 ac yn ymdegolol, o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r llun, o'r rhan o'r rhan o'r llun o'r rhan o'r hyn o'r teimlo cymaint o'r ddau o'r mhelyn o'r hefyd, Monty Python a'r Hwyllgor. Yn y cwrs, mae'n fydd yn ymgylch gyda'r sefyllfa cyllid yn yng Nghymru, yn ychydig o'r cyllid o'r cwrs, ychydig i gael y script fel y bydd ychydig, ystyried, ychydig i fyfyrwyr gyrdd y bydd ymrwynt. Ar fain o'r Ffyrwyd, ac mae'r cyffreddau am gyda'r ffyrwyr ac ond y cych yn ffordd o blaenau gyda'r bodys, o'r grwmau. Ac mae Arthy. Mae'r gwrthodd yn ddim yn ystafello i ddod oedd yn rwyf. Mae'r rhagor oedd yn ystafello i ddod oedd. Dwi'n dechrau'r ystafello i ddod ychydig i'r cyffreddau. I'm sanitising the script here for the benefit of the sensitive. From the searing intensity of Ingmar Bergman's 7th Seal, which of course is sending up, to the surreal humour of the pythons, the cinematic middle ages are all too often emerge smeared with filth and littered with garbage. And it's not just on the silver screen. Popular History, as exemplified in the fairly recent TV series Filthy Cities, a title which speaks for itself, presents a truly dismal picture of medieval urban life. It's hardly changed since the scholars and sanitary campaigners of Victorian England first addressed the topic. A representative example of their views may be found in The Coming of the Friars, a book of essays composed in 1890 for the popular market by the antiquary Augustus Jessup at 1889. He observed, and you can read the text yourself, that the sediment of the Tyne population in the Middle Ages was a dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Liverpool or Paris in nothing of. What greatly added to the dreary wretchedness of the lower order in the times was the fact that ever-increasing throngs of beggars, outlaws and runaway ruffians were simply left to ffenn for themselves. The civil authorities took no account of them as they quietly rotted and died. Six years later, in 1895, the eminent physician, Sir George Newman, cited this very passage as evidence of the feculent conditions in which leprosy was bound to flourish, adding further embellishments of his own about the grim business of survival in a society, and I'm quoting here, which knew little of decency, cleanliness and order and was notable for its total neglect of all hygienic or sanitary laws. Now, I've quoted these remarks before in papers that I've given on this topic and make no apology for doing so again since the assumption that late medieval men and women remained indifferent to matters of public health and that plague 38 simply will not die. Indeed, a belief that English magistrates in particular were completely supine in the face of epidemic disease and that their only response lay in prayer and penitence still lingers on today even in academic circles. For example, Professor Oliver Dicto has recently argued that the dramatic shift from a high pressure to a low pressure model of human population across northern Europe during the mid-16th century can be explained in terms of the first stirrings of medical and sanitary progress. In other words, numbers began to rise as pragmatism triumphed over superstition and he writes, it's evident that a key factor in this transition was the great change in the understanding of infectious diseases which began at the end of the 15th century or perhaps slightly later. Please bear those dates in mind. Now, instead of simply being fatalistically comprehended as a divine punishment for human sin, communicable disease began to be seen as a natural phenomenon, one that could be prevented, limited or haunted by human countermeasures, even though the transmission of diseases was still understood in terms of the classical notion of miasma, that's corrupt air. Now, this attitude seems especially surprising in view of the fact that from the 1920s onwards scholars who'd worked closely on medieval records began seriously to question these Victorian assumptions. It was in 1928 that the author of a magisterial History of Medieval Science, Lynn Thorndyke, issued his memorable appeal in the journal Speculum for less mudslinging and more facts, which is part of my title tonight, where pre-modern public health was concerned. And his revisionist agenda was taken up in the following decade by E.L. Sobine, with a trio of important articles, again in Speculum, that cast medieval London in a very different and much cleaner light, doctored in specific times and cities such as London, Hull, Salisbury and York, while others have addressed such specific issues in the provision of water and the condition of the streets. What's now needed, I think, is a more interdisciplinary and integrated approach to these findings, which brings together archaeological and environmental and historical sources in the context of late medieval, medical and religious beliefs. These in turn need to be understood from a contemporary perspective, a medieval perspective, free from the condescension of posterity. I hope to demonstrate the value of this approach today by focusing on Norwich, which is unusually blessed with source material, and which also helps us to understand why the ideas advanced by Augustus Jessup, and here he is, and his associates have proved so very tenacious, that these men should have formed such a negative view of the Middle Ages is entirely understandable. They were, after all, products of