Parched City (3 page)

Twelfth century author William Fitz Stephen wrote of social life at ‘special wels in the Suburbs, sweete, wholesome and cleare, amongst which Holywell, Clarkes wel and Clements well, are most famous and frequented by Scholers and youthes of the Citie in sommer evenings, when they walk forth to take the aire’.
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Two of these wells related to locations of important nunneries founded in this century. Holywell was the site of a major nunnery and Clarkes well was situated just outside the walls of St Mary Clerkenwell, which was founded in 1144 on ten acres of land.
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Fitz Stephen’s reference to the taste of these waters confirms that they were drinking sources. Imbibing ‘holy’ water was part of Christian culture of this period, in which some wells were associated with the cult of the saints and miracle cures, many with pagan origins. The historian Alexandra Walsham describes how the grounds surrounding certain wells ‘became littered with crutches left behind by grateful pilgrims’,
who presumably believed that they had been cured.
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External and internal uses of such waters were considered to be equally therapeutic, depending on the ailment.
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Fitz Stephen’s categorisation of the suburban wells as ‘special’ suggests that other un-holy wells related to ordinary water uses such as mere thirst relief or cooking. Within the City walls, the supply of ordinary, but sufficient, high quality, freshwater became a quest in the thirteenth century.

Conducting sweete water

Evidence suggests that the plans to convey water from Tybourne ‘for the profite of the Citty’ began as early as 1236 with donations from ‘Marchant Strangers of Cities beyond the Seas’.
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According to William Fitz Stephen, the City’s increasing populace ‘were forced to seek sweete waters abroad’.
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Significantly in this quote, the water’s quality ranking as ‘sweete’ obviously suggests its relationship to human consumption. The project he was referring to resulted in the construction of the City of London’s first ‘conduit’.

One interpretation of this early form of water engineering, provided by the London water historian H.W. Dickinson, is that the idea for a conduit was inspired by monastic water supplies.
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Tybourne was a village in Middlesex, named after the tributary of the Thames on which it was situated near contemporary Marble Arch, some four and a half miles to the west of London. The ambitious project of transporting water from the Tybourne to the City was not completed until 1285, almost fifty years after the donations had been gathered. Lead pipes, also referred to as ‘rods’, fed the water underground by gravity from the rural west to the urban east. Archaeologists discovered a section of pipe that was destined for the City’s conduit two meters underground, with a diameter of almost ten centimetres.
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Four hundred and eighty-four of these rods were reportedly involved in this ambitious civil engineering enterprise. The early
road works must have been quite a labouring and logistical feat (no doubt plenty of medieval travellers were inconvenienced as their thoroughfares were temporarily dug up).
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Eventually, the receiving ‘conduit’ for the water rods was built at the junction of Bucklesbury, Cheapside and Poultry, at the heart of the medieval marketplace for food.
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The water-engineering historian Hugh Barty-King explains that conduits were simply based on the diversion of an existing watercourse and the employment of gravity. Conduit ‘houses’ received the diverted water. They consisted of ‘a large tank of lead or stone into which the water poured itself, and out of which, by a free-flowing spout or a controllable tap, it poured into a stone basin below’.
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Architecturally, conduit houses could be modest or monumental.

Cheapside Conduit was the latter. It was a major new civic landmark, as well as a practical resource. The archaeological discovery of the ‘long rectangular building’ gives us this view of what it consisted of and how the building was used: ‘The vault of this building was still intact and the carved greensand quoins and doorway survived at the eastern end. This led to a staircase which would have exited up to the medieval street. Londoners descended into the building to collect their water before climbing the stairs back to street level.’
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Though there was a practical need to cover the water tank, the scale of the conduit exceeded this function. This excessive mass ensured that the civic and charitable goodwill that had paid for the freshwater bounty could be publicly appreciated.

