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TY - ELEC
A1 - Foley, Christopher
ED - Jenstad, Janelle
T1 - Sewage and Waste Management
T2 - The Map of Early Modern London
ET - 7.0
PY - 2022
DA - 2022/05/05
CY - Victoria
PB - University of Victoria
LA - English
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/SEWA1.htm
UR - https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/edition/7.0/xml/standalone/SEWA1.xml
ER -
From at least the mid-fourteenth century onward, the threat of improperly disposed waste was a serious—and persistent—concern to royal and civic officials. This concern was motivated by religious ideology as well as premodern medical theories of disease-transmission (e.g., miasmic and humoral theories). To assist in the practical implementation of city-cleaning efforts, the mayors and aldermen of English towns and cities instituted a number of administrative positions and regulations devoted to the cleansing of city streets and waterways. By the seventeenth century, punishments for transgressors against waste-management regulations were notably severe, especially in London, where a growing population and urban density put increasing pressure on waste-management systems. Issues of sewage and waste figure prominently in popular literature from the late-Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods, as is seen in works by
Project Manager, 2020-2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019-2020. Research Assistant, 2018-2020. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. She published papers in
Programmer, 2018-present. Junior Programmer, 2015-2017. Research Assistant, 2014-2017. Joey Takeda was a graduate student at the University of British Columbia in the Department of English (Science and Technology research stream). He completed his BA honours in English (with a minor in Women’s Studies) at the University of Victoria in 2016. His primary research interests included diasporic and indigenous Canadian and American literature, critical theory, cultural studies, and the digital humanities.
Project Manager, 2015-2019. Katie Tanigawa was a doctoral candidate at the University of Victoria. Her dissertation focused on representations of poverty in Irish modernist literature. Her additional research interests included geospatial analyses of modernist texts and digital humanities approaches to teaching and analyzing literature.
Data Manager, 2015-2016. Research Assistant, 2013-2015. Tye completed his undergraduate honours degree in English at the University of Victoria in 2015.
Director of Pedagogy and Outreach, 2015–2020. Associate Project Director, 2015. Assistant Project Director, 2013-2014. MoEML Research Fellow, 2013. Kim McLean-Fiander comes to
Janelle Jenstad is Associate Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of
Christopher Foley received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in December 2015. His research interests include Renaissance drama, urban ecology, and civic management initiatives in early modern London. He has also worked on a number of digital humanities projects housed in the UCSB English Department, including the English Broadside Ballad Archive, the Early Modern British Theatre: Access initiative, and the Early Modern Center’s online publishing platform:the EMC Imprint.
Programmer at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC). Martin ported the MOL project from its original PHP incarnation to a pure eXist database implementation in the fall of 2011. Since then, he has been lead programmer on the project and has also been responsible for maintaining the project schemas. He was a co-applicant on MoEML’s 2012 SSHRC Insight Grant.
Playwright, poet, and author.
King of England
King of Scotland
Poet and playwright.
Playwright and poet.
Writer.
Hero and god in Roman mythology. Famous for his strength.
Second Baron Harington of Exton. Courtier.
All Good Rule of the Citee: Sanitation and Civic Government in England, 1400–1600
The city of London, not to be confused with the allegorical character (
Moorditch was the section of the City Ditch outside the Wall, which ran east-west from Bishopsgate to Moorgate (Sugden).
The Fleet, known as
Our editorial and encoding practices are documented in detail in the Praxis section of our website.
From at least the mid-fourteenth century onward, the threat of improperly disposed waste was a serious—and persistent—concern to royal and civic officials. This concern was motivated by ideology as well as premodern medical theories of disease-transmission. For ideological reasons, civic officials strove to maintain the ideal, divinely ordained social and spatial order within their urban communities. Anyone or anything not in its
To assist in the practical implementation of city-cleaning efforts, the mayors and aldermen of English towns and cities instituted a number of localized administrative positions devoted to the cleansing of city streets and waterways. These lower-ranking positions emerged first in London, beginning in the fourteenth century, and had spread to other English towns by the sixteenth century (Sabine; Jørgenson). In London, the Sergeant of the Channels surveyed local streets and lanes to make sure they were kept free of rubbish; he also had the power to fine violators.
Waste-management regulations and city-cleaning efforts in early modern London and other English cities and towns continued regularly, if periodically, in a similar fashion until the seventeenth century, when the severity of punishments for transgressors against waste-management regulations notably increased (Sabine 318). Especially in London, this increased severity was clearly a consequence of the city’s phenomenal population growth and dramatically increased urban density, which placed a corresponding pressure on the urban ecological environment with respect to collective waste disposal. In fact, the modern, principally cloacal connotation of the word
Commission of the Sewersunder
This growing public concern is also evident in popular literature from the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean periods.
scowring of Moore-ditchto
the cleansing of Augeaes stable(Dekker sig. B4r-B4v), while
louder than the ox in Livyand sinks (i.e., open sewers) that
pour outtheir rage against the intrepid travelers (Jonson ll.74-75).