Magnificent
Romans. I did not know of this wonderful coin until I read this wonderful
thread.
For the most
part our generation has never come to grips with the difficulty of drainage in premodern urban settings. Water and filth
had to go SOMEWHERE, and if your street and
home were surrounded by other homes and streets, without a sewer, runoff from your place would ruin someone else's day.
I am reminded of a very interesting passage in Rolfe's
Shakespeare the Boy, that described a drainage dilemma in Stratford on Avon, on the very street where lived Shakespeare himself.
From the book:
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=loc.ark:/13960/t6sx7094h;view=1up;seq=57"Chapel Lane, which bounded one
side of the New Place estate, was one of the filthiest thoroughfares of the town...a streamlet
ran through it, the water of which turned a mill, alluded to in town records of that period. This water-course gradually became "a shallow fetid ditch, an open receptacle of sewage and filth". It continued to be a nuisance for at least two centuries more...Thomas Cox, a carpenter, who lived in Chapel Lane from 1774, remembered that the open gutter..."was a wide dirty ditch choked with mud, that all the filth of that
part of the town
ran into it, that it was four or five feet wide and more than a foot deep, and that the road sloped down to the ditch."
Below is a map depicting the situation.
Star is the Poet's
home, arrows show the runoff and makes the dilemma clear. It's the middle of town, and the land formed a drainage basin that
had to go somewhere. This modest little "streamlet" defeated the city fathers and urban planners for ten generations or more, because the topography of Stratford and gravity's effect on liquids.
Nowadays millions of people have walked to Shakespeare's house without soiling their shoes because of sewers running silently underfoot.
Thanks for the terrific post.
