NO LIFE FOR A SELF-RESPECTING BEADLE!

The Beadle has just returned from attending a weekend study conference to learn more about the history and practice of his ancient office. He was mortified to learn that in their medieval incarnation, beadles were a forerunner of modern sanitary inspectors, and brought back the following report from John Kelly's The Great Mortality: An intimate history of the Black Death, the most devastating plague of all time [pages 70-71]:

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London supplemented its sewer system with municipal

sanitation workers. Every ward in the city had a cadre of

inspectors, the Dickensian-named "beadles" and

"under-beadles," who probed, peered, sniffed, and

questioned their way along the medieval street. Was waste

being cleared from housefronts? Were alleys being kept

clean? Better-off Londoners often built indoor privies,

or garderobes, over alleyways, suspending them "on two

beams laid from one house to the other."  For the

garderobe’s owner, the privy meant liberation - no more

chamber pots on cold nights - but for his neighbours, it

meant piles of dung in the alley, a medley of frightful

odours, and swarms of flies (rats do not usually feed on

human waste). Beadles and under-beadles also investigated

acts of sanitary piracy. The year before the plague

arrived in England, two malefactors were arrested for

piping their waste into the cellar of an unsuspecting

neighbour.

Under the beadles were the rakers, the people who did the

actual cleaning up.  Rakers swept out gutters, disposed of

dead animal carcasses, shovelled refuse from the streets

and alleys, and hauled it to the Thames or other dumping

points, like the Fleet River.

The beadles and rakers not only had the dirtiest job in

medieval London, but the most thankless as well. In 1332

a beadle in Cripplegate Ward was attacked by an

assailant who, to add insult to injury, stole the

beadle's cart; a few years later, two women in

Billingsgate heaped such abuse on a team of rakers,

municipal authorities ordered the women arrested. Indeed,

judging from contemporary accounts, medieval London seems

to have been engaged in a low-level civil war sanitation.

On one side were miscreants, like the foul-mouthed

Billingsgate ladies and William E. Cosner, the garbage

king of Farringdon Without.  On the other side, the king,

Edward III, who thundered, "Filth [is] being thrown from

houses by day and night"; the nervous mayor, who tried

to assuage these royal outbursts with a flurry of widely

ignored sanitation ordinances; the much-abused beadles,

under-beadles, and rakers; and irate private citizens

like the murderous shop owner.