Summary: The realities of life in preindustrial England reveal a world teeming with physical discomforts, social cruelty, and environmental hazards unimaginable to modern sensibilities. England from 1600 to 1770 was plagued by disease, primitive hygiene, adulterated food, and oppressive punishments. Far from the romanticized notions of simpler times, living in this early modern time and place often meant enduring relentless hardship and indignity.
British historian Emily Cockayne’s Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England, 1600–1770 provides a window into the lives of ordinary people in the preindustrial and early industrial era. A “social history,” the book conveys how the world sounded, smelled, felt, and tasted—a horror show beyond the comprehension of most modern people. The chapters bear titles such as “Itchy,” “Mouldy,” “Grotty,” “Dirty,” and “Gloomy.”
A preindustrial person transported to the present day would be amazed by the current prevalence of relatively smooth, clear skin enabled by better general health in addition to the widespread use of sunscreen, moisturizers, and all manner of modern beauty treatments. In the past, frequent illnesses left victims permanently marked. To be “Pock-broken” or “pock-freckled” was a common descriptor. Skin was often directly disfigured by diseases and further damaged by how fleas and then-common medical conditions caused compulsive scratching. “Fleas would have been a common feature of institutions and inns, as well as domestic settings,” proliferating in crammed households, cities, and seaports. A Dutch traveler named William Schellinks (1623–1678) found the fleas in one English inn so “aggressive” that he opted to sleep on a hard bench rather than the provided bed. But fleas were far from the sole culprit. “Many conditions would have caused itching, including eczema, impetigo, ‘psorophthalmy’ (eyebrow dandruff), scabies, chilblains, chapped and rough skin, tetters’ (spots and sores), ‘black morphew’ (leprous or scurvy skin) and ringworm. Few citizens [of Britain] enjoyed smooth unblemished skin.”
If you could visit the past, you would be shocked at the commonness not just of pockmarks but also of oozing open sores. “Venereal disease was the secret epidemic that blighted the entire period,” resulting in such outward signs as “weeping sores on the lips” and “pocky” countenances. Many other diseases also produced wounds that festered and exuded foul discharges on the faces of everyday people. “In this pre-antibiotic era, skin eruptions in the forms of bulging pustules, lesions, acne and gout-induced ulcers could all have become infected, causing chronic wounds.” Such skin problems affected all social classes. “In 1761, as an Oxford undergraduate, the parson-in-waiting James Woodforde . . . was plagued by a ‘bad Boyle on my Eye-brow’. This boil reappeared the following year, to be joined by a stye among his lower right eyelashes.”
With so many faces covered in scars, as well as boils and sores emitting blood and infected pus, it is an understatement to say the people of the past were in desperate need of skincare. Sadly, their primitive skincare and makeup regimens made matters even worse. “Caustic and toxic ingredients lurked in many ready-made and home-mixed cosmetics and toiletries. Eliza Smith’s cure for pimples included brimstone (sulphur). Johann Jacob Wecker suggested the use of arsenic and ‘Dogs-turd’ as ingredients for ointments to ‘make the nails fall’. The Duchess of Newcastle warned that the mercury in some cosmetics could cause consumption and oedema. Indeed, some preparations were so toxic that they could ‘take away both the Life and Youth of a Face, which is the greatest Beauty.’ The Countess of Coventry was said to have died from toxic properties in her cosmetics.” That countess, Maria Coventry née Gunning (1732–1760), died at age 27, likely of lead poisoning, as lead was a common ingredient in skin-whitening makeup at the time, despite lead’s propensity to make its wearers ill (or, in Maria’s case, deceased).
Even nonlethal makeup was of far poorer quality than today’s cosmetics, frequently dissolving and dripping. Women “shunned hot places for fear of melting visages.” Even royalty, with access to the best cosmetics of the era, fell victim to this tendency of makeup to drip. One observer remarked in his diary after seeing the queen of England at a banquet in 1662 that “her make-up was running down her sweaty face.”