the culture which passed, and I'm quoting, in the revealing light of science, and tended as a result to disparage those unfortunates who, in Jessup's words, are foretime warped in darkness. We should also remember that Jessup was a Norwich man, and that his judgmentism historian was clearly overshadowed by his own personal experience of the devastating impact of the Industrial Revolution upon one of the economic backwaters of Victoria in England. It's surely no coincidence that the Norwich of his youth ranked as one of the most insanitary provincial cities in England, with an infant mortality rate slightly higher than those of Manchester Leeds in Liverpool, but with none of their prosperity. It was, in the words of one observer, in that painful state of transition from a once flourishing manufacturing prosperity to entire decline, a decline marked by poverty, deprivation and neglect. Dysent she was endemic, colour and smallpox rife, prompting one of today's leading demographers to describe Victoria in Norwich, and I'm quoting, as a hotbread of squalor, disease and premature mortality. It's a rather sanitary of that particular dismal area of the city on the banks of the River Wensham. The desperate state of the slum housing in this area was vividly described in 1849 during a campaign for sanitary reform mounted by the morning chronicle. Neglect and decay are now conspicuous in the streets and quarters occupied by the working classes, it reported. The poor lived in the twilight of narrow, filthy alleys, closed yards and dilapidated buildings whose conditions were cramped and unhygienic. As in Mayhew's London, it was, and I'm quoting, next to impossible for a person not born in the place to navigate this murky, miasmatic underworld. And here, again, sort of slightly cleaned up, this is a later version, is what the housing was like. The ghettos were called holes, and in words that were replicated verbatim by Jessup in a medieval context, the author noted that many are to be found in the lower parts of the city, a butting on the river where the ground is constantly damp and moist, where heaps of filth and garbage, open bins and privies, decaying vegetable and other matters are constantly contaminating by their offensive malaria, the unwholesome atmosphere in which the wretched inhabitants live. So, despite the many approving references to its clean, well-paved streets, sophisticated water supply and fresh air made by 17th century visitors, there was a growing consensus on the part of the Victorians that Norwich must always have been filthy. And that's the quotation from The Morning Chronicle, which gives us such a grim picture. And those words are transposed back by Jessup into the Middle Ages. This, I love, this is Cunningham's map. He was a physician showing a very healthy medieval city according to Hippocratic ideas of health, facing westwards with wonderfully fresh breezes. And you can note it's depicted as clean, healthy environment, quite the antithesis of what Jessup describes. The presumption of squalor, though, was reinforced by an excoriating report of 1851, commissioned by the Board of Health on the infamously bad sanitary conditions which still blighted the city. William Lee, the superintendent inspector, was horrified by many things, but saved his most withering condemnation for the water supply, which he pronounced very bad and very defective, bad in quantity, bad in quality, and bad in everything that should constitute a water supply. And this was partly due to the fact that sanitary provision was even worse. In Lee's uncompromising words, the city upon the whole would be about as well off or better without any drainage at all. But, as a good Victorian progressive, Lee was determined to prove some or provide a sense of context and began with a graphic account of the ravages of disease in former times, which had been, of course, much, much worse, and to have been occasioned by even higher levels of urban squalor. And he rammed home the point by citing grossly inflated mortality figures of 57,374, besides religious and beggars, sustained in Norwich during the first months of the Black Death, which he misdated. And so, in light of these statistics and his terrible report, you can see why Jessup takes the tone he does when describing Norwich in the 13th century. The actual death rate during the Black Death is impossible to establish, but it was clearly far lower than Lee's estimate. Norwich's population slumped from around 25,000 in the 1330s to fewer than 8,000 in the 1370s. That's during the period which saw the first three major outbreaks of plague in East Anglia. Other factors besides disease explain this dramatic fall, but it's clear that pestilins still cut a swath through the populace. But was the city really in as bad a state as Lee believed? Elizabeth Rutledge has documented high levels of overcrowding among the immigrant day labourers who flooded into Norwich looking for work in the aftermath of the early 14th century famines. Their living conditions were often cramped and dirty, but it was a constituent in which infectious diseases such as TB, typhus, malaria and even leprosy could spread. But we should be wary of assuming that the entire city was submerged under a sea of filth, or that the ruling elite was indifferent to the need for sanitary regulation. Not surprisingly, the Black Death gave rise to a significant amount of