It would be inappropriate, in a book of this scope, to attempt any profound or detailed analysis of day-to-day life in a medieval city. Nevertheless there is much about the state of London, as for that matter about Paris or Florence, which is directly relevant to any study of the plague, since there were certain built-in features in the Londoner’s pattern of life which contributed directly to its successful spread. Perhaps the most relevant of these was the overcrowding. Privacy was not a concept close to the heart of medieval man and even in the grandest castle life was conducted in a perpetual crowd. Hoccleve writes of an earl and countess, their daughter and their daughter’s governess who all slept in the same room. It would not be in the least surprising to know that they slept in the same bed as well if, indeed, there was a bed. In the houses of the poor, where beds were an unheard of luxury, it would not have been exceptional to find a dozen people sleeping on the floor of the same room. In the country villages, indeed in many urban houses as well, pigs and chickens and perhaps even ponies, cows and sheep, would share the common residence. Even if people had realized that such a step was desirable it would have been physically impossible to isolate the sick. The surprise is not how many households were totally wiped out but, rather, in how many cases some at least of the inhabitants survived.
The dirt and inadequate sanitation of these hovels was, strictly speaking, less relevant to the spread of the Black Death. No one was going to become infected with bubonic plague by drinking tainted water or breathing foetid air. But, equally, it is true that the plague found its work easier in bodies weakened by dysentery, diarrhoea or the thousand natural shocks that the unclean body is particularly heir to. Still more important; warmth and dirt provide the ideal environment for the rat. The eventual victory of the brown rat over the plague-bearing black rat was in part due to the physical superiority of the former, but, at least as important, was a tribute to the rise in the standard of living and the substitution of brick for clay and wood which deprived the black rat of his sustenance and favourite way of life. The medieval house might have been built to specifications approved by a rodent council as eminently suitable for the rat’s enjoyment of a healthy and care-free life.
What one might call the cinematic image of a medieval town is well known. Lanes barely wide enough to allow two ponies to pass meander between the steep walls of houses which grow together at the top, so as almost to blot out the light of day. The lanes themselves – they seem indeed more drains than lanes – are deep in mud and filth; no doubt to be attributed to the myriad buxom servant-wenches who appear at the upper windows and empty chamber pots filled with excrement on the passers-by. No street corner is without the body of a dead donkey and a beggar exhibiting his gruesome sores and deformities to the charitable citizens. Clearly one is in a society where hygiene counts for nothing and no town council would waste its time supervising the cleaning of streets or the emptying of cesspools.
The picture, though of course over-drawn, is not entirely false. A medieval city, by modern standards, would seem a pretty filthy and smelly spot. But it would be unfair to suggest that citizens and rulers were indifferent to the nuisance or did nothing to remedy it. Thanks to the researches of Mr E. L. Sabine{287} and others, we now know much about conditions in London and the activities of the mayor, aldermen and common council. Though London, as the largest city of England, had the most serious problems, so also it had the greatest resources with which to deal with them. The overall picture of London’s filth or cleanliness will be more or less valid for most of England’s towns and cities.
Sanitary equipment, it need hardly be said, was scarce and primitive. In monasteries or castles, ‘garderobes’ were relatively common. Since 1307, the Palace of Westminster boasted a pipe between the king’s lavatory and the main sewer which had been installed to carry away the filth from the royal kitchen. But this was probably unique in London; usually the privies of the aristocrats jutted out over the Thames so that their excrement would fall directly in the river or splash down the face of the castle wall. The situation was worse when the privies projected, not over a free flowing river but above a shallow stream or ditch. An inquest into the state of the Fleet Prison Ditch in 1355 revealed that, though it should have been ten feet wide and deep enough to float a boat laden with a tun of wine, it was choked by the filth from eleven latrines and three sewers. So deep was the resultant sludge that no water from Fleet Stream was flowing around the prison moat.
