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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
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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).