The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England (46 page)

How do these humours get out of balance? This is where the
overlapping ideas of Elizabethan medicine might leave you a little confused. By far the most important cause is divine intervention. People believe that illnesses may be sent to punish them for a sin – or simply because God wants them to die and go to Heaven. Some hold that God, by sending them an illness, is giving them a chance to atone for some previous transgression through suffering, and so they are thankful for their affliction. Other causes of illness are old age, excitement or contagion through close proximity to other ill people and decaying matter. Filthy areas such as stagnant pools and dead bodies create a miasma around them, and if the air or water of a miasma enters the body, it disrupts the humours. In
The Boke for to Lerne a man to be wyse in the building of his howse for the helth of body
(1540), Andrew Boorde lays out some key concerns:

If the air be fresh, pure and clean about the mansion house it doth conserve the life of man, it doth comfort the brain and the powers natural, engendering and making good blood, in which consisteth the life of man. And contrarily evil and corrupt airs doth infect the blood and doth engender many corrupt humours and doth putrefy the brain and doth corrupt the heart, and therefore it doth breed many diseases and infirmities through which man’s life is abbreviated and shortened. Many things doth infect, putrefy and corrupt the air: the first is the influence of sundry stars and standing water, stinking mists and carrion lying long about the ground; many people in a small room lying uncleanly and being filthy and sluttish …

You get the picture. If something smells bad, the air is putrefied; breathe in that air and you will fall ill.

People believe that the balance of the humours is also upset by eating too much or too little of something. As noted in the previous chapter, Thomas Elyot believes that fish and fresh fruit are bad for you, and that white bread is more nutritious than bread with the bran. William Horman maintains that drinking cold liquids after prolonged activity is very dangerous for the health. Richard Carew states that the ‘eating of fish, especially newly taken and of the livers, gives rise to leprosy’.
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Although you will know that brown bread is more nutritious than white, and that fish does not cause leprosy, you will probably agree with the general idea – that what you ingest affects your health. You probably already subscribe to the belief that carrion
and stagnant water are likely to cause disease. What you are less likely to swallow is that the stars can cause an imbalance in your bodily humours. Or that such things as humours control your health. Or that illnesses can be triggered by witchcraft. Or that black marks can be caused by fairies pinching you in the cradle.
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Or that God has sent you a disease simply so that you can prove your virtues by suffering.

The theory of the humours is just the basic framework into which physicians fit a number of other ideas. Galen teaches that every living thing is composed of the four elements: fire, earth, air and water. Each of these corresponds with one of the four humours. Fire, which is said to be hot and dry, corresponds with choler; water (cold and wet) with phlegm; earth (dry and cold) with black bile; and air (hot and wet) with blood. These properties are all associated with parts of the body, so the brain is cold and moist, the kidneys hot and moist, and so on. If an imbalance in the humours clashes with the properties of an organ, the patient will be ill. No distinction is made between mental and physical illness; the mind is seen as being similarly vulnerable to imbalances. Physicians recognise that the body is to a certain degree self-regulating, through the excretion of tears, urine, faeces and sweat, but they also believe that further purges, bleedings and vomits must be applied to rid the body of the substances corrupting the organs.

Sanitation

Noisome smells and noxious fumes are common in Elizabethan England, but that does not mean that people do not notice them. Nor is it simply that they tolerate them. This is a difficult subject, so it is worth looking at it in a little depth to understand it properly.

When you wander along a country lane you might smell the earth, especially if it has recently rained. If it is summer you might smell the pollen, and in late summer the cut hay. What you will not be so aware of is the clean air. It is such a ubiquitous and subtle smell that you notice it only by its absence, when something particularly foetid, alluring or sweet overpowers your olfactory senses. Your mind calibrates your sense of smell and, like your sense of balance, you ‘notice’ the fresh air only when it changes. If you walk into a small room in the corner of which there is a privy – a twelve-foot shaft full of
several hundred gallons of decomposing excrement and urine that has been lying there, seeping into the clay, for two or three years – you will notice that change immediately. Suddenly your olfactory senses are off-balance. What differentiates you from the Elizabethan person who lives in this room is how prepared you are for this assault on your senses and the connotations of health, disease and poverty that you associate with the smell. Also, and most importantly, there may be a profound difference in how much shame you think the householder should feel on introducing someone else to this stinking environment.

