Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages by Frances Gies & Joseph Gies

Author:Frances Gies & Joseph Gies
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science, History
ISBN: 9780060925819
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Published: 1995-01-11T10:00:00+00:00

Paving, from the fifteenth-century Chroniques de Hainaut. [Bibliothèque Royale, Brussels, Ms. 9242, f. 48v.]

By the late Middle Ages, strenuous efforts to alleviate some of the problems were being made by city authorities, rich and influential men who unlike their modern descendants lived in the city themselves and had a direct interest in the environmental quality. Two keys to urban sanitation were street paving and storm sewers, both of which were known to Rome and a few other ancient cities. Moorish Cordova paved its principal streets in the ninth century, but Paris and the largest Italian cities followed only in the late twelfth and thirteenth. Paving was indispensable for street cleaning, but besides being expensive to install, it needed endless upkeep. Cobblestone or brick surfaces had to be repaired and replaced under the pounding of heavy cart wheels that were either iron shod or, worse, wooden but studded with nails. Street repair was often done directly over the old broken surface, causing a rise in street level.63

Paris dug the first storm sewer in the fifteenth century and was copied by a few other cities, but at the end of the Middle Ages most towns still depended on open ditches that flooded in heavy storms. Systems designed to handle domestic sewage and industrial waste awaited the nineteenth century, when London pioneered a combined system. Meanwhile cities were still pocked with private cesspits, periodically emptied at “an understandably high cost” (Christopher Dyer).64 Archaeologists found one medieval London latrine to contain a thousand gallons of ordure. Bylaws and building regulations sought to control maintenance and cleaning of the pits.

City water supply nearly always depended on local sources: wells, springs, and rivers. Professional water carriers assisted distribution from the fountain in the town square or the public well, served by bucket and windlass or bucket and counter-weight. Better-off households had their own wells or cisterns, for which the proximity of cesspools and latrines posed chronic pollution problems and contributed to epidemics.65

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