Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England, 1600-1770

by Emily Cockayne

Modern city-dwellers suffer their share of unpleasant experiences—traffic jams, noisy neighbors, pollution, food scares—but urban nuisances of the past existed on a different scale entirely, this book explains in vivid detail. Focusing on offenses to the eyes, ears, noses, taste buds, and skin of inhabitants of England’s pre-Industrial Revolution cities, Hubbub transports us to a world in which residents were scarred by smallpox, refuse rotted in the streets, pigs and dogs roamed free, and food hygiene consisted of little more than spit and polish. Through the stories of a large cast of characters from varied walks of life, the book compares what daily life was like in different cities across England from 1600 to 1770.
Using a vast array of sources, from novels to records of urban administration to diaries, Emily Cockayne populates her book with anecdotes from the quirky lives of the famous and the obscure—all of whom confronted urban nuisances and physical ailments. Each chapter addresses an unpleasant aspect of city life (noise, violence, moldy food, smelly streets, poor air quality), and the volume is enhanced with a rich array of illustrations. Awakening both our senses and our imaginations, Cockayne creates a nuanced portrait of early modern English city life, unparalleled in breadth and unforgettable in detail.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, British Literature, Anthropology, Urban, 18th Century, 17th Century

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Ben Oderwald · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a little dry, with a dissertation-turned-book feel.

[Indiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved it! OMG talk about time traveling...I don't know about you but I always do these lets pretend imaginings in my mind where I imagine myself back in a certain time period. Some times its influenced by what I'm reading. Other times its just pure day dreaming. But as I've gotten older I've gotten a lot more realistic about all the things most books describing historical time periods leave out. So I don't have any romantic notions about what time travel would involve. And I knew I'd be holding my nose in certain periods. LOL! BUT OMG if this book hasn't convinced me I never ever want to go back in time EVER! LOL! The smells are going to be the least of your problems.

I got this book because one the lectures I give is on the law of nuisance as related to the emergence of land use laws in the USA. And this book talks in detail about some nuisance lawsuits which I thought might be gross enough to interest students so that worked out well on that front. But oh so many other interesting details that I hadn't expected! The chapters in this book are all sorts of delicious titles like Ugly, Itchy, Mouldy, Noisy, Grotty, Busy, Dirty, and Gloomy. Up till now I've sort of thought about nuisances from a purely physical viewpoint but this was an eye opening as you clearly realize that all your senses can be assaulted in more ways than you ever dreamed of.

I would basically starve to death if I inadvertently time traveled and found myself back in this period after reading this book because I would be afraid to eat anything! All sorts of lovely details about poison being used in bread because it bleached the flour and made it whiter to little cheats the butchers used to perform to make their weeks old meat appear fresh. I also would be afraid to go to the bathroom anywhere after learning about what was going on in the outhouses.

This book was just chop full of all sorts of interesting details related to living in 17th and 18th century cities in England. Its so interesting to read about but man oh man its killed just about any desire I ever might have had for time traveling. LOL.

[Lisa the Tech · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well worth the feeling of nausea that hit me on two occasions while reading. If you do not have a very strong stomach, have just finished a meal, or if you want to keep your appetite, steer clear of the chapters called 'Mouldy' and 'Dirty'. The former speaks of food storage and of the tricks used to make the food look good no matter what was wrong with it. The latter speaks of all the wonderful waste disposal methods they used back in the 1600's and 1700's.
Hogarth is most prominent in the pages of this book, especially where the chapter called 'Ugly' is concerned. Nothing beautiful here, but the author says pretty plainly that she was going to look at the gross and nasty. Astounding book!

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not one for the weak of stomach, this is a fascinating examination of the experience of urban living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It looks at the ways in which the inhabitants of some of England's key cities dealt with issues around personal hygiene, urban health and what were the daily dangers and trials of city life in that era. The style of the writing is sometimes rather stilted and the tone sounds like an extended academic essay but the book is stuffed with images and is a really interesting read for anyone interested in historical urban life, social health and hygiene.

[José Alejandro Vázquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una forma muy entretenida de aprender cómo era la vida diaria en la Inglaterra de los siglos 17-18.

[Jack Bates · Rating 4 out of 5]

Birthday book from my parents.