Did the new water source add to the area’s growth and definition as a market and commercial centre? Clearly the quantity of the water was a motivating factor for channelling water in this way, but there is compelling evidence that the quality of this rural water was perceived to be different, ‘sweete’, and therefore used for specific, dietary-related purposes. John Stow’s seminal early-modern urban study,
A Survey of London (1603)
, includes
this record of the Cheapside Conduit’s intended role in medieval water supply: ’…for the poore to drinke, and the rich to dresse their meate’.
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Clearly, the water was considered to be of a dietary quality, though we are left wondering whether the poor drank it only because they could afford no other beverage. One interpretation is that the water was free and publicly available to those on the street, or possibly even to those without a permanent home. However, as we now know, neither the lead leaching from the pipes or the conduit’s building materials were good things for human health.

London grew further in the 1300s, with the population doubling by 1340.
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Perhaps the greater mass of competitors for high quality water was one motivating factor for the Corporation’s installation of a Conduit Warden at Cheapside in 1325.
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Queues for water were likely to be more boisterous than when the Conduits staircase was first used for water seekers forty years previously. There is evidence that the queues were not always socially harmonious. During the 1330s, one group of regular conduit users was criticised because ‘the water aforesaid was now so wasted by brewers, and persons keeping brewhouses, and making malt, that in these modern times it will no longer siffice for the rich and middling, or for the poor, to the common loss of the whole community’.
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The use of water from the conduit to make ale or malt was subsequently banned.

Indoors, medieval Londoners could draw their water from chalk-lined wells within modest houses.
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Coupled with resourceful home-made guttering devices for rainwater harvesting — sometimes causing neighbourly disputes when they flooded adjacent properties — we know that the conduit was not the only water on offer for washing bodies, or clothes, but were these domestic sources considered to be good enough to cook with or drink?
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It is hard to know for certain, but they were definitely more readily accessible than the water from the city centre conduit, which could not serve residents living extramurally.
So, the Great Conduit, as Cheapside became known, potentially served a number of practical functions including hydration for those working outdoors, or passing through London temporarily, and a high quality raw material in the centre of food production from a source untouched by urban pollution. The conduit was obviously considered to be successful, or indeed necessary, as the device was replicated elsewhere the following century.

‘A lusty place, a place of all delytys…’
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Just west of Cheapside, lay the other main strip in the medieval City. On Cornhill, the ‘tonne’ was adapted into a cistern in 1401, whilst retaining its penal use on the upper storey of the structure. On top, rogue bakers, nightwalkers and other ‘suspi-cious persons’ could be seen incarcerated in stocks.
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Conduits transcended from functional to festive as state pageants or religious celebrations related to these central features of urban life. During a 1421 pageant, King Henry the Fifth’s wife, Catherine of Valois, was greeted with high theatricality at the little Conduit by ‘giants of a huge stature ingeniously constructed to bow at the right moment, lions which could roll their eyes and…bands of singing girls’.
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The same account also recorded how the conduits flowed with wine instead of water during the pageant.

John Stow, who recorded the rise of conduits before and during his lifetime, reflected on the disappearance of the natural environment under the increasingly built-up City and extramural neighbourhoods. He wrote of the demise of the Walbrooke Stream for instance: ‘This water course hauing diuerse bridges, was afterwards vaulted ouer with bricke, and paued leuell with the Streetes and Lanes where through it passed, and since that also houses have beene builded thereon, so that the course of Walbrooke is now hidden vnder ground, and thereby hardly knowne.’
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As water within London submerged from view, Stow
recorded donations for new conduits rising steadily from the late-fifteenth century at the start of the Tudor period and into the Elizabethan period, up until the mid-sixteenth century. Celebrations aside, for many of the City’s workforce and residents, the conduits were associated with the gruelling physical task of transporting water. As the historian Mark Jenner has asserted of early modern London (spanning 1500–1725): ’…for most households the cost of water lay in the hours spent fetching it…’
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Energy and time could be displaced, if a household could afford to pay some other body to expend that labour on its behalf.