The state of clothing for the masses contributed to skin and health problems. The truly poor bought used garments. “Poorer citizens rarely bought new items of clothing, but made do with second-, third- and fourth-hand clothes. . . . By the time they reached the poorest members of society, garments would be smutted, food-stained, sweat-ridden, pissburnt and might shine with grease. . . . Clothes in such a state would be hard, unyielding and smelly.”
“The second-hand market was a thriving one” in early modern London. “Some specialised in old shoes, or even old boots. [The Dutch-born artist] Marcellus Laroon included an image of a trader who exchanged brooms for casto-off shoes . . . in his Cryes of London (1688). . . . A high demand for second-hand clothing meant that garments constituted a considerable proportion of property that was stolen. Thomas Sevan was apprehended . . . wearing three stolen shirts in 1724. He had left his old ragged shirt behind at the scene of the crime. Elizabeth Pepys’s new farandine waistcoat was snatched from her lap as she sat in traffic in Cheapside. On Easter Monday 1732 John Elliott became the victim of highway robbers who relieved him of his hat, wig, waistcoat and shoes. . . . No item of clothing was immune from theft—even odd shoes and bundles of dirty washing were lifted.”
“Clothes could be taken to a botcher, or a botching tailor, for patching and repair. . . . Old shoes were rejuvenated or modified by cobblers, or ‘translators.’ The subsequent wearers of shoes would have worked their feet into spaces stretched to fit a foreign shape, which might have caused blisters, bunions and corns. . . . Partial unstitching and ‘turning’—the inner parts becoming the new exterior—could prolong the life of coats and other garments. Even the rich eked out the life of their favourite garments by turning, dyeing and scouring. . . . However, clothes could only be refashioned a limited number of times before they became napless, threadbare and tattered. If enough good fabric remained, this could be reused to make a smaller item of clothing, a garment for a child, or a cloth cap. . . . Tired garments were passed down to apprentices or servants.”
The condition of teeth was also disturbingly poor. “Queen Elizabeth sported black teeth. Emetics were popular cure-alls, and these would have hastened tooth decay through the acidic erosion of the enamel. Archaeological surveys suggest that the majority of early modern adults suffered tooth decay.” While they did not meet with much success, the people of the past certainly attempted to keep their teeth from rotting. “There was an array of dentifrice powders and cures on the market. Although most would have had little or no effect on cavities or diseased gums, some of these powders and recipes would have carried away some dirt and plaque from teeth. Powders were concocted from cuttlefish, cream of tartar and sal amoniack (ammonium chloride). These abrasive substances could be rubbed on” teeth, and some recommended “hard rubbing with a dry cloth or sage leaf” to cleanse teeth. The writer Thomas Tryon (1634–1703) recommended swishing river water as a mouthwash. Needless to say, such routines were insufficient. “A lack of adequate tooth cleansing and an inappropriate diet led to bad breath and also caused tooth decay.” Missing teeth were common. “A character in an eighteenth-century play bemoaned the poor dental state of London’s women” by claiming that “not one in ten has a Tooth left.” When those suffering from toothaches sought dental care, what passed for dentistry at the time could make matters even worse. Consider the unfortunate case of the English lawyer and politician Dudley Ryder (1691–1756). “After spending a month in 1715 chewing on just one side of his mouth to avoid the pain of a severely decayed tooth, Dudley Ryder finally summoned up the courage to have it drawn. In the process, a little of his jaw was broken off, but he rallied, claiming it didn’t hurt. Much. By the mid-eighteenth century wealthier citizens would have the option of trying out a transplant, using teeth from a paid donor.”
