Waste Management in Early Modern London

Para1
But they unfrighted pass, though many a privy
Spake to them louder, than the ox in Livy;
Ben Jonson, On the Famous Voyage (72–74)

A Brief History of Public Sanitation

Para2Getting rid of waste, human or otherwise, was no easy task in early modern London. Without flushable toilets and a modern network of underground sewer pipes, dealing with waste affected everyone, rich or poor. As early as the 13th century, when Carmelite monks complained that the waste accruing in the Fleet River was so vile that it overpowered the scent of their incense and caused the deaths of several monks, London faced problems with how to deal with the waste produced by a large population. The most pressing concern for London citizens was how to deal with human excrement as its population grew rapidly in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Methods of Waste Management

Para3Gutters were built into the streets, running down either the middle or the sides to carry away kitchen or production waste called slops and other liquid waste. Due to rain and run-off from wells, these channels were nearly always flowing. In addition, men called rakers were hired to rake garbage off the streets and transport it to designated dumping zones in and around the city.
Para4Early records show that human waste was dealt with in several ways:
Chutes from garderobes (“stone privies built into the walls of wealthier homes”) flowed down into passing rivers or streams.
If no moving water was available, deep pits were dug into which waste flowed.
In poorer parts of London, public privies emptied into deep cesspools which were regularly cleaned to not overwhelm the surrounding area with strong odor.
Para5Eventually, the filth that filled rivers and waterways in London became unbearable, and so the digging of cesspools became common practice. London had ideal terrain for such latrines because it resided on a thin layer of clay underneath which was a layer of gravel that helped disperse the cesspools’ liquid contents, such like modern septic tank fields. The downside to these cesspools was that they often contaminated local water supplies from the hundreds of shallow wells. This regularly caused outbreaks of diseases like cholera.

Privy Politics

Para6The building and maintenance of privies and latrines became such a complicated issue that a governing body of four men, known as the London Viewers, had to be placed in charge of mediating disputes. These conflicts ranged from where a privy could be built to who had to clean them out. Difficulties arose because property lines in London were based on generations of agreements and personal negotiations.
Para7Mass accumulations of human waste had to be cleaned out regularly, but because of the smell involved, laws were put in place in the late 17th century that only allowed cesspools to be cleaned out after 10 PM in the winter and 11 PM in the summer.

Fleet River

Para8Despite being contaminated as early as the 13th century, the Fleet River, which once flowed through central London into the Thames, was at one point wide and deep enough to allow ships transporting goods to travel up and down its length. Centuries of using the Fleet as a dumping spot led to it becoming dammed up at certain points, prohibiting even the passage of water. Attempts were made to clean the river, with documented efforts in 1307 and again two centuries later in 1502.
Para9Almost 90 years passed before the city attempted another cleanup process, spending 1000 marks to clean the banks of the Fleet. Such was the level of filth continually entering the river that contemporary commenter John Stow remarked that the
money being therein spent, the effect failed; so that the brooke, by meanes of continuall incroachments upon the banks, getting over the water, and casting of soylage into the streame, is now become worse cloyed than ever it was before.(Tomory 28)
Para10Further cleaning attempts in 1606 and 1652 also had relatively little success and eventually many portions of the Fleet River and its waterways were covered by the growing city.

Filthy Books: Jonson’s On the Famous Voyage and Harington’s The Metamorphosis of Ajax

Para11Various English literary works of the early modern period comment upon the filthy state of London’s streets and waterways. Two of the most famous are Ben Jonson’s poem On the Famous Voyage and Sir John Harington’s The Metamorphosis of Ajax. Jonson was perhaps Shakespeare’s most well-known competitor as a playwright, while Harington was a courtier and favorite of Queen Elizabeth I until he fell from favor, in part due to this poem.
Para12Jonson’s On the Famous Voyage tells the tale, in mock-epic style, of two men who travel up Fleet River. Jonson uses classical allusions and imagery to make the seemingly simple voyage of traveling up the river out to be something requiring Herculean fortitude. The poem is noteworthy for its savage reception by later readers who were shocked and affronted by Jonson’s bold depictions of human waste, and the sights, sounds, and smells that accompany it.
Para13Harington’s The Metamorphosis of Ajax is less obviously filthy. Concerned with the whoreson saucy stink which emanated from the cesspools, vaults, and waterways of London and other major cities, Harington used his text as a way to put forward the idea of a flushable toilet (Harington 60), but also as a covert criticism of the monarchy that eventually led to his exile from the court. Printed in 1596, Harington’s plan for a flush toilet has the fame of being the first such published invention. His text shows how great a concern the smells surrounding privies and latrines had become for not only the poor but for the wealthy as well.

Key Print Sources

Crane, Mary Thomas. Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, pp. 4–22.
Sabine, Ernest L. City Cleaning in Medieval London. Speculum vol. 12, no. 1, 1937, p.19.
Sabine, Ernest L. Latrines and Cesspools of Medieval London. Speculum vol. 9, no. 3, 1934, p. 303.
Orlin, Lena Cowen. Boundary Disputes in Early Modern London. Material London, ca. 1600. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.
Tomory, Leslie. The Roots of a New Water Industry. The History of the London Water Industry, 1580–1820. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017.

Key Online Sources

Foley, Christopher. Sewage and Waste Management. The Map of Early Modern London. Ed. Janelle Jenstad. University of Victoria, 20 Jun. 2018. https://mapoflondon.uvic.ca/SEWA1.htm.
Harington, Sir John. A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called The Metamorphosis of Ajax. Ex-classics Project. 2015. https://www.exclassics.com/ajax/ajaxcnt.htm.
Jonson, Ben. On the Famous Voyage. The Poetry Nook. https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/famous-voyage. Accessed 7 Jul. 2024.
Thornbury, Walter. The Fleet River and Fleet Ditch. Old and New London: Volume 2. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878, pp. 416–426. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol2/pp416-426.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Michael Best

Michael Best is Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, BC. He founded the Internet Shakespeare Editions in 1996, and was Coordinating Editor until 2017, contributing two editions to the ISE: King John and King Lear (the latter also available in print from Broadview Press). In print, he has published editions of works of Elizabethan magic and huswifery, a collection of letters from the Australian goldfields, and Shakespeare on the Art of Love (2008). He contributed regular columns for the Shakespeare Newsletter on Electronic Shakespeares, and has written many articles and chapters for both print and online books and journals, principally on questions raised by the new medium in the editing and publication of texts. He has delivered papers and plenary lectures on electronic media and the Internet Shakespeare Editions at conferences in Canada, the USA, the UK, Spain, Australia, and Japan.

Tyler Abbott

Tyler Abbott was a student at Utah Valley University.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title Waste Management in Early Modern London
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Tyler Abbot, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times, Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
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