As you will soon find, the idea that everyone cheerfully puts up with noxious fumes is a modern myth. Everywhere people comment on the nuisances of latrines. Yes, you will come across people urinating or defecating in fireplaces at night when they are staying in somebody else’s house, but what else do you do when no chamber pot is provided? People remark on such difficult situations precisely because they are extraordinary. Andrew Boorde states categorically that pissing in chimneys is not to be tolerated: it contributes to the stinking airs that he, like most people, believes is the cause of illness.
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Remembering a room he rented some years earlier, the physician Simon Forman writes that ‘the evil stink of the privy did annoy me much and because many [patients] did resort unto me there I left it because it was little and too high up and because of the stink’.
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Forman is not only unhappy with the smell on his own account; he is obviously embarrassed to have patients visiting him in a place that is filled with corrupt air. This room is one of the upper chambers in a stone building, so the cesspit is a long way below. The smell he describes comes from the stone flue that drops to the cesspit: the urine and excrement that have caught on the stonework on the way down, and the vapours that are blown up the flue by the draught.

As a result, it is simply wrong to say that Elizabethan people are generally more tolerant of filth and smell than us.
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There is not one standard for Elizabethan England and a different one for us; rather there is a wide range of thresholds of tolerance and senses of shame, both then and now, and a wide range of solutions. Queen Elizabeth will not tolerate dyeing with woad or burning coal within five miles of her palaces.
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Rich people, who are accustomed to removing the smells of the body and perfuming themselves on a daily basis, would not dream of asking you to sit in a chamber that stinks of urine and
faeces. The queen’s godson, Sir John Harington, even builds a flushing water closet, with a stone bowl and a brass sluice, at his house, Kelston, near Bath. In his book
A New Discourse of a Stale Subject Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax
(1596) he explains that smoke and the stench of privies ‘are two of those pains of Hell … and therefore I have endeavoured in my poor buildings to avoid those two inconveniences as much as I may’.
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The queen also has a flushing loo built for herself at Richmond. In the great houses moveable ‘chairs of easement’ (commodes) are emptied and tucked away when not in use. Privies are situated some distance from living quarters behind a closed door, with the chute being stopped with a lid or a cushion. Townsmen living in wealthy neighbourhoods do not empty their chamber pots in the streets: to do so risks being reported to the civic authorities by their neighbours and fined. In his book on how to construct your house, Andrew Boorde recommends that his readers build their privies over flowing water to remove the filth in the same way that a flushing toilet does. Sir William Petre’s Ingatestone Hall in Essex has running water (controlled by taps) and drains in sealed underground pipes, which take away the waste from the five privies in the house. Sir William even builds an inspection chamber for making sure the whole system continues to run properly. If people can afford to remove the smells of faeces and urine from their living quarters, they do so.

Affordability is the key. In the country it is not expensive to have a clean-smelling house: build your house of easement at the end of the garden and just visit it when necessary. For the vast majority of people living in towns and cities this isn’t possible. It costs £1 10s 8d to build a water closet like Sir John Harington’s – but you would need your own drain and a plentiful water supply, which almost no one has. Even a cesspit is expensive to maintain: in London it requires a team of twelve men to dig out sixteen tons of excrement in an average household latrine over the course of two nights, several large barrels to contain the ordure, carts to take it away, food for the workers, candles (as it has to be done by night), juniper to refresh the pit, brickwork to rebuild the funnels of the privy chute (which have to be broken by the emptying operation) and, last but not least, the cost of cleaning up the house after sixteen tons of excrement, slopping about in barrels, has been carried through it. The total cost of such an operation in 1575 is £2 4s – the equivalent of 132 days’ work for a labourer.
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You can see why the tenements of the poor have stinking cesspits and why people
in the city slums dump their filth into the gutter and allow their cesspits to overflow into the street. The authorities in large cities have no choice but to build public latrines. Exeter’s city council orders new public facilities to be provided in 1568 and London has several communal jakes, the largest sensibly being situated above the Thames on London Bridge (although this is also where the pumping engines that supply private water are situated).
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Ironically, the smell of excrement is not something Elizabethans connect with backwardness or the rustic past, but with progress and urbanisation.
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HOUSEHOLD CLEANLINESS