Collecting water from the conduits created an economy and an official workforce of water-bearers, answerable to the City’s Corporation. After 1543, when the City was granted the right ‘to exploit all large springs within a five-mile radius’ to boost conduit resources, the quantity of work for the water bearers was also boosted and their role in urban water collection provided a much-needed employment opportunity for those teetering on the lower rungs of London’s economic ladder.
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A water bearer appeared as a minor character in Ben Johnson’s 1598 play
Every Man In His Humour
in which he was clearly shown to be of a low social rank.
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Water bearers served wealthy households as dedicated individual servants, or as teams employed by larger companies or institutions. Though water as a raw substance remained free, its transportation to the point of use elicited a charge. Quantity was controlled by the regulated size of tankards that the water bearers had to use. Those standardised tankards bobbing through the Elizabethan street throng, on the shoulders or heads of their carriers, was surely a common sight in early modern London. What exactly the water was used for when it passed from conduit to client is more difficult to ascertain. If the conduits’ bounty did indeed remain ‘sweete and wholesome’ as was intended, then the likelihood of its ingestion is certainly a greater possibility.

We know that people drank at least some pure water in the sixteenth century, because during the Reformation, supping from ‘holy’ wells was banned as a Catholic practice.
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The custom, which had continued from medieval times, became associated with anti-Protestant forms of worship such as idolatry, deifying nature and saints as opposed to one God.
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Waters curative powers were seriously questioned as part of the Reformation’s religious revolution. Then in 1542, this time from a secular perspective, more doubt was cast on water’s valuable properties. Andrew Boorde, the Duke of Norfolk’s physician proclaimed that ‘water is not holsome by it selfe for an Englysheman…water is colde, slow and slake of digestion’.
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Boorde’s health ‘regyment’ also discussed the importance of the use of particular water for dressing meat and baking. He was emphatic that such water must be from a running, rather than a stagnant, source and that for the best results he advised that inferior water should be strained ‘through a thick linen cloth’.
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Boorde seemed to eye the contents of wells with suspicion. Were they stagnant?

By the Elizabethan period, post-Reformation, parish wells had a strong civic function as local domestic water sources and were maintained under the watch of church committees (church vestries became formal governing bodies for parishes from the mid-sixteenth century).
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The well sources were possibly considered to be inferior to ‘rural’ grade water from the conduits, as they was not associated with the labour of water bearers. How preoccupied Londoners were with that quality distinction is difficult to know, though no doubt evidence exists somewhere. Mark Jenner has recorded the switch from well to pump as taking place gradually between the early sixteenth to seventeenth centuries.
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As that low-grade technology evolved, a far more ambitious mode of water supply was also in development.

‘A most artificial forcier’
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Advances in water engineering were moving beyond the
conduits’ gravitational system to the use of wheel-based technologies. Now, water could be transported from a lower gradient to the required point of use, particularly when using the new technology in tandem with the natural power of a tidal river.

The engineer Peter Morris was to push the notion of a convenient water supply into completely new territory. Morris, sometimes appearing as Marsh or Maurice in different historical records, had a nationality as uncertain as his surname. Whether he was Dutch, German or English — all of which have been proposed — the land drainage engineer saw an opportunity to exploit new urban water demand with a massive resource that was currently untapped; the Thames. By the 1570s Morris convinced the Corporation of the City to co-invest in a large-scale experimental waterworks scheme to pump from the river at London Bridge. When construction ran behind schedule, officials were reluctant to part with the second half of the finance but luckily for the entrepreneur, he happened to be in the service of the Lord Chancellor, who had a direct line to Queen Elizabeth I. A state hearing of Morris’ predicament, in 1580, concluded that the City Corporation was unfairly withholding monies when the engineer had also personally risked large sums.
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The next year Morris was granted a 500-year lease for the arch under London Bridge where his giant waterwheel was eventually constructed.
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