regulations which were, from the evidence of the courts, being continually flouted. Stallholders were supposed to set up their stands only in the middle of the street, between the two “kennels” or gutters on either side. In the narrower thoroughfares the kennel ran down the middle of the street, thus effectively forcing pedestrians to “take the wall.” The scavengers and rakers of each ward were ordered “to preserve, lower and raise the pavements, and to remove all nuisances of filth”; all such “filth” was taken by horse and cart down to the river where it was carried off in boats built for the purpose. Special arrangements were made for carting off the noisome stuff from the sites of butchery-the shambles, the Stocks Market and the market at East Cheap-but there were always complaints of foul odours. In More’s Utopia (1516) the killing of animals takes place outside the city walls; his pointed recommendation is evidence of the real disgust which many citizens felt about the proximity of this trade.

In the Liber Albus there are also instructions that pigs and dogs be not allowed to wander through the city; more curiously, perhaps, it was decreed that “barbers shall not place blood in their windows.” No citizen was allowed to carry a bow for firing stones, and no “courtesans” were permitted to dwell within the city walls. This last ordinance was persistently flouted. There were elaborate regulations about the building of houses and walls, with special provisions applied for neighbours’ disputes; once again the impression is of a close compacted town. In the same spirit of good order it was decreed that the owners of the larger houses should always possess a ladder and a barrel of water in case of fire; since it had been ordained that tile rather than thatch should be the standard material of the roofs, the aldermen of each ward had the power to come with a pole or hook in order to remove any offending straw.