Butchers' slaughter-houses were then, as now, private premises and
right in the heart of the city.

The rooms in the houses were quite small, with low ceilings. The small
windows, whether they were merely fitted with wooden shutters or
glazed with many small panes kept together with strips of lead,
lighted the rooms but poorly. The closeness of the houses made
internal lighting still less effective. The interior walls were of
timbering and plaster, often white- or colour-washed.[5] Panelling was
used occasionally. The ventilation and hygienic conditions generally
were far from good, as may be imagined from a consideration of the
smallness of the houses, the compactness of the city, particularly the
parts occupied by the people, and especially of the primitive system
of sanitation, which was content to use the front street as a main
sewer. There were, of course, no drains; at most there was a gutter
along the middle of a street, or at each side of the roadway. It was
the traditional practice to dump house and workshop refuse into the
streets. Some of it was carried along by rainwater, but generally it
remained: in any case it was noxious and dangerous. There was
legislation on the subject, for the evil was already notorious in the
fourteenth century. The first parliamentary attempt to restrain people
in towns generally from thus corrupting and infecting the air is dated
1388. The many visits of distinguished people and public processions
always conferred an incidental boon on the city, for one of the
essentials of preparation was giving the main streets a good cleaning.
There is no wonder that plagues perpetually harassed the people of
mediæval times and reduced the population miserably. The plague never
disappeared till towns were largely rebuilt on a more commodious scale
in the next great building era, which began in 1666 in London and in
the early years of the eighteenth century elsewhere. No advance was