This took me ages to read, it's quite dense and full of information. The subtitle tells you what it's about. It's very interesting obviously, dealing with various 'nuisances' in the cities of the past, mostly London, Manchester, Oxford and Bath, all of which grow exponetially during the period covered. It made me think a lot about what's considered acceptable in a shared space like a street, and reading all the quoted examples of complaints, legal and otherwise, about dunghills and noise and potholes reminded me very much of the sort of posts you get on NextDoor. If you're interested in the gritty/sticky/smelly realities of life in the past it's a fascinating read.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of pretty interesting historical facts here about the reality of living in an English city in the 17th and 18th centuries. The movies make it look like it was all glamorous dancing and beautiful people, but Cockayne paints a bigger picture of the excrement, raucousness, indoor gloom and roving pigs that London and other cities would have had back then.

I didn't quite finish it because it got monotonous in the last few chapters--there were only so many random tidbits that my brain could take. Still, it was entertaining and made me glad of our modern conveniences (and cleanliness). It would be a great book to peruse for anybody trying to write historical fiction in that period in England.

[Marty · Rating 5 out of 5]

So glad to be alive today instead of the time Cocayne describes. Read this to see how far things have improved.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this for a historiography class in college and it's one of the books I still think about, almost 10 years later!

[Adam Stevenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across Hubbub at the right moment. It was a few days after I’d recieved the keys for the new house, wandered about and realised how much work there was to do and fatefully tugged on that first bit of anaglypta paper which unravelled half the room and revealed what a bad state it was all in. I was about to spend the rest of the month (and who knows how long) in the muck, dust, discomfort and noise of house renovation and here was a book about the inconveniences of the past.

Emily Cockayne (cool surname) even had her own uncomfortable housing in mind, structuring her acknowledging about all the rough-n-ready places she’d lived in through the development of the book and the people who had helped in her journey - it was one of the warmest and classiest acknowledgements pages I have read. The book started as a dissertation about noise, and the place irritating noises played in cities in the early modern period, but grew to a more general discussion of “how people were made to feel uncomfortable by other people”.

To help navigate her journey through the noisome, she assembled a council of ‘inperts’, not objective factual experts, but people who were deeply alive to the experiences around them. Many of them were people I’ve already read and enjoyed; they include Samuel Pepys, Anthony Wood, Ned Ward, Jonas Hanway, Margaret Cavendish and Tobias Smollett. There were also people I was looking forward to meet like Mary Chandler. The little potted biographies of these inperts were written wittily, with an eye on their quirks and sensitivities.

Cockayne really enjoys Ned Ward, finding any occasion to mention him and even naming her son after him. Being fond of him myself, I knew I was in good company. More strange is her seeming affection for Jonas Hanway. Known as the most boring man in Britain, Hanway introduced the umbrella into the country and wrote a description of a journey from Portsmouth to London which Samuel Johnson reviewed by thanking God that the journey hadn’t been any further. In that same book, Hanway has a digression about the evils of tea drinking which led to a wonderful Johnsonian rant in the review. Hanway did have lots of ideas about how to lay out a street though, and a lot to say about nuisances, so I suppose the ol’ busybody was a useful find for the author.

One of the little joys of the book, apart from the use of words like ‘ugglesome’ were the names of people mentioned. There are many legal cases and official complaints mentioned in the book and they included people who rejoiced in names like Andrew Niblett, Abraham Shakemaple, Thomas Toopots and Sarah Smallwick.

The book focuses on four towns; London, Manchester, Oxford and Bath but Portsmouth, Nottingham, Coventry and many other places are mentioned as well. (It did help me to see the pride Johnson has in Lichfield, due to the Conduit Lands Trust, many of the problems of other towns were lessened in his hometown.) Indeed, focus is the problem of the book. It focuses on the towns, except when there’s an interesting titbit from somewhere else. It focuses on the testimony of the inperts, except when someone else has something relevant to say. Even the chapters, headed things like ‘Noise’ and ‘Gloom’ meander in and out of the subject. As such, the book was itself a hubbub, a cacophony of different voices, towns and time periods all mixing together and trying to shout over each other. It’s a little exhausting, and I read this book as I was spending three hours after work scraping decades of wallpaper off walls and so was pretty exhausted already.

There is a through story in the book which is reiterated in the last chapter. London was already a large city, Manchester growing from a small town into a metropolis, Bath a backwater into a fashionable spa and Oxford plodding along with its tensions between town and gown. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, they were dealing with mediaeval problems, like pigs rootling in the streets but as they grew, and as the modern world was born, had to keep up with increasing industrial process and expectations.

