Sovereignty and Sewage

Abstract

Modernist opinion disparages medieval cities as random, unplanned, clogged, complicit in their own filth-choked self-strangulation, and unheeding in their courtship of contagion and disease. Arch-modernist Le Corbusier offers a low estimate of the medieval capacity for city planning. The harum-scarum cities of the Middle Ages allowed themselves, in his account, to grow up according to the “pack-donkey’s way,” the unplanned meander of the unreflective brute: “The pack-donkey meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, he zigzags in order to avoid the larger stones, or to ease the climb, or to gain a little shade; he takes the line of least resistance.” ¹ Even the most sympathetic modern commentators have been unable to resist moralization about this “fetid, messy town,”² and to hint that its inhabitants brought its woes— including contagion and plague—upon themselves. I want to suggest, in rebuttal, that medieval cities were not sordid because people wanted them that way; that, in fact, medieval persons thought a great deal about the conditions of town life, and were unceasing in their attempts to achieve clear sightlines, rational planning, cleaner streets, and better sanitation. Commoners no less than kings had a legitimate interest in flushing out their city, and the wish to have access to a good latrine or garderobe emptying into the Thames needs no symbolic explanation.