London Record Society

Edited by JANET SENDEROWITZ LOENGARD
Sixteenth-century London was busy, proud, prosperous and expanding. But even a constant expansion in area could not match an ever-growing population; London was congested, noisy and dirty. The certificates herein offer detailed, even official, evidence from appointed master masons, carpenters and tilers of the physical difficulties inherent in the cheek-by-jowl existence of Tudor Londoners. Many of the disputes which involved the viewers would be familiar to a modern city dweller -- one man has built beyond his property line, another's chimney is about to fall down onto his neighbour's roof -- while others arose from deplorable sanitary conditions. Lingering medieval ideas of propriety became more and more anachronistic as population swelled and subdivision of tenements became the norm. 
252pp volume 26, 1989 LIST PRICE: £20.00

[British History Online] 

Available from Boydell and Brewer