In the second year of Edward II.'s reign (1309) a proclamation was issued for cleansing the streets, which were more encumbered with filth than they used to be, and penalties were enforced against those who neglected their duty in this matter.[190] Between forty and fifty years after this we have evidence that one of the main thoroughfares of the city was in a very bad state. On August 22, 1358, Isabella, the widowed Queen of Edward II., died at Hertford Castle, and in the following November she was buried in the Church of the Grey Friars. In order that the passage of the body through the city should be carried out with any decency, it was necessary to enact that Bishopsgate Street and Aldgate Street should be cleansed of ordure and other filth.[191]
Dr. Creighton criticises the public regulations, and writes: 'There are several orders of Edward III. relating to the removal of laystalls and to keeping the town ditch clean, which show, of course, that there was neglect, but at the same time disposition to correct it. It is farther obvious that the connection between nuisances and the public health was clearly apprehended. The sanitary doctrines of modern times were undreamt of; nor did the circumstances altogether call for them. The sewers of those days were banked-up watercourses, or shores, as the word was pronounced, which ran uncovered down the various declivities of the city to the town ditch and to the Thames. They would have sufficed to carry off the refuse of a population of some forty or sixty thousand; they were, at all events, freely open to the greatest of all purifying agents, the oxygen of the air; and they poisoned neither the water of the town ditch (which abounds in excellent fish within John Stow's memory), nor the waters of Thames.'[192]
This seems exactly to explain the sanitary condition of the city, and we must never forget that the streets were cleared by means of surface drainage, which carried the refuse of the city to the river, to find its way to the sea at last. The streets were evidently fairly well attended to in ordinary times, and it is not for those who have polluted the Thames and made the streams into covered sewers to point the finger of scorn at the evils allowed by their ancestors, who at all events kept the Thames pure.