Tooth and skin problems were visible, but internal ailments that were less apparent also plagued our ancestors. One of the many negative health effects of animals crowding the cities was that parasites from the creatures often spread to humans. “The abundance of dogs and pigs on the city streets provided the perfect breeding ground for a variety of intestinal parasites, many of which wormed their way into humans. Eliza Smith asserted that ‘vast numbers’ were infested. Many bottoms would have itched with discomfort thanks to the presence of thread and tape worms in the digestive system. According to the numerous contemporary adverts, worms created a myriad of physical discomforts, including ‘pinching Pain in the Belly, when hungry, a stinking Breath’, vomiting, nightmares, pallidness, fever and teeth gnashing.” The animals caused other problems as well. “Neighbours near to houses in which beasts were kept or slaughtered would have endured stench and noise.” For example, “those living near Lewis Smart’s huge piggery on London’s Tottenham Court Road described how servants fell sick and resigned on account of the smell, which ‘Drive thro’ the walls of the houses.’ Visitors to the house opposite were forced to hold their noses, and one neighbour explained how the fumes dirtied newly laundered linen and tarnished plate.”
The people of the past often went hungry. “Recording a high rate of corn spoilage in 1693, due to a wet summer season, [the English antiquary] Anthony Wood noted that scarcity pushed prices out of the pockets of the poor, who were forced to ‘eat turnips instead of bread’. During this dearth [the writer] Thomas Tryon outlined a diet for a person on a budget of twopence per day. The recipes are uniformly bland: flour, water, milk and peas, all boiled to differing consistencies.”
Food often spoiled during transport to the market. “Eggs that came to London from Scotland or Ireland were often rotten by the time they arrived.” Food was often adulterated, and some degree of adulteration was considered unavoidable. Malt was only deemed unacceptable if it contained “half a peck of dust or more” per quarter. “Butchers would disguise stale slaughtered birds. [A contemporary account] warns of one such operator who greased the skin and dredged on a fine powder to make the bird strike ‘a fine Colour.’” Butter was frequently adulterated with “tallow and pig’s lard.” “Some fishmongers coated gills with fresh blood, as red gills indicated a recent netting,” to misrepresent stale fish to the unwary buyer. Fish were often wormy and if not cooked thoroughly remained so at the time of serving. The English statesman Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) once noted his disgust at the sight of a sturgeon dish upon which he observed “very many little worms creeping.”
Bread, the mainstay of most diets, was not immune to contamination. “Some loaves were deliberately adulterated with stones and other items to bulk them up.” In 1642, an unscrupulous Liverpool woman named Alice Gallaway “tried to sell a white loaf that contained a stone, to make up its weight. This sort of practice would have been widespread—the baker could claim that the stone had not been removed in milling, and blamed the miller. Stone, grit and other unwelcome contaminants would have posed dangers to the teeth of the unwary.” Millers also engaged in such unethical behavior as adding “beanmeal, chalk, animal bones and slaked lime” to disguise musty flour. Perhaps it should be no surprise then that London bread was described in 1771 as “a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes, insipid to the taste and destructive to the constitution.”
There are even accounts of human remains being added to food for sale, resulting in unknowing cannibalism on the part of the buyer. The author of the 1757 public health treatise Poison Detected claimed, “The charnel houses of the dead are raked to add filthiness to the food of the living.” The squalid state of the marketplace further exposed food to pollution or contamination. “The market stalls, and the streets on which they stood, were frequently described as being filthy and strewn with rotting debris.” Flies and other insects swarmed each market. “Hanging meats were vulnerable to attack by hopper-fly, and if they got too warm they would rust and spoil.” The smoke of London’s chimneys was said to fill the air and “so Mummife, drye up, wast and burn [hanging meat in the marketplace], that it suddainly crumbles away, consumes and comes to nothing.”