One interesting development was about street furniture. The traditional expectation was that every house had to pave and maintain the front of their houses as well as providing lighting, sometimes on a rota basis. As the century moved on, councils took the job of paving for themselves, creating more uniform streets. People began to hire other people to take over their lighting duties, which was then a job organised by the council for a fee - which is essentially one of the things the council tax does. The first independent lamplighter essentially worked himself to death with the responsibility of patrolling a large area every night and maintaining the lights.

This book also answered something I wondered, why Mount Pleasant is called that. It was originally a sarcastic name given to a large rubbish heap outside the city walls. I wonder if the hundreds of other Mount Pleasants outside of London have similar origins.

There were also some texts that added to my personal theory about the a symbolic role cucumbers played in early modern writings (now that’d be a PHD dissertation). There’s a woman in one of Ned Ward’s articles complaining that she is pregnant but has nothing to eat but a crust of bread and a cucumber, and the doctor, Thomas Cogan saying that cucumbers are not suitable for “flegmatyke and delicate persons who do not labour.” Cucumbers, only suitable for the tough labourer.

There are so many little bits and pieces all crammed together in this book. Whether its a town ordinance that states that wives are not to be beaten after nine at night; a watchman’s wife complaining that when he isn’t at work, he still announces the hours at night by farting, or the huge pig farm in London which drove house prizes down and ‘discoloured silver.’

Because of the subject matter, I’m tempted to say this book is like dumpster-diving, seeking the treasures among the detritus but that’s not fair, this book is packed with interesting information, it is a bit higgledy piggledy though.

[K. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Trigger warnings: death, death of a child, death of an infant, animal death, seriously y'all there is a lot of death in this book.

There's a lot of people who've reviewed this book and talked about how this book isn't for the faint of heart or weak of stomach. I...had no such problems. I honestly expected it to go into a lot more detail than it did.

But I digress. This was a fascinating look at the grim reality of life in early modern Britain. The Stuart and Hanoverian eras aren't periods of history I've read a lot about, so it was fun to dive in with what's essentially a series of microhistories rather than what was happening in politics and royalty and well known people in the era.

Essentially, I really liked this. The writing was fabulous, it was a compelling book, and I'm really glad I read this.

[Allegra Goodman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just adore this evocation of the (rather grotty) texture of early modern life. A richly layered book chock full of quotations and images. Cockayne uses her sources masterfully, drawing upon documents famous and obscure, texts public (laws and ordinances) and private (letters, diaries). She is wonderful as well at discussing class differences. The different cloths, for example, used in clothes for the rich, the middling, and the poor. The different foods and drinks and dwelling places and privies. Light, privacy, relative quiet, nutrition, all of these varied, depending on your social station. This book is the perfect antidote to the romance we make of the past in films, miniseries, and historical novels.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started out strong, got a little long winded near the middle and end. The subjects and chapters also seemed to start blending and repeating for me. But, despite that, I got to step into the grimy, dinghy world of 17th and 18th century England for a little bit which was fun. Gotta go find a dunghill now to fully immerse myself…

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book about the disgusting underbelly of English life in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is full of revolting anecdotes and horrifying details that will really make you appreciate modern sanitation. Highly recommended.

[Teresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty far to the academic end of things. Good reading for thinking about day-to-day sensory life on the edge of industrialization.

[Lia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very informative and interesting, with lots of detail.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who goes on about how life used to be better has obviously never been in the general vicinity of this book. We have no idea how good we have it.

[Quinn Strange · Rating 5 out of 5]

When we take a look at history, we tend to look at the big stuff. Royalty, war, and the great inventions of the day. What ordinary people really lived every day is ordinarily seen as just too boring to take notice of. But history is about more than big events, it’s about raw, un-romanticized reality. I remember being distinctly annoyed in university when this wasn’t covered. It was the endless string of dates on the projector, devoid of life, that really bored me. And the professor didn’t seem the least bit pleased when I told him this. I wasn’t a great student. I slept in class a lot.

