Controlling corruption: regulating meat consumption as a preventative to plague in seventeenth-century London

Seventeenth-century medical theory saw epidemic diseases like the plague as being caused by stinking miasmas resulting from putrefying matter polluting the air. The butchers’ trade was singled out in London as a major polluter, implicated in both the regulatory literature and popular images as corrupting both the physical and moral health of the City and its citizens. Controlling the food trades, especially the butchers’, was therefore an essential part of containing environmental pollution and preventing disease. The purpose of urban regulation is to establish and maintain social order and stability. The regulatory measures selected articulate public policy and reflect concepts both of an ideal social order to be maintained, and of the perceived threats that endanger that order. This regulation includes controls on economic activities, and the protection of public health, with the two areas of concern overlapping where the regulation of the processing, sale and consumption of food is involved. Studies of the history of food regulation have assumed that concerns about controlling the food trades are a modern issue, as are the public health measures and environmental regulations with which food quality concerns intersect. While the long history of public health measures and environmental regulation has been well established,1 the control of the food trades as a connected aspect of these broader regulatory areas needs to be addressed. Paul Slack has pointed to the usefulness of crisis events, such as outbreaks of epidemic disease, in illuminating the institutional structures and beliefs of ‘the societies with which they collide’, and that this is demonstrated ∗ All printed primary material cited in this article was accessed through Early English Books Online unless otherwise stated. Quotations from primary sources retain the spelling and punctuation of the original text. 1 H. Cook, ‘Policing the health of London: the College of Physicians and the early Stuart monarchy’, Social History of Medicine, 2 (1989), 1–33; M. Jenner, ‘Early modern conceptions of “cleanliness” and “dirt” as reflected in the environmental regulation of London c. 1530 – c. 1700’, Oxford University Ph.D. thesis, 1991. Controlling corruption 25 through the ways in which the crisis is interpreted, and the measures taken in response to perceived threats.2 This article examines communications between the lord mayor and aldermen of London and the privy council during the 1630 outbreak of plague, using this as a lens to explore how early modern authorities regulated the urban environment in response to the threat of plague in seventeenth-century London, and the beliefs their strategies reflected. The 1630 plague orders invoked traditional religious notions of providence and health, and drew on urban customs of controlling pollution, but were also shaped by emerging medical discourses and contemporary political conflicts. Although the 1630 plague outbreak was a relatively minor one,3 and is not usually regarded as a significant crisis, ‘it was not always the gravest crisis which evoked the fullest and most articulate reaction’.4 The 1630 plague coincided with poor harvests and economic depression, and this combination of interrelated factors, along with a desire to avoid a disaster on the scale of the previous outbreak of 1625, resulted in an unusual level of regulatory attention and intervention on the part of the crown.5 This was also the beginning of Charles I’s Personal Rule, when the City government’s resistance to Charles’ moves to reform the body politic brought them into conflict, and the City increasingly under the regulation of the privy council.6 It is the degree of attention given by the different levels of government, not the actual numbers of deaths, which makes the 1630 outbreak useful in examining the beliefs that underpinned the strategies employed, particularly those that focused on the food traders in the City. In November 1630, the mayor and aldermen of London wrote to the privy council outlining their diligence in taking measures to prevent the spread of plague.7 One of these measures involved ordering the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers to search out those breaking the fish day regulations by producing and consuming meat. Fish days were fast days where the killing, processing, sale and consumption of meat were proscribed by law. They could, but did not necessarily, include Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, the Sabbath,8 Ember days, Lent and 2 P. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1985), 4. 3 See ibid., 146, for the relative burial figures. The outbreaks of 1603, 1625 and, to a lesser degree, 1609 and 1636 led to a far greater number of deaths that were attributed to plague than that of 1630. 4 P. Slack, ‘Books of orders: the making of English social policy, 1577–1631’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 30 (1980), 7. 5 Ibid., 2–7. 6 Cook, ‘Policing the health of London’, 30–1. 7 Corporation of London, Remembrancia, vol. VII, letter 56. Consulted on microfilm held at the London Metropolitan Archives. Numbering used is that found on the right-hand side of each document and is consistent with that found in the Corporation of London, Analytical Index, to the Series of Records Known as the Remembrancia. Preserved among the Archives of the City of London A.D. 1579–1664 (London 1878). 8 The Sabbath was a contested term with debates focusing not only on whether the Sabbath should be strictly observed, but also on whether the term ‘Sabbath’ referred to Saturday