Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in York by Keith Henson

Author:Keith Henson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: TRU000000: TRUE CRIME / General
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781783038077
Publisher: Wharncliffe
Published: 2003-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

The flood waters recede in Lower Wesley Place by the Foss in Hungate. York City Archives.

As we walk through York’s streets today, it is hard to imagine what life inside the city walls meant to a great deal of its citizens in the nineteenth century. As the population increased from 17,000 in 1800, to 40,000 in 1850, they sought housing within walking distance of employment and the largest source of that was domestic service. The industrial boom that built up the likes of Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford for the most part missed York. The Rowntree’s factory, which by 1914 would employ more than 4,000, had a workforce of 100 in 1879. Even the railways, could not compete in terms of the number of domestic employees, having little more than 1,200 men at the works in 1855.

Between 1821 and 1841 the number of houses in the city increased by sixty per cent, mostly of a poor type. They built back-to-back courtyard developments, crammed together, where a dozen families would be forced to share a single standpipe and one midden privy. In general, the houses had two rooms – one up, one down – while many single storey, single room cottages housed whole families in dark, damp conditions. Several homes had a pigsty or stable attached to them and slaughter yards shared courtyards with private houses.

The midden privy was an archaic contrivance, little more than a wooden seat fixed above a dry pit. Once the night soil had accumulated it was barrowed into the street and from there taken to huge dung heaps in the town, ready for sale to the farmers. In Fossgate, on the border of Hungate, a particularly huge mound famously stood by Foss Bridge filling the air with its reek. Although this particular practice was halted, the city had 5,000 such privies still in use at the turn of the twentieth century.

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