Crop rotation in the 14th century

The Year of the Plague, part 4

Part One: The Worst Year Ever
Part Two: Rats
Part Three: Rome’s Miserable Fate

London at the time was about a quarter the size of Paris, a city of 50,000 people lined with narrow streets, and spilling out of its Roman walls. It would have been crowded, and notably unhygienic. The Fleet, a tributary which flowed into the Thames just west of the city, was filled with the filth of eleven latrines and three sewers, so ‘choked with sludge, garbage, and human and animal waste that water barely flowed’, as Robert Gottfried put it. Unfortunately for anyone convicted of a crime, the Fleet Prison had been built inside a moat on the river, so conditions were insalubrious, to put it mildly. If they didn’t catch diseases, then they might simply starve; of 50 prisoners who died in nearby Newgate Prison in the 1320s and 1330s, two passed away from hunger, which indicates the level of comfort one might expect inside. There were alternatives to imprisonment, however; Cheapside, the City’s high street, was home to the city’s main pillory, where rotting meat or worse might be thrown at convicted felons, an ordeal that could prove fatal.

Sewage and drinking water were often in close proximity, while tanners and dyers’ waste also went into the water supply. One coroner’s report at the time sadly reported how ‘John Funke, died 1348, having been sick in bed, rose to wandering at midnight as though he were mad, fell into a cesspit and there drowned.’ Not the most dignified of exits. The year before, the government’s ‘Assize of Nuisances’ found that two men were piping their excrement into a neighbour’s cellar – which began to overflow, with gruesome results.