The population was so accustomed to foul-smelling meat that “in 1736 a bundle of rags that concealed a suffocated newborn baby was mistaken for a joint of meat by its stinking smell.” Between the bugs, the smoke, and the dirt, few groceries reached customers unscathed. One 18th-century writer complained of “pallid contaminated mash, which they call strawberries; soiled and tossed by greasy paws through twenty baskets crusted with dirt.” The state of the marketplace even inspired deprecating lyrics, such as these from 1715, “As thick as Butchers Stalls with Fly-blows [where] every blue-ars’d Insect rambles.” “As the market day progressed, perishables . . . were more likely to be fly-blown or decayed.” Those undesirable leftovers unsold at the end of the market day were often later hawked by street vendors. A letter in The Spectator in 1712 complained that everything sold by such vendors was “perished or putrified.” Recipes took into account the poor quality of available ingredients. “Imparting some dubious tips for restoring rotting larder supplies, [cookbook author] Hannah Glasse’s strategy ‘to save Potted Birds, that begin to be bad’ (indeed, those which ‘smell so bad, that no body [can] . . . bear the Smell for the Rankness of the Butter’) involved dunking the birds in boiling water for thirty seconds, and then merely retopping with new butter.”
Yet those shopping at the marketplace with all its terrors were relatively fortunate compared to others. Broken victuals, the remnants and scrapings from the more affluent plates, were a perk of service for some servants, and the saviour of many paupers.” One account from 1709 tells of a woman reduced to living off “a Mouldy Cryst [crust] and a Cucumber” while breastfeeding, an activity that greatly increases caloric needs. Desperation sometimes resulted in swallowing nonfood objects, such as wax, to ease hunger pangs. “Witnesses reported that a young London servant girl was so hungry in 1766 that she ate cabbage leaves and candles.” She was far from the first person to use candle wax as a condiment. “The underfed spread butter thickly on bread (this was necessary to facilitate swallowing dark or stale bread). Cheap butter was poor grade, akin to grease . . . a ‘tallowy rancid mass’ made of candle ends and kitchen grease was the worst type” of concoction to pass under the name of butter. Another account of hunger from 1756 relates how a starving woman felt “obliged to eat the cabbage stalks off the dunghill.”
The people of the past also had good reason to wonder whether their homes would collapse around them. “A proverb warned that ‘old buildings may fall in a moment’. So familiar was the sound of collapsing masonry that in 1688 Randle Holme included ‘a crash, a noise proceeding from a breach of a house or wall’ in a list of only nine descriptive sentences to illustrate the ‘Sense of Hearing’. Portmeadow House in Oxford collapsed in the early seventeenth century. Among the casualties recorded in the Bills of Mortality for 1664 was one hapless soul killed by a falling house in St Mary’s Whitechapel . . . Dr Johnson described London of the 1730s as a place where ‘falling Houses thunder on your Head.’ . . . In the 1740s, ‘Props to Houses’ appeared among a list of common items hindering free passage along the pavement in London. A German visitor wondered if he should go into the street in 1775 during a violent storm, ‘lest the house should fall in, which is no rare occurrence in London.’” “Thomas Atwood, a Bath plumber and property developer, died in 1775 when the floor of an old house gave way.” Regulations sometimes made matters worse, preventing the tearing down of homes on the verge of collapse. One account notes that homes in disrepair became “the rendezvous of thieves; and at last . . . fall of themselves, to the great distress of whole neighborhoods, and sometimes to bury passengers in their ruins.” Windy days could knock down homes. “Gales swept [London] in 1690, leaving ‘very many houses shattered, chimneys blowne down.’”
Inside, homes were often filled with smoke from fireplaces. “With open fires providing most of the heating, filthy discharges of soot and smut clung to interiors.” Even with regular chimney sweepings, clogged chimney pots and soot deluges could and did occur. One writer railed against the “pernicious smoke . . . superinducing a sooty Crust or furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and Corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest stone with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphur.” Interior smoke disturbed the air of the humblest homes and the grandest palaces alike. The German consul Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (1683–1734) complained that the Painted Chamber of London’s Westminster Hall could “scarce be seen for the smoke” that filled the interior; in the Upper Chamber he similarly noted that the tapestries were “so wretched and tarnished with smoke that neither gold nor silver, colours or figures can be recognized.”