economic and social dislocation, prompting the crime to write harshly in 1351 to Norwich's magistrates, ordering them to put the unemployed to work cleaning the streets, which had been rendered hazardous by piles of filth and broken paving. Similar letters were dispatched to the citizens of London. In both cases drawing attention to the fact that under normal circumstances thoroughfares were kept admirably clear of garbage and that acceptable standards of hygiene had been maintained. Three years later the Norwich authorities themselves took steps to deal with the unacceptable number of stray dogs and swine roaming at large. This too was a public health measure occasioned by the dramatic consequences of sudden mortality and again underscores the fact that normal patterns of life had dramatically broken down and note the streets were already paved. Although it staged an economic revival thanks to a well-timed shift into cloth production and was thus considerably better off than most late medieval English cities, Norwich couldn't escape the ongoing ravages of epidemic disease and continued to suffer repeatedly from both local and national outbreaks of pestilence until the 17th century. These outbreaks are reflected in the city's art. Here the one surviving panel from a set of panels of stained glasses in St Andrews Church depicting the dance of death. Death here sees as a bishop which was considered suitable to survive the reformation the rest were destroyed. Underscoring the presence of death in the city. This wonderful painting of Robert Janis, Alderman of Norwich, which is taken from a stained glass window in the Guildhall now lost, again with death. The point to bear in mind is underneath the glass originally was a set of verses pointing out that if you wish to seek a memorial like Janis you must invest in public works. Because, as we shall see, the repeated experience of pestilence had a significant impact upon levels of sanitary provision and anxiety about health hazards, which increased exponentially after every outbreak. It is, however, important to stress that much of the grindwork had already been laid, not least by the Franciscans, about his living conditions, Jessup had been so gloomy. Here we have a map of the water system of Norwich and the Franciscan Friary is just here. Being a new convert technology I tend to go rather mad with the arrows but the Franciscan Friary is here. Whoops, sorry, let's go back. On a cocky or stream going into the River Wensum. Here's the River Wensum going round the city. The Friar's initial home was indeed rather marshy but a recently published excavation report by the Norfolk Archaeology Unit on the permanent site to which they soon repaired has revealed an extremely sophisticated scheme of water management. This is clearly planned as part, an integral part of the claustral layout and included no fewer than 11 wells, a network of lead and ceramic piping and an impressive system of brick and flint lined underground drains the cheap of which ran into this daling fleet stream and into the river. I'm very grateful to Mr Brian Ayers for this slide. Thank you Brian. The sewerage system, this system was clean, there was no deposits when it was excavated. The system was constructed to allow regular flushing with clean piped water to prevent blockages or the deposit of offensive matter. This is a partial reconstruction of the water system with wells, settling tanks and machinery for flushing out this drain to avoid the buildup of miasmatic airs which were believed to spread disease. The grain friars were not unusual in this regard. Informd by the growing corpus of literals which occupied a prominent place in their libraries, religious houses throughout the city and indeed throughout England invested heavily in the construction of sewers designed to prevent these dangerous accumulations of waste while ensuring a regular supply of fresh water. Excavation has also disclosed part of a massive medieval drain serving the latrines of the infirmary at the Benedictine Priory just north of the Franciscans. It was made as you can see here of flint and mortar, almost a metre thick with a barrel vault over two metres high, arched in cairn stone. The entire drainage system, at least part of which dated back to the 12th century, may have extended for as far as 500 metres so that again it could flow into the river. And even again to the north of the cathedral, this map is not to scale, the little hospital of St Giles to the north on the bend of the River Wensum had from the 1270s onwards piped water, partly because the marshy site was unsuitable for sinking wells. But not all improvements were ecclesiastical. Significantly, in his lengthy catalogue of Norwich's 19th century shortcomings, Lee drew particular attention to the absence of any public measures for the removal of refuse or the repair of the rudimentary sewerage system, to the accumulation of stagnant waste in open drains and to the proliferation of noisome slaughterhouses resulting in the sale of contaminated meat. A very relevant topic. Yet all of these abuses have been subject to stringent regulation before the Black Death. And it's upon these specific issues that I propose to concentrate in the rest of this talk. These are patterns of zoning in early 14th century, late 13th century Norwich. And if we focus for a moment upon the slaughterhouses and the butchers, we