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âGREAT STENCHES, HORRIBLE SIGHTS, AND DEADLY ABOMINATIONSâ
Butchery and the battle against plague in late medieval English towns
Carole Rawcliffe
In early January 1350 as the people of Norwich were counting the cost of their first devastating experience of bubonic plague, the bailiffsâ court, then the most important judicial body in the city, resumed its hearings. Not surprisingly, given the recent level of disruption and scale of mortality, few individuals then faced prosecution, but one case, in particular, attracts attention, not least for the severity of the sentence. It concerns a local butcher named William Brok, who was found guilty of selling âmeat of oxen and sheep measly, bad and putrid through ageâ (succematas corruptas et pro vetustate putridas). The offending wares were to be burnt, while Brok himself was to be imprisoned at the courtâs pleasure, but only after spending an unspecified time in the public pillory.1 We do not know if, as was already the case in London, the rotting meat was actually burnt beneath him as he endured this very public humiliation, but at a slightly later date corrupt foodstuffs were customarily destroyed on a bonfire in the middle of Norwich market, right next to the pillory.2
It was certainly appropriate that one whose merchandise had polluted the environment and endangered the lives of his fellow citizens should be obliged to inhale the noxious fumes of contaminated meat. For, in the context of a community recently ravaged by pestilence, Brokâs conduct must have seemed little short of homicidal, as other contemporary urban records confirm. One of the very first measures instituted by the rulers of Venice when plague struck in 1348 was to order the incineration of infected pork, âwhich creates a great stench and attendant putrefaction that corrupts the airâ.3 Ordinances passed by the mayor and aldermen of London in the aftermath of the second great national epidemic of 1361â1362 specifically warned victuallers against retaining foodstuffs until they became âcorrupt and stinkingâ, upon pain of the draconian punishment just described.4
This chapter will explore the ways in which a steadily growing body of regulations for the control of butchers and butchery in late medieval English towns can illuminate and develop our knowledge of urban responses to epidemic disease. Having established the extent to which the populace at large acquired a working knowledge of relatively sophisticated and complex theories about human physiology, it will concentrate upon the impact of these ideas upon the built environment. We can detect a close relationship between the fear of plague and the creation of purpose-built slaughterhouses and meat markets, the introduction of designated refuse-disposal systems and the practical steps taken to safeguard water supplies from contamination by blood and offal. Systematic attempts were also made to oversee the quality of the urban meat supply through the more stringent inspection of markets and introduction of byelaws designed to eliminate insanitary practices.
A few scholars have already drawn specific attention to some of these initiatives: one of the three pioneering articles on public health in fourteenth-century London published in the 1930s by Ernest Sabine focused upon the cityâs butchers. Although he did not attempt to place the measures that he described within the wider context of contemporary medical beliefs, Sabine was convinced that there must have been âsome correlationâ between them and âthe ravages of the Black Deathâ. He also felt it important to document the efforts made by the civic authorities to curb pollution and protect the community as a whole.5 Both Philip Jones and David Carr have reiterated this message, the former in an official history of the Butchersâ Company of London in which he approvingly documents various early campaigns âto improve sanitary conditionsâ. He does not, however, consider why âthe dangers of contamination and contagionâ came to be so closely associated with unregulated butchery, or explore any possible connections between fear of infection and the imposition of tighter controls.6 Carrâs brief survey of the ways in which late medieval English towns dealt with their butchers resorts to similar generalisations. While maintaining that magistrates were primarily motived by a âsimple desire to have a more pleasant, more ârespectableâ urban environmentâ, he nevertheless concedes â without further elaboration â that a contemporary âmythâ attributing the spread of disease to airborne miasmas may also have gained âbroad acceptanceâ.7
Despite the appearance of a rapidly growing corpus of publications that explores this âmythâ and its impact on late medieval strategies for the preservation of communal health,8 the assumption that men and women (and especially English men and women) remained supine in the face of pestilence still persists in some academic circles. As recently as 2012, Ole Benedictow argued that it was not until the sixteenth century that people ceased to accept epidemics âfatalistically as a divine punishment for human sinâ and began to regard them as a ânatural phenomenon . . . that could be prevented, limited or halted by human countermeasuresâ.9 It would be foolish to deny that plague was, ultimately, regarded as an act of divine retribution (which might, significantly, be assuaged through charitable works, such as the provision of refuse-disposal systems), but we need also to recognise that more immediate and potentially more manageable agents seemed also to be involved.10
Butchery and the transmission of plague
Chief among these agents was corrupt air, which had long been blamed for the spread of epidemics and was frequently associated with the stench arising from butchersâ waste. Indeed, the vernacular plague tracts or concilia which circulated in increasing numbers during the late fourteenth and fifteenth century warned specifically against the threat posed by âstynken caryn cast in the water nye to the cytees or townes, as the boles [entrails] of bestesâ.11 The reader was consequently urged âto eschew halle euyl aers [all evil air], as to say in stabulys, ffyldys & strettys & namely the heer [air] of bestys that soddenly dye & be stynkyngâ.12 Advice manuals of this kind drew heavily on the Canon of Avicenna, which had formed the bedrock of the European medical syllabus since the thirteenth century. An influential passage in book four describes the toxic effect of miasmatic exhalations upon the human body:
Shorn of their theoretical underpinnings, these ideas began to percolate downwards through society at a comparatively early date, their transmission (often through the medium of statutes, royal ordinances, civic proclamations, and local byelaws) being hastened by repeated outbreaks of plague from the 1360s onwards.14 It is hardly surprising that the University authorities in Cambridge, who knew their Avicenna, should insist in the aftermath of the fourth national pestilence of 1374â1375 that all âputrid fleshâ and other noxious waste had to be removed from the butchersâ shops every morning and evening. Even so, their response was far from unusual.15
Notwithstanding the fact that Londonâs three major meat markets and slaughterhouses had already been consigned to peripheral areas, including St. Nicholas Shambles at Newgate (see the map in Figure 1.1), we can readily appreciate why Edward III prohibited the butchering of animals anywhere near the city during the second and third great national epidemics of 1361â1362 and 1368â1369. His attempts permanently to remove such activities to Knightsbridge (in the west) and Stratford (in the north-east) nonetheless had unwelcome consequences an...