Rotting vegetable matter is merely unpleasant, but rotten meat and fish can seriously undermine your health. Cleaning your plates and bowls is thus important. After a meal, you will wipe your knife clean on your napkin and put it back in its sheath. Spoons and any other cutlery provided at your meal will be taken out to the scullery or kitchen and washed along with the pewter plates and cooking dishes. ‘Wash all the greasy dishes and vessels in the lead cauldron or pan in hot water and set them clean upon the scullery board,’ William Horman instructs his pupils. No soap is used in washing pots and plates, just hot water. If pieces of fish or meat have stuck to the bottom of the frying pan, the recommended process is to soak it first in boiling water and then scour it. Scouring requires a handful of straw and some potash sprinkled in the bottom of the pan: scrub until it is clean, rinse and set it to dry. Similar measures are taken for the serving jugs for drinks like beer and ale. The butler at Wollaton is specifically charged with keeping his leather jacks (large flasks) free from ‘furring and unsweet savour’.
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As for the state of cleanliness elsewhere in the house, much depends on the availability of soap. Dirty sheets are likely to harbour insect life and vermin; bedbugs and fleas are ubiquitous. On the subject of fleas, Thomas Moffet writes that, ‘though they trouble us much, yet they neither stink as wall-lice doe, nor is it any disgrace to a man to be troubled with them, as it is to be lousy’. Clearly not everyone is as determined to rid themselves of the pestilential little devils as you will be. But Moffet does not speak for the whole of society: many people go to great lengths to kill fleas, fumigating rooms and bedclothes, and
pressing everything tightly in chests in the hope of suffocating them. Again we have a wide range of tolerances and opinions.

Those who associate smells with dangerous ailments cannot bear their bedchamber to smell of anything other than fresh air. Andrew Boorde echoes Galen in urging householders to make sure they have a draught blowing through the chambers of their houses to carry away the smell of people. You, of course, know that the mere smell of someone cannot infect you. In their reaction to human fumes you will find some Elizabethans more fastidious than you are, rushing to the nearest pomander lest they smell something that will corrupt their humours. It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that many modern people think of their Elizabethan ancestors as less concerned about dirt than they are. One of the reasons that fires are kept burning in the chambers of so many houses is to take away any dangerous smells lurking there and to air the room. Mind you, the smell of a bedchamber in the morning is nothing compared to that of a hall if the rushes have not been changed for a few weeks, with dogs urinating on the floor and rats running free. Sir John Davies describes the hall of a country house as ‘stinking with dogs and muted with hawks’. It is not surprising, therefore, that Sir Francis Willoughby has banned dogs from entering the hall at Wollaton.

Bodily Cleanliness

Personal hygiene is perhaps the second most-discussed and second worst-documented aspect of the history of the human body (after sex, in both respects). For the starving poor, bodily filth is a major contributor to ill health. If you own only one woollen garment, which becomes dirty and riddled with lice and fleas, you will have the carriers of typhus and plague living on your skin all the time. An account of some beggars in Norwich states that ‘so cared they not for apparel, though the cold stuck so deep into them, that what with diseases and want of shifting [changing of clothes], their flesh was eaten with vermin, and corrupt diseases grew on them so fast and so grievously that they were past remedy’.
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These men appear to their fellow Elizabethans as walking sources of infection, and the general consensus is that you should do all you can to avoid coming into contact with them, their parasites and bodily fluids. As if you needed telling …