To view the reconstructions you will need London: The greatest city
Medieval London
By the 12th century, London was once again the largest, wealthiest city in England. Its population of around 20,000 was double the size of its nearest rival, York.
It pours out its fame more widely, sends to farther lands its wealth and trade, lifts its head higher than the rest.
William Fitzstephen, A Description of London, 1173
'London was so successful because it was a good port,' says author Professor Maxwell Hutchinson. 'That's why the Romans chose it in the first place. We have this large conurbation with a great deal of energy, manufacturing energy and financial energy, so we were a powerhouse of making and selling and trading.'
William conquers
The Norman king, William the Conqueror, had recognised London's importance when he made sure he was crowned in the newly built abbey at Westminster, close to the modern Houses of Parliament. Westminster was where the king resided when he was in London. But in the Middle Ages, it was a separate town, four miles down the river from the City of London, the commercial centre in the east.
The Normans made a point of building the hulking fortress of the Tower of London right on the edge of the city. According to Simon Thurley, chief executive of English Heritage, 'People look at the Tower of London and think: "That was built to defend the City from incoming invaders." Well, that's nonsense. It was built to subjugate and to dominate the City.'
London as a factory
Medieval London was still largely confined within the walls of the Roman city. By the 1300s, the same 448-acre site was heaving with 80,000 people. Space was in such short supply that enterprising souls built houses, and even a church, on the medieval bridge.
Whole streets were devoted to one trade or craft – their names survive today in the modern financial district. The city had become one of the trading and manufacturing capitals of Europe, producing everything from woollen cloth to weapons – a huge factory sucking in workers.
'It's difficult for us today to understand the medieval city as a multitude of simultaneous activities,' says Professor Hutchinson. 'People living, people bringing up families, being educated, worshipping and, most important of all, making and trading. But all cheek by jowl. They don't separate industry and living.'
Industrial pollution and bad hygiene
But the tightly packed city would become a victim of its own success. In its expansion lay the seeds of disaster. Its infrastructure was primitive, its hygiene poor, its citizens at the mercy of foul diseases. The seething mass of people was a death trap.
By the 14th century, industrial pollution was endemic. London's public services were creaking under the strain of its bloated population. 'By our standards, London would have been a very unpleasant, dirty, smelly place to live,' says author Philip Ziegler. 'The streets were always narrow; now they were cramped. The houses grew together. The streets would have a gutter on each side, and between these a muddy track that divided the houses. It was a pretty squalid scene.'
'There was a lot of industry in the medieval city, and this produced an enormous amount of smell,' says historian Benedict Gummer. 'The tanneries boiling up leather, wool and sheepskin caused the most disgusting stench.
'And then, of course, there was the simple fact that people did not wash, so you'd be used to an overwhelming smell of body odour. People slept in the same bed, if they had a bed at all. People would wear clothes when they slept; they would very rarely change. Bathing was taken to be almost profligate, not something you'd normally do.
'So there was an overweening smell of the muck and faeces of both humans and animals – and, most importantly, of the industry that was going on around you.'
Controlling the filth
The city authorities did make an effort to keep the streets free of rubbish by employing an army of cleaners, paid for by the local residents. From 1345, anyone convicted of throwing refuse into the lanes was fined the huge sum of two shillings and forced to remove it.
'A serious effort was made to control the filth – the offal and refuse that gathered in the streets,' says Philip Ziegler. 'Rakers with carts, who were attached to each ward, would come round and take away the larger stuff. There were scavengers who would get rid of the mess, and those who allowed their streets to become fouled and foetid were fined quite heavily. It certainly was a strong incentive to keep the streets in order.
'There was one celebrated case where a peddler tossed an eel skin into the gutter. The furious citizens descended on him, saying, "Do you realise that you could get us fined?" and started assaulting him. And he ended up dead, poor chap.'
Open sewers
But London was so much larger than any other city in Britain, and its sanitary dilemmas were overwhelming. Its biggest hygiene problem was the very river on which its prosperity was founded. By the 14th century, the banks of the Thames had become a dumping ground for tons of domestic rubbish and noxious industrial waste, from tanners, dyers and slaughterhouses.
The city's many butchers were some of the worst offenders. Throughout the 14th century, the authorities tried in vain to stop them fouling the river and streets with putrid meat, offal and entrails.
For water, Londoners relied mainly on wells, although in the early 13th century, the city fathers had built a pipe to bring water from the springs in the west to the public pump. Only the very rich had toilets. The night soil man had the unenviable task of emptying the city cesspits and removing the contents, much of which found its way into the river.
'A number of rivers flowed through the city into the river Thames,' says Benedict Gummer. 'Rivers and ditches that became effectively open sewers. Not only were people discharging their own human effluent into these ditches, but industry, too. It seems extraordinary to us that it was more than likely that people took their drinking water – and certainly the water they were using to wash utensils and food – from the river Thames.'
The king complains
The king, the autocratic Edward III (1312-77), was moved to complain to the authorities about the foul state of the capital, which he suspected would lead to disaster:
When passing along the water of Thames, we have beheld dung and lay stools and other filth accumulated in diverse places within the city, and have also perceived the fumes and other abominable stenches arising therefrom, from the corruption of which great peril to persons dwelling within the said city will, it is feared, ensue.
'Importantly for Edward III,' says Benedict Gummer, 'it was the smell that was bad. The idea of disease then was entirely different from our own. For people in the Middle Ages, the actual smell itself was what was bad for you. They had no idea that you should wash your hands or bathe regularly or clean food rigorously to make sure that it is clean for eating. So we know from archaeological studies that conditions such as amoebic dysentery, tapeworms, boreworms and whipworms were very common in the population.'
The Black Death
Weakened by so many diseases, Londoners were acutely vulnerable to a terrible plague that had been sweeping in from Asia – the Black Death. The first wave hit the city in 1348. To the medieval mind, it was caused by a miasma: a cloud of putrid air. But it's now believed that the Black Death was spread either on the breath of infected people or carried in rats' blood and transmitted by the bites of fleas.
'From the point of view of the rat, London was the ideal holiday camp,' says Philip Ziegler. 'It was warm, there was plenty of food around, the houses were made of wood and clay, which made wonderful areas for nesting. It was a rat's paradise. And because they were there and because Londoners lived in hideously congested circles, one could almost guarantee that, once somebody in a house had got the plague, it was very unlikely that anybody else there would survive.'
The victims were affected by boils or tumours in the armpit or groin, flu-like symptoms and vomiting. The only cure on offer was lancing the boils. More often families resorted to praying for the victims, who usually died within a matter of days, or even hours.
By 1349, the death rate was so high that bodies were thrown into common pits with nothing more than rough lead crosses. In all, the Black Death wiped out over a third of London's population of around 80,000, including the king's own daughter – the equivalent of four million people in today's conurbation.
Brimming cemeteries
The city ground to a halt. 'The infrastructure of London's public services – which was never very robust at the best of times – crumbled under the impact of the plague,' says Philip Ziegler. 'And having to dispose of something like 20,000 corpses, which had to be transported from the centre of the town to vast new communal graveyards, put an impossible burden on the city.'
London did not sort out a proper sewage system for another 500 years. Until then, its citizens were haunted by the spectre of disease. The Black Death returned to London almost every generation for the rest of the 14th century.
'The cemeteries were brimming,' says Benedict Gummer. 'Whole trades were wiped out. Some of the guilds had lost all of their officers. It was as if an atom bomb had been dropped on the city. So the impact was absolutely cataclysmic.
No family in London was untouched by the Black Death. It would be another 300 years before the city experienced disease on this scale again.
