ABSTRACT
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.
