ABSTRACT
Managing and regulating the drainage and disposal of the large amount of domestic, industrial and agricultural waste which was produced within the urban landscape occupied a significant proportion of urban governors’ time and effort. Today, public hygiene matters are managed exclusively by separate and dedicated administrative departments within large-scale and complex urban councils, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, waste disposal, street cleaning and the regulation of insanitary nuisances were truly integral parts of the whole, overarching system of government by which a city's ‘commonweal’ was maintained. In a typical weekly council meeting, drainage and waste disposal problems, such as a blocked sewer or the disposal of offal, tended to be discussed between or even alongside other urban problems, such as card-playing, begging or forestalling. This seamless system of urban government had been established and handed down by the civic leaders’ medieval predecessors. Dolly Jorgensen studied sanitation in two English regional centres, Norwich and Coventry, with populations broadly between 8,000 and 12,000 from 1400 to 1600, and found that although sanitation services were ‘neither the most costly nor the highest profile activity’, that by 1500 both city councils perceived sanitation services as ‘necessary for the commonwealth’ and ‘one of the components of good and godly rule in the late medieval/early modern English city’. 1 In relation to the late medieval period, Carole Rawcliffe found that although ‘ordinances for the removal of the intimidating quantities of garbage, dung and other detritus’ which accumulated in urban centres were common by the mid-fourteenth century, they ‘increased exponentially after the Black Death’ and ‘the financial and logistical challenges faced by magistrates remained daunting’. 2 Thus, urban governors’ tenacious efforts to combat inadequate sanitation in the early modern period were not unprecedented, but rather medieval initiatives dovetailed quite seamlessly into the early modern epoch, with some modification, as part and parcel of the medieval inheritance of civic governance.