can see that they're all relegated to a ridge to the south of the city. And this illustrates, I think, that this zoning pattern is how much care was taken to avoid pollution. On this high ground, there was plenty of grazing land, easy access to the river for waste disposal, downstream of more densely populated areas and a strong breeze to dispel the myosomatic air, which was believed to spread plague. And this rather delightful early 18th century engraving shows you this is looking at Norwich from the north. There's the Great Hospital, there's the cathedral. That would have been the friary. And there's the best, there's the ridge where the butchers were situated. And they dumped their waste into the river here. Of course, it went down the river to Brundle, but they weren't concerned about the people who lived in Brundle. And I think it is important. This is an Italian image to point out here that butchery was something which really concentrated the minds of urban authorities in the Middle Ages throughout Europe, because it's seen as a particular source of myosomatic air. And one of the things authorities are particularly keen to do is to prevent butchering in a city where meat is actually being sold. So just like the Victorians, late medieval men and women were convinced that epidemic disease was spread by contaminated air. And notably that arising from butchery, dung heaps, overflowing privies, rubbish tips, stagnant water and other sources of urban pollution. And just like the Victorians, they took active steps to eliminate these hazards to the best of their ability, based upon the Hippocratic principles of air, water and situation. These texts were known and understood in the Middle Ages. That Norwich might ever have been cleaner or that the corporation might once have played a more dynamic role in the struggle to protect the health of its inhabitants, nonetheless seemed unimaginable to right-thinking Victorian sanitarians who still today cast such a long shadow over writing about urban standards of living. And it's not just the Victorians that influenced our attitudes to public health in medieval England. Although, as Derek Keane has observed, English writers were from the 12th century onwards avidly extolling the virtues of their native tyons and cities, Italians, such as Leonardo Bruni, have effectively stolen the show. His panagiric to the unique virtues of Florence, composed in 1402, is this way into most histories of the Renaissance. It seems to me, it looks pretty cramped to me, but it seems to me that Florence is so clean and neat that no other city could be cleaner. He boasted in a celebrated passage, which has, until recently, been taken at face value, the challenge more recently by Professor John Henderson, who's here tonight. The assumption that England lagged centuries behind Italy with regard to the introduction of sanitary legislation has become an enchanted orthodoxy, reinforced by a conviction that, from 1348 onwards, English urban communities remain supine and helpless in the face of plague. In their survey of environmental law in medieval Italy, Zucco and Lores, for example, contrast the measures taken for street cleaning in relation of nuisances as early as the 13th century in times such as Bergamo and Bologna, with the apparent ignorance and indifference of North European magistrates. Does this unflattering comparison really hold true? Setting aside the fact that Siena did not regulate its butchers to the urban periphery until the 1450s, we can, I think, make a pretty convincing case and this case hinges in part upon the nature of late medieval urban custom and of urban record keeping. The fact that English cities did not establish boards of health on the Italian model or keep special books recording sanitary measures does not mean that such measures were not taken. One simply has to search for the evidence in different places. Norwich is earliest surviving leap rose which date from 1287, confirm that local courts or wardmoots were anxious to name, shame and punish residents whose behaviour posed a hazard to public health and this shows you the city breakdown in towards each of which had their own court and it's here at this level that sanitary cases are investigated or breaches of sanitary regulation. In that year alone, 1287, at least seven people were accused of obstructing waterways or contaminating them with sewage and in 1288, 20 more came to notice for the illicit dumping of waste. Repeated references to the great corruption of the air to the endangerment of human life, occasioned by such nuisances, demonstrate a keen awareness of miasma theory long before the first outbreak of plague through the dangers of stagnant water and noxious odours into such sharp relief. As well as condemning practices which they personally found jurors who made these presentments were responding to lists of prohibited nuisances compiled by local magistrates and indeed by central government at Westminster. Prominent among the latter was a comprehensive composizio or synthesis of measures concerning the quality and inspection of consumables drawn up in 1275 by Edward I. Into Alia, these ordinances imposed heavy penalties on the vendors of swine's flesh, measled, that's lepros, or flesh dead of the marine. It doesn't say anything about horse meat. These composizios are keen to regulate the quality of meat being sold in the butcher stalls