5IO TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



were confined to these places also. The source of the food supply was, therefore, 

 foul. . . . Places of public resort were without means of ventilation. The air 

 of the churches was death-dealing, and made tolerable only by the fumes of 

 incense. (Gorton.) Personal cleanliness was unknown; great officers of state, 

 even dignitaries as high as the Archbishop of Canterbury, swarmed with vermin ; 

 such it is related was the condition of Thomas a' Becket, the antagonist of an 

 English king. To conceal personal impurity, perfumes were necessarily and 

 profusely used. The citizen clothed himself in leather, a garment, which, with 

 its ever-accumulating impurity, might last for many years. . . . After night-fall 

 the chamber shutters were thrown open, and slops unceremoniously emptied 

 down. (Draper.)^ 



From the fourteenth to the sixteenth century plagues were frequent 

 and attended with great mortality. Among the plagues known by 

 various names as the " sweating sickness/' " black death/' etc., we are 

 able to distinguish bubonic plague, typhus and small-pox. Likewise 

 syphilis had been on the increase since the fifteenth century, and pre- 



^ The original upon which these statements are based I have been unable to 

 obtain. Gorton's statement is evidently at second hand. C. Creighton in his 

 "History of Epidemics in Great Britain" doubts the accuracy of the sweeping 

 charges "of neglect of public hygiene" and "of lack of rudimentary instincts 

 of cleanliness" in Plantagenet and Tudor times, but as careful a writer as 

 F. Harrison gives in ' ' The Meaning of History ' ' the following summary of 

 personal and community hygiene in the Middle Ages: 



' ' The old Greek and Eoman religion of external cleanness was turned into 

 a sin. The outward and visible sign of sanctity now was to be unclean. No one 

 was clean; but the devout Christian was unutterably foul. The tone of the 

 Middle Ages in the matter of dirt was a form of mental disease. Cooped up in 

 castles and walled cities, with narrow courts and sunless alleys, they would pass 

 day and night in the same clothes, within the same airless, gloomy, windowless 

 and pestiferous chambers ; they would go to bed without night clothes, and sleep 

 under uncleansed sheep-skins and frieze rugs; they would wear the same leather,^ 

 fur and woolen garments for a lifetime, and even for successive generations ; they 

 ate their meals without forks, and covered up the orts with rushes; they flung 

 their refuse out of the window into the street or piled it up in the back-yard; 

 the streets were narrow, unpaved, crooked lanes through which, imder the very 

 palace turrets, men and beasts tramped knee-deep in noisome mire. This was at 

 intervals varied with fetid rivulets and open cesspools ; every church was crammed 

 with rotting corpses and surrounded with graveyards, sodden with cadaveric 

 liquids, and strewn with disinterred bones. Bound these charnel houses and 

 pestiferous churches were piled old decaying wooden houses, their sole air being 

 these deadly exhalations, and their sole water supply being these polluted streams 

 or wells dug in this reeking soil. Even in the palaces and castles of the rich the 

 same bestial habits prevailed. Prisoners rotted in noisome dungeons under the 

 banqueting hall; corpses were buried under the floor of the private chapel; 

 scores of soldiers and attendants slept in gangs for months together in the same 

 hall or guard-room where they ate and drank, played and fought. It is one of 

 those problems which still remain for historians to solve — how the race ever 

 survived the insanitary conditions of the Middle Ages, and still more how it was 

 ever continued — what was the normal death-rate and the normal birth-rate of 

 cities? The towns were no doubt maintained by immigration, and the rural 

 labourer had the best chance of life, if he could manage to escape death by 

 violence or famine. ' ' 



