ABSTRACT
The majority of urban dwellers valued a clean environment in the outdoor public spaces where they lived and worked. Contemporaries went to considerable lengths to protect their collective neighbourhood standards of outdoor cleanliness against the minority of neighbours whose inconsiderate waste disposal arrangements and noxious activities threatened to undermine those standards. In the urban neighbourhoods of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, the overwhelming majority of neighbours lived in streets and vennels which hosted a necessary, but problematic, combination of human activities. The confluence of noxious, unsavoury waste materials emanating from the workshops of butchers, dyers, tanners, soap-boilers, skinners and tallow-chandlers, as well as those from both agricultural backlands and dwellings, was potentially overwhelming, especially during periods of hot weather. Such conditions were not conducive to harmonious neighbourly relations. Keith Wrightson noted in his important essay, ‘The “Decline of Neighbourliness” Revisited’, that ‘the evidence surviving for the … early seventeenth century abundantly demonstrates the vitality of the concept of neighbourliness as both a centrally important social relationship and a primary social ideal’. 1 While neighbourliness was, indeed, a central social ideal, this chapter argues that the daily business of living together, in often very densely populated urban streets, vennels and closes, strained neighbourly relations. Insanitary nuisance was a perennial problem, which quite often caused conflict between more and less fastidious neighbours. For example, in October 1635, the Bristol Court Leet Jurors presented Robert Evans and fined him 10s ‘for throwing downe fish water in St Mary Porte Streete being very noisome to the passers by as also to the neighbours and beinge by them reproved … answered contemptuously he would doe it againe in spite’. 2 This chapter explores the bottom-up, micropolitics which surrounded insanitary nuisances in the urban neighbourhoods of several English towns before focusing on the case studies of Edinburgh and York. It explains inhabitants’ positive reactions to suffering insanitary nuisances as such experiences encouraged them to develop their attitudes towards sanitation and to use their local courts proactively not only to suppress nuisances but also to prevent their recurrence in the long term. It highlights the large extent to which inhabitants could and did engage with, and thereby supported, environmental regulation from above by initiating complaints at their courts, petitioning their urban councils to request more stringent regulation and complying with bylaws pertaining to waste disposal and noxious trades themselves. Neighbours in the Low Countries also worked together to force urban governors to improve the environment. On 30 October 1633, neighbours living in the Hoogstraat, the Poel and the Drabstraat in Ghent complained to their local governors about the erection of a salt refinery. 3 The Ghent governors supported the neighbours, discontinuing the refinery's activities and henceforth buildings which produced noxious fumes could not be erected until the entrepreneur had obtained the written permission of their neighbours. As Harald Deceulaer notes, formal neighbourhood organizations were absent in the Low Countries in the middle ages, and therefore this neighbourhood institution marks an important discontinuity in the early modern period, highlighting that Ghent's neighbours played no formal institutional role in the administration of justice or in the policing of the town until after 1584. 4
