In Pursuit of Healthy Environments

Historical Cases on the Environment-Health Nexus

Esa Ruuskanen, Heini Hakosalo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000215588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica sociale

In Pursuit of Healthy Environments brings temporal depth to a highly topical issue, the interaction between health and the environment. By means of a rich set of historical case studies from Americas to Europe and from the tropics to the Arctic, the volume demonstrates that the concern for creating and finding healthy environments is not a new one, shows how the link between the environment and health has been perceived at different times and in different cultures, and discusses the practical implications of these conceptualizations.

The book written by scholars from architecture, cultural anthropology, history, Indigenous Studies, media studies and sociology will be of interest to a reader interested in the historical roots of present health-related environmental issues. It discusses the spatiality and materiality of the conceptions of health and the practices of nurture in colonial and post-colonial environments and shows how greatly indigenous and colonial mindsets have differed during the last 300 years.

It also investigates how certain environments have become labelled as healthy and life-preserving while others stigmatized by death and disease and how fluctuating these notions can be. Finally, it analyses the materialities and immaterialities, as well as the transgenerational and transboundary characters of environmental and medical knowledge.

Part I

Healthy and unhealthy environments

Chapter 1

Crafts and cleanliness

The regulation of noxious business activity in English towns during the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries

Dolly Jørgensen

Introduction

In their plan for cleaning the River Wensum in 1532, Norwich town council identified the businesses that should be charged more than the average resident for river cleaning operations because their trades had a more significant effect on the river’s quality: “barkers, dyers, calaundrers, parchementmakers, tewers, sadelers, brewers, wasshers of shepe, and all suche great noyers of the same rever tobe ffurder charged than other persons shalbe….”¹ Twenty years later, Norwich town council reiterated their stance on polluting industries – “dyers, calendrers, tanners, glovers, parchemyn makers, brewers and encrochers of the river” – as annoyances in the town because of pollution.²

Norwich’s list of polluters is quite comprehensive: textile manufacturing (launderers, washers of sheep skins, dyers), leather working (barkers, tawyers, saddlers, tanners, glovers, and parchment-makers) and brewers. These particular trades consumed significant quantities of water and often generated noxious wastes which contaminated water sources. Noxious here connotes both harmful and unpleasant which, as this chapter will show, was the case with these crafts’ by-products. Norwich councilmen therefore felt justified in levying higher environmental taxes on these businesses. The Norwich lists provide a starting point for a more general inquiry into the environmental aspect of the relationship between late medieval/early modern business and boroughs in England.

Before delving into the sanitary controls placed onto these crafts, we need to recognize their importance in the premodern urban milieu. From English lists of taxpayers and citizens, historians have reconstructed the general employment scene in various cities.³ A detailed study of Norwich’s economy from 1275 to 1348 showed that almost half of the working population was in manufacturing, a quarter provided food and drink, 15% were merchants and traders and the remainder provided services, worked in the building trades, or were artists. Leather and cloth working were the largest manufacturing industries in Norwich.⁴ Records for Coventry show a similar picture: of the 739 persons named in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century records, there were 211 (29%) in the cloth trades, 132 (18%) merchants, 108 (15%) metal workers, 80 (11%) in the production of food and drink and 79 (11%) in leather and fur trades. The cloth trades, therefore, dominated the town economy, although metal and leather working were also significant. Members of the leading crafts were influential in local government: by 1450, the guilds of the drapers, dyers, smiths, shoemakers, and whittawers (white tanners) all had members who had held town offices.⁵ Textile manufacturing in the late fourteenth century likewise dominated York, with about 28% of the freemen involved in the industry. It appears, however, that the textile crafts suffered decline and contraction in the fifteenth century.⁶ These figures reveal the significance of crafts to the medieval urban economy. Of particular importance for this study, we see that cloth working, leatherworking, and victualing comprised high proportions of the working population in the English towns.