and other marketplaces of medieval England, particularly keen on contaminated meat. Between 1287 and 1289, for instance, Norwich courts do attention to four sellers of infected bacon and two of measly pork. Dealers in the flesh of dead animals passed off as sound, retailers of unwholesome veal and all those spoused men who sold contaminated pork along with dodgy sausages and puddings unfit for human consumption. They indicted other officials for retailing flesh condemned as unfit and most of all the cooks and pie-bakers who reheat their wares, they were fined six bansige, recalcifactors, people who reheat. It's a contra-deaning sell by dates, really. They are the bane of magistrate's life. Many of you will know Chawson's description of the cook in his fly bone premises, with a saw on his leg, and this is a constant theme in medieval sanitary legislation. I don't know about you, but I would be reluctant to purchase food from those two. It's a sort of greasy spoon, I think, or kebab shop. As time passed and the enormity of such offences became even more apparent, the penalties rose. Members of this audience will, of course, be aware that diet was regarded as the first instrument of medicine during the Middle Ages, and crucially that the ingestion of substandard food was believed to destabilise the humours, thereby making an individual vulnerable to plague. And here's the science bit. This is a body map of 1292 showing how you ingest food. Cooked in the stomach goes to the liver where it's turned into humeral matter and is then transported through the venous system to feed the body. And it's believed that if this food is corrupt, then the body will be not only made ill, but also more vulnerable to the miasmus of plague. As one physician writes, the fire will only break out where matter is combustible, and this, of course, is well known to urban magistrates. And in extreme cases, there was the generation of disease-bearing miasmus to consider. One of the first measures enacted in Venice when the plague struck in 1348 was for the removal of infected pork, which creates a great stench of attendant putrefaction that corrupts the air. From this date onwards, in Norwich, confiscated meat would be publicly burnt in the middle of the marketplace as a terrible lesson to potential offenders. And it's at this date that Norwich Market is divided into rows where you have the butchers, the fishmongers and all the other food sellers, so they can be more effectively patrolled by the clerks and sergeants of the market, like modern-day food inspectors. And one of their tasks from the 1470s onwards was to ensure that nobody who worked in the local leper hospitals touched the meat that was on sale. It's interesting to note that butchers who were stuffing carcasses with foul cloths and other vile stuff to make them look plumper were not only accused of causing a great increase of diseases, but also besmerching the good name of the city. So just as in Italy, appearances, virtue and reputation really mattered. And the people who were guilty of these offences were put in the pillory at the market cross, and in some instances they had to inhale the fumes of what's burnt below them. The quality of the water supply was equally important, not just because contaminated water caused sickness, but because flooding itself a recurrent hazard in medieval times like Norwich was directly associated in the period with the stagnant water and pools of rotting debris that bred the miasmas of plague. And I've put up for you here an extract from the kind of book that was owned by urban magistrates in the late 15th century. It's Thomas Forestier's vernacular manual of 1485 on the avoidance of sweating sickness, but it's actually pinched from John of Burgundy's play tract. And it explains that pestilence comes of an open cause, a stinking carrion cast in the water night as cities or towns. And the corruption of prithys of this, the water is corrupt. And when his meat is boiled and drink made of this water, many sickness is gendered in man's body. And also of the casting of stinking water and many other foul things in the streets, the air is corrupt. And let the emphasis on smell and the keeping of stinking waters in houses or in kitchens long time. And then in night of those things, vapours are lift up into the air, the witch doth infect the substance of the air by the witch substance of the air corrupt and infect men to die suddenly going by the streets or by the way. Of the witch things that every man that loves God and his neighbour amend. And note that emphasis on God and his neighbour. And then returning back to the science bit, another body map. These are the arteries. Air is inhaled through the nose, mixed with arterial blood, sorry, in the heart and lungs, and then transported along the arteries. And this corrupt air could have a terrible effect on the natural thermostat of the body, spreading corruption and causing plague. And so there is an underlying scientific rationale for these ideas. Even so, for some historians, nothing illustrates the backwardness of English cities so much as the presumed inadequacies of the water system Richard Holt's rather grudging survey of provision in English medieval towns published in 2000 led him to conclude that urban authorities were indifferent if not hostile to the need for improvements. This he pointed out with some asperity was in marked contrast