The Fields Beneath Read Online Free PDF

the site of the one-time prison that bore its name, past Fleet Street, and finally out into the Thames itself and hence at long last to Gravesend and the sea. Today, from the Highgate and Hampstead ponds onwards, it is encased in cast iron pipes the whole way to the Thames.
    There is evidence that, from the thirteenth century on, there was chronic concern about over-use and misuse of the river. In 1290, the eighteenth year of the reign of Edward I, we find the White Friars, near Ludgate Hill, complaining that putrid exhalations from it stifled the smell of their incense at Mass, and this was a complaint which was to be repeated up and down stream, with variations, till the Fleet’s final imprisonment. In 1307, according to Stowe, there were complaints that whereas ‘in times past the course of water, running at and beside London under Olde-bourne Bridge and Fleet Bridge in to the Thames, has been of such bredth and depth that ten or twelve ships laden with goods, could sail there together,’ it was now ‘sore decay’d’. The blame was laid on the tanners, who polluted the waters, and on those who raised wharves beside it, but the principal problem seems to have been that the water was diverted to turn the paddles of mills built near the stream. The struggle for supremacy between those who wanted to use waterways for industrial purposes and those who wanted to use them to transport heavy goods about, is a constant theme in mediaeval and post-mediaeval life. Successive laws were passed and efforts made in the following centuries to clean the river, dredge it, remove the mills and so forth, but it was never brought back to its old breadth and depth, and came to be regarded less as a river than as a brook. The last plan for cleaning and canalising it was by Christopher Wren. But, like most of Wren’s grandest plans, including his scheme for rebuilding London after the Fire with a new street pattern like a classical Italian city, this idea for turning the squalid outflow of the Fleet at the Thames into a Venetian-style asset did not come to anything. London has a long tradition of rejecting visionary planning schemes, though this has not prevented twentieth-century planners from seeing visions and dreaming dreams just as revolutionary as those of a Wren or a Haussmann.
    Waterways lead a life of their own, and there may have been other factors in the Fleet’s decline apart from the wasteful, despoiling ways of those who lived upon its banks. One identifiable cause for its progressive degradation was the late sixteenth-century formation of the pond-reservoirs north of Kentish Town, with conduit pipes made of elm trunks leading the water off to supply London. This lowered water levels further downstream – though not enough to prevent the occasional disastrous flood in the Battle Bridge (King’s Cross) district, overturning brick walls and drowning cattle. Where the stream ran through Kentish Town it still seems to have been reasonably sweet and clean up to the end of the eighteenth century or even later, which was just as well when you consider that it was still the main source of water for many people living in its vicinity: only middle-class houses, in the eighteenth century, had water laid on, and then usually only in the kitchen or yard. But lower down, towards Clerkenwell and Holborn, where it was now known as the Town Ditch, it had by then become a byword for filth:
    … Fleet ditch, with disemboguing streams
    Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
    The king of dykes! than whom no sluice of mud
    With deeper sable blots the silver flood.
    (Pope)
    Gradually, as the eighteenth century progressed, more and more of this fetid open drain was arched over and confined to a brick culvert. Its lower reaches became a general sewer into which scores of latrines, built out over the backs of houses, discharged directly. And, as London gradually increased in size, so the brick gulley extended higher and higher up the