Environmental Regulation in Edinburgh and York, C.1560-C.1700 with Reference to Several Smaller Scottish Burghs and Northern English Towns

Durham E-Theses Environmental Regulation in Edinburgh and York, c.1560-c.1700 With Reference to Several Smaller Scottish Burghs and Northern English Towns SKELTON, LEONA,JAYNE How to cite: SKELTON, LEONA,JAYNE (2012) Environmental Regulation in Edinburgh and York, c.1560-c.1700 With Reference to Several Smaller Scottish Burghs and Northern English Towns, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/7016/ Use policy This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 (CC0) Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk 2 Environmental Regulation in Edinburgh and York, c.1560-c.1700 With Reference to Several Smaller Scottish Burghs and Northern English Towns Leona Jayne Skelton Submitted for PhD History Department, Durham University September 2012 i Abstract This thesis challenges the deeply entrenched stereotypical image which depicts early modern urban dwellers throwing rubbish and effluent directly out of their windows and doors into the streets below almost as is this was a normal and widely permissible waste disposal practice. This ‘chamber pot in the window’ myth has become almost synonymous with the early modern period itself in the current, popular, historical imagination, especially in relation to urban settlements. But the majority of urban inhabitants and their local governors alike valued clean outdoor public spaces. They had a vested interest in keeping the areas in which they lived and worked clean and they invested substantial time and energy into upholding their collective standards of acceptable cleanliness in the neighbourhoods, wards, towns and cities of which they were so proud. The small minority of householders who flouted sanitation bylaws by disposing of their waste problematically and by creating insanitary nuisances in public spaces encountered substantial resistance from their neighbours. Contemporaries were not afraid to approach the courts to complain about less fastidious neighbours, whose inadequate waste disposal arrangements and noxious trades threatened to undermine their daily life quality. While the contents of chamber pots were thrown from some early modern urban windows, this was by no means a normal, common or widespread practice, at least before 1700. The main task of this thesis is not to establish how clean early modern urban streets actually were, but rather to explore cultural attitudes towards outdoor salubrity and waste, both among local governors and urban inhabitants. The thesis focuses on Edinburgh and York in a comparative framework, shedding light on the complex relationship between how governors organised street cleaning, managed waste disposal and regulated the cleanliness of the outdoor environment, top-down, and how typical urban inhabitants self-regulated their neighbourhoods, bottom-up. The ways in which the respective cities' waste disposal and sanitation systems and processes were undermined, adapted and improved over time, as inner Edinburgh’s population swelled while York’s remained relatively stagnant, are also analysed. While focusing on Edinburgh and York, the thesis also discusses the challenge of pre-modern urban waste disposal, in the context of both necessary urban agriculture and rudimentary technology, in a much broader context and with reference to several smaller towns in Scotland and northern England. The relationship between neighbourhood, urban and national politics is a recurring theme in the thesis and the relevant sub-topics of the urban-rural manure trade and Sir John Harrington’s water closet invention of 1596 are also analysed. The thesis is split into five chapters. The first is an introduction to the topic, to the cities of Edinburgh and York, to the existing historiography, to the modern-day misconceptions surrounding the topic and to the methodology. The second chapter explains the character of the environmental challenge in early modern urban Britain. The third chapter explains the legal, governmental and administrative context of environmental regulation in Edinburgh and York, respectively. The fourth chapter compares the management and provision of street cleaning and waste disposal in Edinburgh and York while the fifth compares how insanitary nuisances were regulated in the two cities. The conclusion relates the two case studies to the ii rest of early modern Britain, comparing them to several smaller urban settlements in lowland Scotland and northern England, as well as highlighting just how differently, and sometimes just how similarly, this area of urban government was managed in different urban settlements. iii Contents Abstract ii-iii Contents iv Acknowledgements v-vi Conventions and Abbreviations vii-viii Illustrations, Tables and Charts ix-xii Glossary xiii-xv Chapter 1: Introduction . Overview of the Topic 1 . Literature Review 6 . Introduction to Edinburgh 18 . Introduction to York 23 . Methodology and Sources 30 Chapter 2: The Character of the Environmental Challenge in Early Modern