“Householders struggled to contain infestations of vermin.” This was a problem even in well-off homes. Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary his multiyear struggle with mice, which “scampered across his desk” with abandon despite his purchase of a cat and deployment of mousetraps. “In 1756 Harrop’s Manchester Mercury ran an advert for a book detailing how to rid houses of all manner of vermin,” including adders, ants, badgers, birds, caterpillars, earwigs, flies, fish, fleas, foxes, frogs, gnats, lice, mice, moles, otters, polecats, rabbits, rats, snakes, scorpions (an invasive species of which had entered England via Italian masonry shipments), snails, spiders, toads, wasps, weasels, and worms.
As if that wasn’t enough to keep people up at night, nighttime was loud. Crying babies and the moaning of the hungry, ill, and dying echoed in the night, as well as the pained wails of women suffering through domestic violence. In London, in 1595, a law was passed to prevent men from beating their wives after 9 p.m. The legislation was not prompted by concern for the wives (after all, wife-beating was generally accepted as normal and morally unproblematic) but by consideration for neighbors trying to sleep through the noise. The law read in part: “No man shall after the houre of nine at the Night, keepe any rule whereby any such suddaine out-cry be made in the still of the Night, as making any affray, or beating hys Wife, or servant.” A similar law forbade smiths from using their hammers “after the houre of nyne in the night, nore afore the houre of four in the Morninge.”
The book gives insight into a far crueler and more violent society. Legal punishments could be grotesque and sadistic. For example, in 1611, a woman who had conducted “lewd acts . . . was punished by the Westminster burgesses by being stripped naked from the waist upwards, fastened to a cart, and whipped through the streets on a cold December day.” Women deemed “scolds” were often publicly humiliated in ritual fashion. “Ducking stools or cuckstools were equipment for punishing scolds and were items of town furniture [and] were still used as a deterrent in the eighteenth century. Ducking was a rite of humiliation intended to put the woman in her place and to teach her a lesson.” Many towns took pride in the maintenance of their ducking stools, and sometimes a device with a similar rationale called a “scold’s bridle,” an iron muzzle that enclosed the head and compressed the tongue to silence the unfortunate wearer.
“Across the country [of England] the civic authorities ensured that their cuckstools were functioning. In 1603 the Southampton authorities complained that ‘the Cuckinge stoole on the Towne ditches is all broken’ and expressed their desire for a new one, to ‘punish the manifold number of scoldinge woemen that be in this Towne’. The following year they wondered whether a stool-on-wheels might be invented. This could be carried from dore to dore as the scolde shall inhabit’. This mobile stool would, it was explained, be ‘a great ease to mr mayor . . . whoe is daylie troubled w[i]th suche brawles’. The Oxford Council erected a cuck stool at the Castle Mills in 1647. The Manchester stool was set up in 1602 ‘for the punyshement of Lewde Wemen and Scoldes . . . six scolds were immersed in 1627. A decade later the town added a scold’s bridle to their armoury of reform. A new ducking chair was erected in ‘the usual place’ in 1738. Even as late as 1770 a knot and bridle hung from the door of the stationers, near the Dark Entry in the Market Place ‘as a terror to the scolding huxter-women.’”
Outhouses doubled as dumping grounds for victims of infanticide with shocking frequency. “Much of what we know about London’s privies and houses of ease comes from unpleasant witness statements concerning gruesome discoveries of infants’ corpses found among the filth. In the trial of Mercy Hornby for killing her newborn daughter we find details of the privy into which the child was cast. Newly constructed in the 1730s, it was six foot deep, with just over three feet of soil at the time of the incident.”
And that is only a small slice of the manifold horrors detailed in Cockayne’s book, where practically every page provides fresh fodder for nightmares.