14 A MEDIEVAL CITY

with many small panes kept together with strips
of lead, lighted the rooms but poorly. The closeness
of the houses made internal lighting still less effective.
The interior walls were of timbering and plaster,
often white- or colour-washed.1 Panelling was used
occasionally. The ventilation and hygienic condi-
tions generally were far from good, as may be
imagined from a consideration of the smallness of
the houses, the compactness of the city, particularly
the parts occupied by the people, and especially
of the primitive system of sanitation, which was
content to use the front street as a main sewer.
There were, of course, no drains; at most there
was a gutter along the middle of a street, or
at each side of the roadway. It was the traditional
practice to dump house and workshop refuse into
the streets. Some of it was carried along by rain-
water, but generally it remained: in any case it
was noxious and dangerous. There was legislation
on the subject, for the evil was already notorious in
the fourteenth century. The first parliamentary
attempt to restrain people in towns generally from
thus corrupting and infecting the air is dated 1388.
The many visits of distinguished people and public
processions always conferred an incidental boon on
the city, for one of the essentials of preparation was
giving the main streets a good cleaning. There
is no wonder that plagues perpetually harassed the
people of mediaeval times and reduced the population
miserably. The plague never disappeared till towns
were largely rebuilt on a more commodious scale in
the next great building era, which began in 1666 in
London and in the early years of the eighteenth

1 Wall-paper, which still bears the influence of the hangings
that it replaced, came into general use early in the nineteenth
century,