Location also plays an important role in the discussion of environmental effect of each industry. In the Middle Ages, businesses of the same type tended to be located together in specific parts of town. Modern streets with names such as Fishmongers Row and Shambles Street are legacies of this practice. Historians often identify where the different trades operated in some cities based on property records, naming evidence and archaeological finds.

The regulation of businesses for product quality is well-known to medieval historians. Local government officials actively monitored the freshness of meats and fish and the quality of goods such as cloth sold in the marketplace. Guilds, which organized the craftspeople, managed the output of their individual members to maintain industry standards. Guild regulations, which were approved and enacted by local authorities, covered the quality of input materials, the types of permitted processing, final goods standards, and labour organization. Governments monitored the production of food and drink to ensure the health and well-being of residents; butchers, for example, were often condemned in local ordinances for selling rotten meat.⁷

As this chapter will show, in addition to market-focused economic measures, local government also regulated craft businesses with an eye on their output to the environment that could have detrimental health effects. The trades listed in the Norwich documents – textile manufacturing, leather working, and brewing – were the target of environmental urban laws. Although industry was vital to the urban economy, premodern local governments were unwilling to overlook the environmental consequences of many craft operations. The authorities recognized potential polluters and created environmental laws to limit damage to both property and residents. The sections below present the environmental effects of each craft type called out in the Norwich list and identify the ways in which English local governments attempted to regulate their activities to promote cleanliness.

Textile manufacture

The technology of medieval textile manufacturing involved heavy use of water, which during the course of the processing steps, became contaminated with oils, fibres and bacteria. Textile manufacturers in northern Europe primarily worked with wool or linen (made from flax or hemp). Wool was prepared by carding (using a board with teeth to separate the fibres), spinning, weaving, and then fulling. In the fulling process, the wool cloth was trampled underfoot while submerged in water. The fuller added clay, known as fullers’ earth, to the water to remove the wool oils and speed the matting process. Cloth was fulled in a tub of water or directly in a water body. The processing of flax and hemp included removing the seeds and soaking the steams in water (called “retting”) to soften the fibre by bacterial action. After the stems were washed and dried, they were beaten and scraped to remove the outside fibres. After being woven, the linen cloth was washed again and then bleached in the sun.⁸ Cloth preparation thus resulted in the release of oils, seeds, stems, and loose fibres to the water. In addition, the process of retting created foul-smelling, noxious effluent.⁹

Town governments identified these textile production outputs as a menace to cleanliness and acted to control this source of water pollution. In Norwich, a complaint against the Dutch and Walloon textile workers charged that they were cleaning their wool processing equipment on the banks of the river to “the greate infeccion of the same.” In addition, the workers combed wool in their open shops and poured out the wash water from their shop floors into the gutters. Because the water contained combing fibres and the workers did not pour supplemental clean water into the gutter to wash the residue downstream, it “reasteth in the gutters and breade the greate infeccions …”¹⁰ Norwich council responded by banning the washing of wool equipment at the river and ordered that wool combing must not take place near the street. This kind of regulation was nothing new – according to the York Civic Ordinances of 1301, canvas and linen were not permitted in the gutters.¹¹ In addition, the Norwich regulations required the wool workers to throw out scouring water only at night and to cast additional clean water after it so that the wool particles and contaminated water would “passe to the cockeyes under the grownde withoute the hurte of anye parson.”¹² Water pollution from cloth working was clearly identified in this passage as the cause of health problems.

Blocked water drains and washwater would become stagnant and create odours, which, at the time, were linked to disease.¹³ Thus, local governments worked hard to maintain free-flowing waterways.¹⁴ Although the flax and wool cloth-processing activities had economic benefits for the town, the councils were not willing to sacrifice sanitation to support the cloth industry. Because of Coventry’s significant cloth working industry, retting in the River Sherbourne appears to have been enough of a problem that in 1554, the council ordered that no one was allowed to place any hemp or flax in the river.¹⁵ They also banned the washing of cloth from looms at the drinking water conduit because this would have caused contamination of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Healthy and unhealthy environments
• Part II Colonial environments and health
• Part III Environmental and medical knowledge
• Index