Britain . Introduction 36 . Domestic Waste, Drainage Systems and the Built Infrastructure 38 . Privies, Chamber Pots and John Harrington’s Water Closet 58 . Noxious Crafts and Trades 70 . Smell in the Early Modern Psyche 74 . Urban Agriculture and the Urban-Rural Manure Trade 83 . Conclusion 90 Chapter 3: The Legal, Governmental and Administrative Structures of Environmental Regulation in Edinburgh and York . Introduction 92 . The Inherited Systems, 1560 93 . Change over Time, 1560-1700 99 . The Systems in 1700 104 . Conclusion 108 Chapter 4: The Management of Street-Cleaning and Waste-Disposal in Edinburgh and York . Introduction 109 . Edinburgh 110 . York 142 . Conclusion 171 Chapter 5: Insanitary Nuisances in Edinburgh and York . Introduction 173 . Edinburgh 175 . York 201 . Conclusion 209 Conclusion 211 Appendices 230 Bibliography 234 iv Acknowledgements I have become indebted to a large number of people in the production of this thesis. First and foremost, I would like to offer enormous and well-deserved thanks to my internal supervisors, Prof. Christopher Brooks and Dr. Adrian Green, without whom I could not have conceptualised the thesis. They have listened patiently to my frequent and extensive ramblings on deeply unsavoury topics and tolerated the mountains of stomach-churning original sources with which I have presented them throughout my MA year and my doctoral years at Durham University. Alas, I was unable to convert them to the urgent cause of researching the fascinating history of privies, dunghills and sewers in early modern Britain, but I hope that at the very least I have sparked their lifelong interest in this topic. I could not have completed this thesis without their support and encouragement; it was a privilege to have been supervised by both of them. I hope that their much appreciated expertise in legal social history and architectural and landscape history, respectively, shines through in my thesis. I also owe a huge thank you to my external supervisor, Prof. Maureen Meikle, who has helped me a great deal with the transcriptions of the Scots documents and with the broader Scottish and comparative Anglo-Scottish contexts of the thesis. As my undergraduate dissertation supervisor at the University of Sunderland, she first inspired me to develop the research at masters and then at doctoral level at the University of Durham from its inception as an idea which first entered my head as I pulled my wheelie bin around to the front of my house one evening in mid 2006, wondering what I might research for my undergraduate dissertation. Maureen sparked and fuelled my passion for early modern British history as an undergraduate and has kindly mentored and supported me for the past eight years of my academic career, and for that I will always be grateful. I would like to thank the Durham University Doctoral Fellowship Scheme for awarding me such a generous scholarship, without which I could not have completed this thesis. This thesis stands very much on the shoulders of my interdisciplinary MA in Seventeenth-Century Studies, which was fortunately and generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I count myself as extremely lucky to have been given the opportunity to complete my MA and PhD with the much appreciated cushioning of full financial support. The army of archivists whom I have encountered at the vast array of archives I frequented during the research stage of the thesis, across northern England and Scotland, has been hugely helpful. Their knowledge of the manuscript collections has been invaluable; if not for their advice and support, I could not have harvested such a large volume of rich, original research. Though she is now enjoying her well-deserved retirement from her position as Assistant Keeper of the Archives and Special Collections at Durham University Library, I would particularly like to thank Miss Margaret McCollum for equipping me with my palaeographical skills, for giving me the confidence to handle original documents throughout my masters degree and for offering kind support throughout my doctoral research too. I have also benefited from much praise, constructive criticism and help from far more scholars than I have the space below to acknowledge at the many academic conferences v which I have attended in the United States, Finland and in the UK, for which I am hugely grateful. In particular, I would like to thank Prof. Elizabeth Ewan, from Guelph University, Prof. Roey Sweet, from Leicester University and Prof. Keith Wrightson, from Yale University. Over the past four years, I have come into contact with a large number of scholars, not only from the discipline of history, but from many other disciplines and sub- disciplines, and it is as a result of their help and advice that I have become an open-minded, interdisciplinary (and modest!) historian. In particular, I would like to thank Prof. David Moon, an environmental historian, Dr. Richard Sugg, a research fellow in literature and medicine, Dr. Peter Collins, a social anthropologist and Prof.

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