What bothered and annoyed people in the 17th and 18th centuries? This book does a perfect job of showing what it was really like to live in England at this time, in all its irritating, disgusting glory. We often need to remind ourselves that the past is rarely as idealistic as we often portray it to be. In movies everybody is usually just too rich, too clean, to important. They wear beautiful clothes without holes in their shoes. They don’t fight with their neighbors, and the roads are evenly paved. The food always looks delicious, with no trace of rocks in the bread. That stuff isn’t real. This was the kind of thing I’d wanted to learn the whole time.

If you were a fan of Worst Jobs in History (still viewable on Youtube), you’ll love this. Like the host of that show, Emily Cockayne’s personality forms an integral part of the writing. You can see it when she calls Robert Hooke a creepy hypochondriac, and says that the apothecaries were stoned, and painters were dazed and confused, on account of the smells that accompanied their trades. Personality also shows itself in the characters of the diarists and many others who documented every detail of their lives. Emily Cockayne is unique here in that instead of consulting experts, she’s left us in the hands of “inperts”, people who were actually there. It’s a refreshing and welcome concept, old hat for historians but not so much for casual readers. The book is also very funny at times, though I’m not sure it intends to be. Especially when you come across the picture of a man unsure of how to use an outhouse, with his feet in the holes, pissing on the floor, or when you learn that the word “fustilug” means “a sluttish woman that smells rank.”

It wasn’t all that funny to them, though. Quite frankly, it sucked, and while some people were always complaining, others were taking this as motivation to inspire great change. This was the early modern period, after the renaissance, when the first stirrings of the industrial revolution can be felt. There was a lot of advancement in this time, and we can also see changes in attitudes and what people thought to be a pain in the ass. By 1770 England was a vastly different place than it was in 1600, with a lot of advantages they hadn’t enjoyed before, and also with a whole new set of complaints. This never changes. We should take this book not only as a history lesson, but as a key to appreciating the world we live in now, and inspiration to create our own change.

Also recommended: The Dirt on Clean, Life in a Medieval Village, Victorian House.

[Sylvester (Taking a break in 2023) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The research this book must have demanded! I imagine Emily in dusty back rooms of almost-forgotten archives, lost in the 1700's, coming out in the evening and getting full-on 21st Century culture shock.

I loved the chapter titles:

The City in a Hubbub
Ugly
Itchy
Mouldy
Noisy
Grotty
Busy
Dirty
Gloomy
'Such things as these...disturb human life'

This is an essential read for Time Travelers. The message is - avoid the 1700's in England if you have anything less than a cast-iron stomach and anything more than the minutest sense of smell. (Another tip - maybe read this book before naming your child Tanner or Chandler.) My gosh but I'm thankful to live now. My shower this morning was bliss. I looked at the vacuum cleaner with something like affection, and actually kissed the washing machine. I've taught young Squirt to say thank you to the men who pick up our garbage - they are the true maintainers of civilization. (Politicians? Pshaw.) What really amazes me is that anyone at all survived the 1700's.
I enjoyed this book - can you believe it?!! One thing I will say - the language of the time was rich, and there was a plenitude of descriptive words for dirt, filth, noise, etc. Word-lovers will love this book.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intriguing example of how you can take pretty much any social reality and turn the same into a prism by which we understand how people lived. The British Scholar Emily Cockayne studies the impact of urban living by-products (by-products of humans living in close proximity) and turns the noise, muck, mire and smells into a vivid portrayal of England in the 17th century. it is based on diaries, public notices, court records and other minutia of daily life and Cockayne turns the dross into historical gold, literary gold as well given that it is a well written and vivid study of human behaviour.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book on an interesting and understudied topic. With chapter entitled "Ugly," "Itchy," "Mouldy," "Noisy," "Grotty," "Busy," "Dirty," and "Gloomy," you know you're in for some fun stuff. Her chapter intros and conclusions are surprisingly mechanical (seriously, how did her editors not tell her to revise these?), but the contents are lively and full of anecdotal detail.

[Reet · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got an understanding of how the Thames got so polluted, for one thing. Amazing to realize how people dissociate themselves as the ones responsible for stink and pollution, for example from slaughterhouses and tanneries, yet are the reason for their existence. And this idiocracy continues to this day, in a so-called more enlightened age.

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was awesome. Noisy dirty historical nobodies, complaining about each other! Best.

[Min · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was another book for research. I didn't really find what I was looking for for my paper. But it was extremely interesting and I ended up reading it cover to cover in a short time.