to the situation in Italy, which was clearly light years ahead in terms of the extent and sophistication of its supply. The fact is that in many cases the fact that he did not mention about 95% of the available examples, including Exeter's spectacular pipe water system, which runs through these stone-lined tunnels, and one I really rather do like, King's Linn, and these show the pipes and conduits available in the early 16th century, rather diminishes the force of his argument. In fact, most English towns of any size by this date have got piped water systems. King's Linn, by the way, is reconstructed from the Hall books. Norwich was in fact one of the very few English cities that didn't boast a piped water system, being so liberally blessed with fresh water streams that it didn't need to spend much-needed resources on pipes until 1582, by which date the population had risen dramatically. Here is the first pump put in by Robert Gibson in 1582, and you can see how dilapidated it had become by the Victorian period. Instead, the city relies on wells and the system of cockies. These are the little dotted lines, which are the natural streams running through the city. These are directed through stone-lined gutters or culverts. Great care was taken to see that these were maintained and the adjoining streets were kept free of garbage and noxious waste. The continuous process of cleaning, scarring and repairing the cockies and adjacent latrines demanded a remarkable degree of collaboration, some being the responsibility of the municipality and some of neighbouring householders. But affluent citizens might undertake to finance specific projects as a charitable work. Yet with a few notable exceptions, which invariably coincided with periods of unrest or epidemics, this system functioned effectively, disproving the widely held view that medieval sanitary measures were inherently unworkable because of their heavy dependence upon individual co-operation. Medieval Norwich had clearly signed up to the big society. It was harder to bridge to the river Wensum, against which the authorities waged a persistent battle. At first the elite courts took the lead in presenting offenders, who were fined for such unacceptable behaviour as stowing carcasses into water courses, leaving offensive muckieps and polluting the river with industrial waste. But naming and shaming at a local level was clearly not enough. In the 1380s draconian fines of 20 shillings for each offence, along with loss of freedom or expulsion from Norwich, were threatened for any breach of the regulations about dumping. Although in practice a more realistic but still heavy sum of six and eight pence was the norm, and please bear in mind this is 20 days work by a master mason, so it's no small sum. In 1459, in the aftermath of an epidemic, measures were first introduced for the regular removal of all muck and filth from the river bank by boat. It's a two-tonne boat, a two-tonne draught, so it's large. Earlier ad hoc efforts to force all those who live by the river to cleanse it themselves or to pay labourers to do so were thus abandoned in favour of a permanent official solution that integrated sanitary measures right across the city. By 1468, one official committee focused upon the state of the streets and gutters, while another was specifically concerned with the cleanliness of the river and its environs. It was then decreed by the mayor's court that the city should be repaved at the expense of individual householders in order to facilitate waste removal and drainage. The road surfaces were to be levelled and paved in such a way that the water will fall in future, running down to the lowest part of the street as far as the gutters call the cockies and then to the river, so they were carefully sloped to facilitate the removal of waste. Initiatives of this kind inevitably followed epidemics, which, as we have seen, were attributed with faultless logic to foul air and brackish water. Without much in the way of infrastructure to sustain them, their success depended upon corporate and communal vigilance. Since the commissioners faced a heavy fine of tuppans a day for neglecting their duties, they were nothing if not meticulous, assiduously noting offences such as the keeping of noisful and very noisful privies, gutters and drains, the casting up of muck and the diversion of water for industrial purposes. Communal measures such as the leveeing of specific rates to clean the river and for the weekly removal of waste by cart rather than water helped further to ameliorate the problems of inner city life. I can assure you that my waste is now removed once a fortnight, so we have gone backwards. So too, and I think this is wonderful, the decision to make the mayor personally liable to the tune of five pounds for any protracted problems with the river, an ingenious stratagem that we might profitably consider worth reviving today. The appointment of a salaried raker and the purchase of two common carts for the avoiding of filthy and vile matter in the early 16th century helped to earn Norwich its growing reputation as an orderly and hygienic city through whose thoroughfares and waterways were kept clean by means, and I'm quoting, of diverse good and godly acts and ordinances. According to the mayor and corporation, and they are of course biased, these innovations have not only been a great ease and helpful