ABSTRACT
Establishing the cultural attitudes and values of late-sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English and Scottish urban dwellers towards the cleanliness of outdoor, public spaces has been this book's key task. It has explored how local and national governors, civic employees and urban inhabitants, living in Edinburgh, York and many other towns and cities across Scotland and England, managed the disposal of waste and limited the creation of insanitary nuisances in the urban landscape. Regardless of their ultimate failure to achieve the pristine streets towards which they passionately aspired, and to eliminate insanitary nuisances completely, they were highly and consistently motivated to invest significant amounts of their time, money and effort into improving sanitation. Urban governors and the majority of those under their governance certainly wanted to curtail malodours and unpleasant and problematic waste within collectively tolerable parameters for the benefit of inhabitants and visitors alike. They valued living, and perhaps more importantly breathing, in a clean environment, in their streets and in other outdoor public spaces, and they aspired towards a clearly defined and collectively imagined standard of cleanliness in the urban landscape. It is indisputable that early modern urban dwellers and their governors appreciated inhabiting an environment which was devoid of foul smells and unpleasant waste materials, and they certainly made a distinction between what they labelled unambiguously as a ‘nasty’, ‘filthy’ or ‘noisome’ street and, conversely, what they labelled as a ‘sweet’ and ‘clean’ street. In short, contemporaries drew a line between what they considered acceptable and unacceptable and they endeavoured to maintain that standard, as individuals, as neighbours, as wards and parishes, and as inhabitants of the respective towns and cities of which they were clearly so very proud. How clean the environment actually was matters far less than contemporaries’ changing perceptions of it and their variable efforts to improve it and to uphold or to attempt to uphold their own standards of cleanliness.
