Water in the City: The Aqueducts and Underground Passages of Exeter by Mark Stoyle

Author:Mark Stoyle [Stoyle, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780859899635
Publisher: University of Exeter Press
Published: 2015-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

How the water conveyed to the civic fountains was used

The primary function of Exeter’s civic conduits, like the primary function of almost all gravity-flow systems elsewhere, was a very simple one—to provide their users with a reliable supply of high-quality water for drinking and for the preparation of food.3 In Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus the Roman tribune Junius Brutus refers in passing to ‘our best water, brought by conduits hither’, and there can be little doubt that the citizens of contemporary Exeter would have regarded the water which was conveyed to their own fountains via the aqueducts from St Sidwell’s in a similarly positive light—as the very best that the city could afford.4 As we have seen, Hooker remarked that ‘these waters’ were ‘of most prize’ in Tudor Exeter:

because by reason of . . . [their] carriage . . . [they are] purified and made lighter then the waters springing within the cittie, and by that me[a]nes more fit for the dressing of meates.5

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