commodity to the inhabitants, but also a goodly beautifying and an occasion that diverse visitors having access to the city from far and strange places have much commended and praised the same and the magistrates for the maintenance thereof. And here is one of the magistrates, Robert Gardner, who died in 1508, mayor of this mass, Comry City, who is a civic artist comodicime, who helped to pay for the new cross and the gutters. Gardner belonged to a long line of wealthy philanthropists who sank their money into schemes for communal health and the amelioration of the city for spiritual as well as pragmatic reasons, and this is why I stressed religion at the start of my lecture. Significantly, after the Black Death, investment in public utilities was increasingly regarded as an extension of the seven comfortable works and therefore a benefit to the donor's immortal soul, as well as the physical health. George Osborne's problems would be solved in an instant if we could bring back the doctrine of purgatory. As the threat of fire on Brimstone is far greater inducement to charitable giving than a few pounds in tax relief. And we can see here how arms giving, whoops, sorry, I'm always doing this, I'll just go back, the giving of arms here and hearing of masses, but the giving of arms means that you are wenched up from purgatory towards heaven, which is a wonderful concept, isn't it? The list of charitable donations made by Norwich Desitators is a very long one, and I'm going to conclude by giving just a few examples to disprove the impression that it's just pious window dressing and to show how these works tie in, how these gifts tie in with the comfortable works depicted here, which Christ enjoined his followers to perform in order to achieve salvation. John Gilbert, Mayor of Norwich in 1519 took a broad view of compassion for the thirsty, giving drink to the thirsty, by instructing his executors to spend £50 on scheme for removing muck and fill from the River Wensum, which was a source of drinking water for some. From Alderman Ralph Segrim came no less than £133 for a similar purpose. Thomas Aldrich, another member of the Audermanic Bench, left £40 for the sick poor of the city, that was to feed them, giving them bread, and an identical sum to clean up the streets. Elizabeth Thorsby kept the muck cart going with a donation of £10, and it's listed next to a gift to the nuns of Cairo, which I think is very interesting. Alderman Thomas Hemming presented the corporation with two acres of land outside St Jars's Gate for the disposal of rubbish, while Edmund Wood bequeathed £100 for street cleaning after the Manor of London. They like to model themselves on London. And there's a sense here that these works are continuing the seven basic works described by Christ and will lead to the salvation of the donor. And at the same time, members of the Civic Elite were expected to contribute personally to relief funds during times of hardship when grain was scarce. In the 1520s, for instance, every Auderman voluntary donated 20 combs of wheat to serve the people, and this is during a period of famine. And although Norwich didn't have a granary like London's Leidenhall until the 1530s, from the early 14th century, provision was made for the purchase of emergency grain supplies and the sale of subsidised bread to the populace during food shortages, again giving bread. Initiatives of this kind were a matter of civic pride and economic necessity, as well as public health and Christian compassion. Fear of bread riots and popular unrest was clearly a powerful motive for escorting these up-and-handed measures. We should also bear in mind that Norwich's prosperity depended upon the trade that conveys goods to and from its outport at Yarmouth. And in this respect, the Wensom functioned as a venous system for the nourishment of the commercial organs. And like any venous system, it needed regular phlebotomy to remain healthy. By the same token, the tanners, line burners, smiths, dios, fullers and practitioners of other noxious trades might be compared to the less exalted parts of the human body and might perform an embarrassing function but was still essential for survival. Yet there was clearly a toll to pay, and by the beginning of the 16th century, the authorities were moving towards what we would call an environmental tax, so that all such great noyos of the same river would be further charged than any other person's shall be when rates were levied for cleaning the Wensom. Norwich is outstanding medieval and early modern archives and archaeological findings. Ffarnish a plethora of similar examples, which suggests that, once they exceeded accepted levels in sanitary behaviour and endemic pollution were regarded as both dangerous and antisocial, as well as un-Christian. Ffarn from being tolerated as an inevitable feature of urban life, they were clearly defined as nuisances to be eliminated by a combination of in and communal action. Lacking the technological expertise and scientific knowledge that we today take for granted, their efforts were inevitably circumscribed and didn't overwork. But I think that we can nonetheless agree that the march of sanitary progress from a time of darkness to the golden age of bacteriology as the chapter headings of one early 20th century medical textbook suppose may well have followed a less direct, but much more interesting route. Thank you.