4 - Material Matters: Improving Berwick-upon-Tweed's Urban Environment, 1551–1603

Summary

This chapter focuses on the case study of late sixteenth-century Berwickupon- Tweed to demonstrate that the regulation of the material environment – the disposal of waste, the installation of water supply and drainage infrastructure, the storage, sale and movement of economically valuable manure, the scouring of open sewers and the cleaning of household forefronts and streets – is a highly illuminating lens through which to analyse urban history. Environmental regulation deserves to be recognised alongside topographical setting as an ‘analytical category’ for the study of urban society, culture and mentality, equally as valid as the other more familiar categories employed by urban historians investigating wealth, gender, status, religion or occupation. Towns also need to be understood in regional context.

Firstly, the chapter introduces Berwick in its unique geographical and political context. While it is important to compare the town to other urban settlements, notably York and Carlisle, it is also crucial to situate the town in relation to its wider region, on the edge of north-east England. Secondly, the chapter focuses on Berwick's material, urban environment, analysing in depth the changes which the corporation endeavoured to make to its sanitation infrastructure, waste-disposal systems and processes and environmental regulation, before explaining the problematic contradiction between Berwick's increasingly improved urban landscape and its simultaneously rural character in the persistent practice of agricultural activities, payment systems and ceremonies. This second section illuminates the often overlooked, yet historically important, sensory experiences and socio-environmental entanglements between people and key natural aspects of Berwick's townscape, including air, water, human and animal excrement, blood and urine, which shaped both the daily lives of the town's inhabitants and the potentially powerful perceptions of its visitors.

A growing sub-field of medieval and early modern urban history is currently highlighting the importance of understanding how environmental perception, engagement and regulation shaped daily lives. It is also illuminating the governmental compromise necessarily negotiated between the powerful environmental self-governance conducted by inhabitants from the bottom upwards and the bylaws, street inspections and court presentments through which local governors regulated the material environment from the top downwards.